Why Every Thought Leader Needs a Plan Before They Publish Writing a book isn’t just…
Thought Leadership Video Production | Stephen G. Pope
How to get the most out of your thought leadership videos.
An interview with Stephen G. Pope about best practices for creating video content, hitting the right audience, and retooling videos for other mediums.
Today’s guest is Stephen G. Pope. He is the founder and CEO of SGP Labs, a creative marketing, media, and technology company with the goal of helping others grow their business faster.
Creating video is as easy as hitting the record button, but once that is done what do you do with it? Stephen shares the importance of having a solid process in place that makes for an easy workflow for everyone involved in it.
Thought Leadership Video Production
Stephen talks about how you can take existing video content such as zoom calls and repurposes them into shorter video clips for social media, transcribe them for consumption on your website, and even convert them into other blog posts to create a deep pool of content suitable for any platform.
If you are thinking about adding video to your thought leadership arsenal, this episode is just what you need to turn that unused potential into a new content library!
Three Key Takeaways
- When creating thought leadership videos, you should be mindful to highlight what your company is doing. Remember to show what value you bring to the table.
- Thought leadership videos are a great way for people to meet you and remember your name.
- Don’t let a thought leadership video stay in that one format. Reuse it in smaller clips, transcripts, or slide decks.
Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.
And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!
Transcript
Bill Sherman Hello. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. And today we’re talking about organizational thought leadership. The process of creating, curating and deploying thought leadership on behalf of your organization. Today, I want to explore a bit of a paradox. Video production has become much simpler over the past few years, but that means the curation of that content has also become much more complex. It used to be that video production meant going into a studio with a crew. You record for a half day or a day, and then post-production happened. Now it’s so simple to record video and voila, you have an asset. But how do you make the most of those assets? How do you prevent the process from spiraling out of control when you have dozens of people within the organization who are creating video assets? It’s a challenge that many heads of thought leadership are having to address. To help us untangle this paradox. I’ve asked Stephen Pope to join me today. Stephen is the founder and CEO of SGP Labs and he spent a lot of time untangling this challenge for himself as well as his clients. A bit of history about Stephen. He comes from an engineering and computer science background, and he’s built applications and backend architecture for Fortune 500 mid-caps and startups. Now at SGP Labs, he’s focused his attention on unraveling the Not a video production. Ready. Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Stephen.
Stephen Pope Hey. I’m super honored to be here.
Bill Sherman So I want to begin this conversation looking at the process of creating video. If we look at technology, it’s gotten a lot easier that almost anyone can create video for content that goes out there. But that’s a problem, I think, in a challenge when you’re creating thought leadership because it’s almost either too easy or too overwhelming. And so I want to focus the conversation to start with on the thought leadership practitioner who’s looking in and hearing from someone, a colleague who’s saying, Yeah, you should create some video. Let’s put some stuff out. And they look and they go, Where do I start?
Stephen Pope Right. And so well, I think the best place to start is like number one. Are you already do you already have some video that you are potentially recording, whether that’s with your team or, you know, something that’s already being. Is it are you already on Zoom a lot? Do you have a lot of video that is already being recorded? If so, you know, where is an opportunity to hone in on some of that content and extract some of it that you can use for content?
Bill Sherman Well, and I think what you said is, are you on Zoom a lot, whether it’s Zoom or players, almost everybody is at this point, right? Right. And to the point of fatigue. But that leads to the question of feeling comfortable on camera. Right. And so we’re used to being comfortable in in-person meetings. We’ve had to learn to be comfortable on camera. But there’s a difference in delivery between recorded and live interaction, right?
Stephen Pope Sure. Sure. So the one question you have to ask yourself is like, do you want to get on video and deliver a specific message? Do you want to do you want to articulate a very specific point to someone? Or do you want to try to do video in such a way that you’re repurposing content that you’re already recording? So I think when you those two angles are very different. And so if you’re delivering a very specific message, like if I get on, you know, on camera and pointed at me, you have to kind of develop some skills to deliver a nice, clear message. But in terms of like, if you decide, hey, I’m just not going to be able to fit that into my schedule, then you have to start thinking about what is the best format. What is what are the best conversations? I’m having that highlight what my company is doing or demonstrating the value that my company brings so that I can hone in on. It’s easy to click record on a Zoom meeting. But then processing it and finding that information, building the processes into the company to actually get that content out is much harder.
