Because you’re a smart Publicity Hound, you have an opportunity right at your fingertips to be a star in the organization and generate so much publicity for yourself that all the other members will be scratching their heads, wondering how in the world you’ve done it. Nonprofits, this applies to you, too.
Here’s what to do.
The next time the chamber has an event that the local media won’t cover, act like a reporter and cover it yourself. Buy an inexpensive Flip video camera and interview people at the event. (The camera shown in the photo above isn’t a Flip.)
If it’s a routine chamber breakfast meeting with a speaker, interview the speaker after the presentation for a segment of two to three minutes. At the same breakfast, create another short video. Ask the chamber president to provide a brief infomercial of upcoming chamber events like the annual golf outing or street festival.
At bigger events, like the annual awards banquet, interview the Business Person of the Year. If you really want to create a stir, choose a controversial topic that chamber members are buzzing about, like a proposed sales tax increase in your state. Interview one person on each side of the issue. You’ve just created two more videos.
Import the videos into your computer, which takes a minute or two, edit them, upload them to your website, give the chamber the links to the videos, and then watch what happens.
The chamber will probably email all its members and tell them to go to your website. Many of those members will share the links with their friends. The links will end up in the next chamber newsletter. And who knows where else.
Here’s the best part. You can offer that same videos to the local newspaper, magazine and TV and radio stations for use at their websites. Print media, in particular, are hungry for user-generated video, even if it’s of events that they’ve decided not to cover.
That’s what videographer John Easton does in Charlotte, North Carolina. He covers local business events and uploads them to his blog, or to his own streaming video channel, sort of like his own TV station, and then he offers the video to local media.
Too busy to fuss with all these details?
John says every community is teaming with people who you can hire for next to nothing to shoot and edit the video for you. He explained how to find them when he was a guest on a teleseminar I conducted recently on “9 Clever Ways to Use Video to Become a Publicity Darling in Your Industry or Community.”
If you’re not a member of a chamber of commerce, you can still cover events in your community and submit the video to local media that are hungry for user-generated content.
Joan, this is a very good idea and then it becomes a lot more interesting to be at those boring networking meetings that some chambers put together.