10 Awesome Tips For Improving Your Digital Video IQ

It was either track down Digital Video for Dummies or talk to an authority.

I think of myself as being as digital savvy as the average person these days—not an expert, not a...dummy either, but my efforts to incorporate video into my digital strategy were meeting with variable results and underwhelming success. There are a trillion bits of video out there; how could something so ubiquitous also be so challenging?

So, I chose to talk to an authority. Liza Glucoft is the Executive Producer, Programming at AwesomenessTV, has been an independent digital strategist, show runner and producer and previously worked with Conde Nast Entertainment, PopSugar Studios and more.

Glucoft was generous with her advice. “I’ll walk you through how—if you were my client—you would do your video. If we were launching video for you we would first need to sit down and figure out what is the end goal with video.

“Because for a lot of outlets the strategy seems to be, ‘we have to get into video.’”

In other words, video exists therefore it must be done. As strategies go, it’s not much. 

“If you don’t know why you’re getting into it, and you don’t know what your end goal is—just adding more content out into the world that isn’t going to be seen, isn’t going to help.” 

For a moment I saw a glimmer of hope: maybe I could just skip video and the pains of the new learning curve it represents; I don’t enjoy the muss and fuss of getting camera-ready anyway. 

“So what are some good reasons for people to get into video?” I asked.

“Are they talking to an audience that is connecting mainly on video?” Glucoft points specifically to Gen Z—“that’s how they talk; that’s how they digest information.” Video is the coin of their realm and not only makes sense, but should be considered de rigueur if we want to talk to that audience.

There may be those who feel like they can skip making a connection with the new generations as they come along, but I’m not one of them. Gen Z is not be my biggest demographic of followers, but it may need to become so at some point.

“A hundred percent of building a brand is knowing your audience and how they’re consuming information and how you should speak to them...That’s the same across the board, even when it isn’t digital.”

In fact, Glucoft gave us ten tips to improve our digital IQ;

1.   Analytics

“You have to listen to the analytics. You get real time feedback so often on these platforms. And you have to embrace the analytics and all the reports...because that’s going to show you exactly what you need to do. You don’t ever have to guess. It’s going to tell you that your audience likes it when you post at 9 am Eastern Standard Time.”

Wow. It’s that specific—a science then, not only an art and certainly not the half-blind stab in the dark that I was making at incorporating video on the platforms where I’m active. I love feedback and advocate for working to get as much feedback as you can as rapidly as you can, so this was a welcome tip from someone who knows.  

2.   Know what your audience wants

3.   Know what your audience is watching and how they’re watching

“If your audience is mainly on Twitter, then Twitter has a live-streaming feature now and that would be a great place to start because your audience is already there.” In other words, she says, they’re not necessarily going to migrate to a YouTube channel if you go there. “They’re already in one place—even though it might all be on their phone it’s still a migration. Trust me, it’s hard.”

4.   In digital, be resourceful because there are fewer resources—have to make a splash and be willing to get your hands dirty

5.   Be nimble and flexible

“The way to work the system”—digital content platforms—“changes constantly” because the platforms themselves are constantly changing. 

6.   Turn ideas around quickly, especially if you’re going to react to current events

7.   Your work needs integrity, but sometimes you have to fix it on the next go around. Moving quickly can be more important than getting everything exactly right.

“The audience is looking for an authentic connection....They want to hear what you have to say; they don’t want to hear some kind of manufactured version of it, which is a different problem with branded content altogether. Find where they are and it frees you up to give your best self.”

8.   Invest in marketing—great ideas need to be seen.

9.   Don’t impose an outside idea on an influencer.

10. Still treat it as storytelling. It may be digital, but people still are most easily engaged in stories.

Some other advice emerged from our conversation. Glucoft is high on Facebook Watch, “I think it’s going to be a real game changer.”

People like me, she says, whose audience is largely business professionals need to be on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook (older people tend to be on Facebook and younger on Instagram but there’s plenty of crossover especially with younger generations being on Facebook in addition to newer platforms).

And finally, “You don’t need anyone to give you the green light. There are so many platforms now; don’t wait, just make it.”

Glucoft herself is busy producing. Her education was in theatre and playwriting. She never yearned to be an actress but has found a real passion on the other side of the camera. She loves to help people discover how to best express their best selves.

She wants to create meaningful content. For example, she’s interested in exploring the reality of young women having plastic surgery as adolescents or in their early twenties. “Not glamorizing or denouncing but highlighting and articulating the issue.”

While she works to bring that project to fruition she also wants to write a book in the area of career development.

“A book?” I asked her. Why write a book. Why wouldn’t she use digital, the medium that she has made her own? Why wouldn’t she produce something like an online class instead. 

It’s a digital world, baby, but the more things change the more they stay the same.

“It seems cool to have a book.”

Whitney Johnson is one of the world's leading management thinkers (Thinkers50), author of the critically acclaimed Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work and host of the Disrupt Yourself Podcast. You can sign up for her newsletter here.