Bill Sherman And let’s click on that for a moment to go a little bit deeper, right? So let’s put ourselves in the position of ahead of thought leadership. And they know that there is a wealth of knowledge and thought leadership insight across the organization. And the question is, how do they make those digestible snackable bytes of thought leadership insight available out into the world. And videos one easy way, but you have to first encourage people to do it and make sure that then that content gets out in the world. So let’s talk about process. So if you’re sitting in the chair as head of thought leadership and either you’re trying to get people started or people are recording, let’s talk about the important. It’s a process in the video production because I think that’s essential here.
Stephen Pope It is because what I find is it’s like people click record, but then nothing happens with it. So I think the layering of the process and getting people on board, it’s better to move slow and get those pieces in place than it is to, because otherwise people just get overwhelmed. So when it comes to process around something like this, what I recommend is you get really you get really micro in terms of what you’re going to try to do. So you pick. If there’s if there’s somebody in your team that’s already willing to volunteer on this, then you can go with them. But ultimately picking one. You know, one group of people or one type of call that has the most rich information in it. And then recording that call and then immediately after that call, huddling together and going through that video and deciding what might be the interesting clips that you might pull from that. Otherwise, if it takes two, if you go if you take too much time after that, then everyone moves on and goes about their day. And then again, you have this video that’s just sitting there and nobody goes about it. So. I think the process really begins with huddling around that, getting the getting the clips that you want from that and then starting to build that into your processes.
Bill Sherman Well, and I think that’s something that you call out, which is really important, is the latent assets, the ones that are already recorded and that are sitting somewhere on a drive within the cloud or within the corporate servers. And all you’d have to do would be to address it and figure out where you’re going to post it. But that process of turning the latent asset when it’s recorded, while it’s still fresh in everyone’s memory into something that can be deployed. And so how do you encourage people to start thinking about that, of identifying what’s the best? What should we clip from an asset?
Stephen Pope And before I jump to that, you mentioned an interesting point, though, is like I run into this a lot where people say they already have a bunch of recorded content, but it’s dangerous because you can always record more and the older it becomes, the harder it is to wrap your mind around what you were doing in that situation. So then your other question is how do you start to think about what clips you would pull? I always try to think like, where am I trying to take somebody? Like, where are they now and where do they want to go and where are there some clips that literally will transform somebody even in a in a micro way. So. And there’s different ways that people can get value from content. It can be it can be humor, it can be information, it can be inspiration. So you have to think a little bit about what is your company trying to help people do. And then once you’re going through the clips, it’s just isolating those clips that that help transition somebody from one place to another. And I think it’s also important as well as that it doesn’t always have to be like a five minute clip, a three minute clip. All it really needs to do is like turn on a light bulb in someone’s head that makes them think, I would love to learn more about this. So when there are two people talking and they’re vibing, it can actually be a very short clip, you know, where they’re kind of like, yeah, that was really interesting. Tell me more. Or, you know, this is the one step, you know, one, two, three process. So I think it’s a matter of trying to isolate those moments that really create some sort of transformation that the audience can have that moment.
Bill Sherman Well, and I think one of the things that’s important is you have to remember your audience is very early on making a decision, is this worth my time? And whether that’s an email or a video, we’re all making that decision quickly. Do we move on? Do we drill in and pay attention? And that’s measured in seconds, not in minutes. Right. Where the Ted talk nor the 18 minutes is the long format rather than the short format.
