First Kick At the Cat Productions

My brother, Mike has been making amateur videos for quite some time and uploading them to the Internet. He’s into antique restoration and has done a series on restoring an antique radio, and has also done some fun stuff using his two boys as subjects. They are pretty good little actors, too! You can check out his stuff on YouTube . I am trying to convince him to set u a blog to showcase his work, as these days YouTube only gets you so far, and the quality is pretty lousy, compared to Viddler. or blip.tv.

His latest production is a video that he put together for my parents’ Square Dancing Troupe, The Village Squares.

We’ve decided to post it not only on YouTube, but on blip.tv and Viddler as well. It’s a great little promotional piece about Square Dancing in general, which is a great social and physical activity. The Village Squares attract mostly the senior set, but I’ve noticed since working on this project and checking out other square dance groups that it’s definitely catching on in the younger set too. However, you will not catch me dosado-ing any time soon, I am WAY too uncoordinated. I’ll stick to videography, thanks.

The Village Squares approached Mike about doing a little promotional video for them, and he enlisted my help to do some of the videography. It was a fancy, two camcorder shoot! But my bro gets all the credit for the editing and directing. I think he’s done a terrific job of it! So here is the debut of the Village Squares on the Internet, done by First Kick At the Cat Productions.

Ok I can’t get the video embed to work, if anyone has any suggestions let me know, but you can see the actual video here on Viddler.

Just a note about my folks. In addition to the square dancing, they are definitely web-savvy seniors. A few years ago I taught my Dad HTML and Dreamweaver and he picked it up quick! He is now the webmaster for the Village Squares web site. My Dad is a webmaster, digital photographer and a madman in Paint Shop Pro (he knows more about how to use it than I do, for sure). My Mom is an expert Facebooker and Instant Messager. They are a great example of seniors making the most of the Internet.

Making a Brand for Yourself

Here’s a guy that totally gets it. Gary Vaynerchuk, of winelibrary.tv didn’t just throw up a little web site with a few videos on it and then sit back and wait for it to go viral. He didn’t think – “gosh, nobody else is talking about wine on the Web”, because he KNEW that lots of people are out there talking about wine on the Web. Instead, he developed a brand – HIMSELF.

10,000 of the people who watch his show don’t know or care anything about wine. But they are interested in Gary. Why? I think it’s because he is not at all the kind of personality that is normally associated with a wine expert. He’s loud, bold, and cusses a lot. His abundant enthusiasm for the subject of wine is enough to draw you in, and his personality gets you hooked. The implementation of his site is fantastic. First, he’s using Viddler, my favourite new video app. Second, his site is all about how you can link up and connect with him. I follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and Viddler , I subscribe to the RSS feed for his show so it’s in my Google Reader, and if I wanted to I could follow him on LinkedIN, Pownce and Cork’d too. What does this mean? He’s EVERYWHERE! I can’t go a day without seeing some sort of update from the guy. And that doesn’t even count all of the other blog posts he’s appearing in these days.

Here’s what I find really interesting about the success he’s had with the Gary Vaynerchuk brand (besides the fact that now just about everyone can spell “Vaynerchuk”). He’s had to get an agent. Mainstream media is noticing him and putting him on their shows (Ellen, Nightline, Conan, to name a few). Hollywood is calling about doing reality TV shows. As he says, mainstream media is beginning to source its new talent from the web.

It’s like an open casting call out here on the Internet right now. You can be sure that the talent scouts are spending more time surfing YouTube and vlog posts than ever before. But I don’t think they are necessarily looking for the next big talent. They are looking for people who are making a brand for themselves and building their audience based on that brand.

What does it mean to content producers? The time to start building your brand is NOW. Quick, before someone else does it.

Watch what Gary has to say about this here:

http://www.viddler.com/explore/richschefren/videos/50/