Stephen Pope Right. I think people make a mistake that that they need to have everything like that. They need to have the full question and then the answer. And you’d be surprised, in fact, if you go through LinkedIn and you see some of the posts that do really well. They’ll come in at just at a very. Strategic place, I guess I would say is it doesn’t have to be that the full idea. It can just be that the snippet because you’re right, like you don’t have much time to grab someone’s attention and your audience is smarter than you think and they can tune in to something. And depending on what you’re talking about, they can grab on to something that’s very partial is the best way I could put it. It doesn’t have to be this big ideas. I mean, sometimes you need the full the full context. But I’m always whenever I’m looking at the clips that people are making, I’m always like, this could be shorter. You don’t need this. This piece here. I’m always trying to get clips down. I guess it depends a little bit about where you’re distributing them. But like on LinkedIn, for instance, the shorter the better.
Bill Sherman 60 90s or shorter than that.
Stephen Pope Well, here’s the thing. As short as possible. Okay.
Bill Sherman So ten second clip.
Stephen Pope Yeah. To be honest with you, I have one clip that was 17 seconds. And that I mean, not that we’re talking about necessarily getting business right now, but I did 117 second video that generated business for me.
Bill Sherman Well, and let’s go a little bit further on this, because I think one of the things that aligns and you talk about this is thinking about where your viewer is in the journey in creating content for each step of the journey. Whether you think of that as a sales funnel or sort of a thought leadership journey where you’re trying to persuade them from where they are today to the future, talk about that sort of mapping of content and meeting people where they are.
Stephen Pope Right? So the way I kind of deal with that is like, you know, that’s like a standard funnel kind of thing where you’re, you’re creating content that creates awareness so that if it’s an organization, it’s probably a less personal content. But, you know, creating content that’s just very, very broad. Can cover multiple angles, can bring awareness to who you are so that it can have a wider reach, especially on social media. Because if something is a little bit more generic and it’s inspirational or covers topics that a lot of people can relate to, it can get a lot of a lot more views. And then later on that might not convert to a sale. But the next time your content comes across, it’s like, Steve, I remember he did that other post. So you become familiar. And then that other stage is like that consideration stage where you’re giving more specific information that people might be thinking about or it’s just more of a specific solution. And then there’s that kind of like that bottom layer where somebody is like, Really? Already aware of their problem. Aware of you. Aware of some of the things that you do. And then you’re kind of showing some like actual testimonials, case studies, results that kind of close the deal and push somebody over the edge. And then what I do is I think about those three areas in terms of the various different types of content that you can create, because you can. What I found is quite interesting is that you can deliver. You can deliver the same information in different mediums and then it feels fresh again. So you can you can do it in text, you can do it in video, you can do it in a slide deck. And even when it’s the same content, people just take it in differently. It’s very fascinating and you can say the same things over and over again just by hitting them at different points.
Bill Sherman Well, and to emphasize that repetition is essential of a core idea from a thought leadership perspective, because it’s folly to think that if you post it once on LinkedIn, everyone within your target audience has seen it. The algorithm doesn’t work that way on its own, let alone that it often takes people multiple times encountering an idea for them to lean in and go, Okay, let me relate that to my situation. So you have to have persistence with you. And I like what you said in terms of shifting modalities to keep it fresh. Right. And it’s fascinating to me. One of the things that I notice is the difference between a pure piece of text versus like when you post on LinkedIn text plus emoji and you might think emoji, okay, that’s for smartphones in that. But people respond in different ways when they see visuals with you with words.
Stephen Pope Yeah, yeah. When I think about content, it really comes down to a couple of things. It’s like you could have the best content in the world, but if you’re not grabbing attention, then people won’t see it. And. You know, like there’s all these different ways of going about grabbing attention. It’s like emojis. And some people don’t want to use emojis because they don’t. There’s I guess what I say is there’s hang ups. People have hang ups with content and it comes in lots of different forms. But some people don’t want to use emojis. But what I would say is, is like when you think about like the newsfeed of LinkedIn, nobody goes there to see you or me. They’re just. They’re just there and they’re consuming that feed and. They’re just scrolling. So how are you going to get them to stop? And that comes with a very clear title. And you might think that there’s not a title on LinkedIn, but it’s that first sentence. What is it? Is it short and sweet? And is there something visual there that’s going to look different than all the other posts on there to get them to actually consume the material that’s going to make you make you the thought leader, make you the expert in your space?
Bill Sherman If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast, please leave a five-star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com.
Bill Sherman So let’s shift for a moment into process. I know you’ve got a computer science and tech background and you’re constantly looking at process. And I think one of the things when you start talking about video production is it becomes a little overwhelming because there are many touchpoints in that. How do you make the video production process manageable?
Stephen Pope Yeah, this is a huge piece because in the end, like what I’ve noticed is that people, once they start creating some video content, they’re not actually using it to the fullest ability before they start to try to do more and more stuff. So the main thing that I find is that in order to effectively, you know, publish all this content, you know, everybody has to be aligned. They have to know where things are. They have to know where they’re places in the process. And you have to automate all of the well, you don’t have to, but the more you automate all of the things that are just kind of painful and they just kind of have to get done like creating directories and sending emails and just keeping track of the status. The more you can layer that in so that people aren’t searching for files, the better you’re going to do and the more you’ll be able to reap the benefits of the content. Because I’ll tell you, if if you have someone on your team who is at the end of their day and they’re searching for a video file and they’re frustrated because John or Susie didn’t put it in the right folder and they’ve got to go email. It seems like a small thing, but these are these are like the thorns in the shoe that just keep hitting that video editor. He’s like, Man, why can’t they just get that video into the right spot so I can just do my work and send it back? So when you think about your pipeline for video creation, you just want to smooth out all of those edges so that it’s a nice easy flow everybody comes into to work and just knows where things are. They don’t they know they’re not going to have to reach out to a bunch of different people to make this happen. And then all of a sudden, just the fact that you’re doing that, you’ll end up producing more and doing less well.
Bill Sherman And that’s one of the things that becomes essential because anybody can click record and do a short video. Once you can post it, you can do it, but how do you turn it into a process that you can do it consistently again and again, not just 1 or 2 times on 100 times, right? So that you have that efficient process that you’re not wasting time, effort and energy and creating frustration. And I think one of the things that you mentioned is that often the people on a team for video production now, especially in the fall leadership team, much more is being created in-house. Rather than flipping it over to full time video production specialists. Right. There’s someone on the team who handles the video production role in addition to something else internally because it’s in concept easier to do it, but it’s not your full time job. Right? And so how do you make that simple enough so that it’s not an annoyance to the rest of what you’re doing during the day?
Stephen Pope Right? Yeah. And so, you know, when you when I think about like content marketing and a lot of ways I kind of think of it as a performance sport, so, so consistency and how effective it is and how long you do it over a period of time is going to determine how well you do it. And not only that, but like, how. I don’t want to use the word cheat because it makes it sound like the content is cheap, but like, literally, how cheap can you make it? And reducing the costs, reducing the frustration, reducing all of the pain points around creating the content and then making sure that before you move on and you add in something new, that you’re utilizing everything to the fullest ability. Like how are you? How are you wringing out every last little bit of drop of value from what you’re already doing before you tack on something new? Because I like for myself, I’m like an engineer. I always like to I’m a creative person. I’m always trying to ask, what else can I do? But sometimes I do that before I’ve really locked down what I’m already doing and it just creates havoc. And. And then you’re not actually doing what you’ve already said you were going to do.
Bill Sherman So you talked about taking out the touch points and automating them so that you can do it more time and cost effective. Can you give an example or two of things that you do to make this go more smoothly?
Stephen Pope Yeah. Just a couple of quick example. So I use a tool called Air table. And there’s lots of different tools that you could use for this, but it’s basically it’s basically a spreadsheet on steroids that allows you to keep track of of rows of data in various columns and allows you to arrange and, and filter data. So I basically keep track of every piece of content that I create, whether it’s a blog or a video, whether it’s long form video, whether it’s a small clip and everything gets assigned an ID. And when I create the content, I will actually just like if pretending I was just I just recorded a zoom call. I can just drag that video file into a Google drive and then I’ll have Zapier come through all that video. It actually creates the entry into air table, sets up the statuses, the folders, you know, where is that? Where is the editor going to find the video when the video editor is done? Where is where all of his assets are going to go? And then so so all of that initial like setting up of the file of the of the video of the record or whatever you want to call it, is all automated so that when I’m done, I don’t have to spend 10 to 15 minutes kind of setting everything up so that I know that when the video editor gets it because frankly, that’s something I can do. I’m a detail oriented person. I still I still don’t want to do that work, but other people can’t do it. So I run into teams where it doesn’t matter how like it. You could write it a million different ways, but they’re just not going to do it. And when you have that initial structure where there’s folders for everything, it’s there’s actual links to everything. So like in that air table, in that software, there’s like a link to the folder, a link to the video, and then it will actually just email the video editor and say, Hey, this is ready. It’s in this folder. Here are the show notes for things that you need to know, like the contact information, because you’re going to you’re going to put some lower thirds in the video and that kind of thing. So it has all the contact information for that person and it’s just like ready to go. So there’s like. You know, 10 to 20 minutes worth of work that’s just done and organized. And then you always have that video store organized. And one of the coolest pieces is that over time. You build up this arsenal of content? In my system, I call it a content pool, but it’s just like totally organized. You can always go back to it and reference it. If you said something two years ago that you remember, like maybe you are forecasting something like Gary V does this a lot where he goes back to an old video where he was predicting something and then he’ll go back and find that video and say, See, I was right. So you have that like catalog of content. So for, for myself, I have every piece of content on every platform that I’ve ever posted. And the bigger that gets, the more powerful it becomes. And it’s just it’s those kind of things that that I’m talking about.
Bill Sherman Well, and let’s go to that other point that you made in terms of squeezing every piece of value out of an asset before going on. Right. So talk about different ways that content can be redeployed from video. What are the things that you’re doing with video? And I know you’re doing some cool things with that, so go ahead.
Stephen Pope Yeah. So my workflow is, is basically and I do, I do a video podcast. I’m going to start to do some lives. So that makes it very easy for me to go back and pull clips from that and republish that and push those to social media. And then also this is this is going to sound this is very manual. But at the same time, I also use those podcasts to, you know, individually I send them to people. So like part of my back end workflows is like, who could use this? And I’ll do some real like manual pushes of this content to people.
Bill Sherman But then also high touch VIP sort of, hey, I think this will be useful to you really stands out in today’s age. Where does it does that the personal aspect where you show you’re thinking of someone rather than. Well, I threw it on my wall. Did you see it? Yeah.
Stephen Pope And that’s where the processes come in. So like at the very last stage of all of my content, I’ve got a checklist that just reminds me. Hey, look through your look through your CRM. Who would be interested in this? It does go out to a mailing list as well, but like that high touch stuff. So. But then beyond that. So you have the transcript. So it depends on where you are. But that transcript can go right onto the website. And I have people that comment that say, Wow, I’m really glad that you had that transcript because I didn’t I’m not the type of person that that wants to listen to the full medium. So delivering the content in multiple ways is important. I would I personally would never read a transcript like that. But there are people that will scan through it. I had a deaf a deaf person reach out to me and say, Hey, I really appreciate that you did that. And they were able to and, you know, like to someone like me, like that might not ever register. But like, that’s that was pretty powerful to me to get that feedback. But beyond that, you can get really strategic. You can actually develop a like an SEO like content strategy. And then based off of that, you can take those transcripts and turn them into actual written blogs. And if you’ve got a good content writer, they can they can take your content strategy and look at the material that you’re creating and actually translate that into a blog that will give you real skill. I think that the transcripts can as well. But if you take the transcripts and you actually convert it into a written blog that’s really targeting, you know, the title and the keywords and all that kind of stuff, you could really turn that into a real defined effort. And then you can turn the videos into slide decks, social posts. Now the blogs can become like mini clips or mini articles that you could post on LinkedIn. Really the options are unlimited. If you allow yourself to kind of just like take a break and just think it through.
Bill Sherman Like and ask yourself, what could we do with this? Right?
Stephen Pope Yeah. You have to slow down like and really just kind of be creative. And then like, what’s funny was like when I’m working with clients, I’ll start talking about this and they’ll start coming up with their own ideas. But I think that there’s. I think when you’re busy and you’ve got a lot of restraints and you’re just locked into how you do things. Sometimes it’s hard to just think outside the box.
Bill Sherman So as we begin to wrap up here, I want to touch on one topic which I know is a passion of yours, but I want to play with the intersection of them. So you’re a jazz pianist, right? And that’s the world of structure plus improvisation. Relate that sort of world to the world of video production and how thought leadership, jazz, piano and video production intersect in your world. What insights do they bring for you?
Stephen Pope Yeah, so. So there’s like, there’s like the logical way of, like, delivering a message. So if the audience is heard, you know, building a story brand by Donald Miller, there is a very kind of structured way of delivering a message to somebody that the human brain kind of is ready to accept. There’s just you say certain things in a certain order, and then people’s brains just are able to digest that information. So there’s a certain structure. And that’s the same with jazz. And that’s what I love about jazz, is that there’s a structure to jazz. There’s chord progressions, there’s scales, there’s all these different things. And what’s interesting is that in both in both formats, in video and in jazz, you need to know that structure. But what all the greats tell you is that once you learn that stuff, you can kind of forget it. Which I think is kind of fun because when in jazz, like, you can’t necessarily always be thinking about that structure all the time because it it creates a rigidity in, in the way, you know, just being in the moment and interacting.
Bill Sherman And it can almost be lifeless, right?
Stephen Pope Exactly.
Bill Sherman The structure overwhelms the experience.
Stephen Pope Exactly. And I’ve been in that moment, it’s like I’m just thinking, this is a major chord. And you’re like one second behind or like a millisecond behind. And that. That difference is what makes it feel like rigid or just kind of magical. And then beyond that, like I learned in jazz, it’s like it’s simplicity. Simplicity wins. So there are the pianist that can go up and down the board and do all this crazy stuff. And it’s the same with video. So there are some people that are just naturally good at that kind of thing. But if you’re not and you’re learning like keep it simple and just stay where you where you are, where you’re comfortable, learn that structure and keep it simple. And anyone I really believe as anyone can get on video and articulate their point of view, especially if they’ve if they have these structures to kind of help them feel confident that that they’re delivering like a strong message. And that’s the same in Jesuit. When I learned that there was this certain chord and I could voice it this way and it sounded cool, it gives you confidence to go out into the world and play. And it’s the same the same way with video.
Bill Sherman And with that, I would add, whether it’s video or podcasting or any media that you’re using, it’s repetition and practice. So you’re going to feel uncomfortable the first few times. Sure. But by the time you’ve done it 50 times or more, you’ll feel much more natural. And that gives you the room that comfort to do the improvisation and to relax and enjoy it. And your audience can tell when you’re enjoying something. And I think one of the things that I say is that you will never have an audience that’s more passionate about your topic than you are. And so if you’re stressed by, I’ve got to record this video or I’ve got to do the podcast. People see that stress. Yeah, they’re going to check out for sure.
Stephen Pope And you mentioned podcasting. That kind of sparked one other idea. Is that one of the most important things that I learned in jazz is being in the moment and just. Worrying less about the mistakes and just being like listening to what other people are doing and reacting. And that’s how I come across or that’s how I try to deal with podcasting as well as like I just try to stay in the moment. Like, right now I’m trying to listen to you as best as possible. There are other distractions that I could I could I could easily get distracted by. I got lights here and all this kind of stuff. And I just try to stay tuned in on to what you’re saying and just being open to letting my mind go where it needs to go. And I think that flexibility is what allows me to not get too nervous because the same thing happens when you get on the jazz piano like you have all these people there. It can be quite unnerving to just get into it. But if you if you’re just in the moment. And you’re just listening and just reacting and having fun. It makes all the difference.
Bill Sherman I think that’s a good place to leave it there. Steven, thank you for joining us today.
Stephen Pope Yeah, I really appreciate you having me on. I really love what you guys are doing and I’m glad that we met on LinkedIn. A testament to LinkedIn, by the way, that you can meet great people on there. And so thank you very much for having me on.
Bill Sherman Absolutely. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.
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