≡ Menu

PurpleCar Park: Interview with Steve Garfield, Author of Get Seen

PurpleCar Park Logo

Pull into PurpleCar Park, a podcast by Christine Cavalier

Mr. Steve Garfield stops in to PurpleCar Park to discuss his book, Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business. Steve is an “internet old-timer” who started doing video in way back in 2004, when there wasn’t user-generated video content on the web. We talk about how Steve got started with online video, some video projects he’s done for businesses, “citizen reporting”, what’s happening with Qik and Skype, and what he sees coming in the future.

Stop what you’re doing, pull the car over and listen in to my friend Steve talk about his step-by-step guide to unlocking the secrets of successful online videos.

Show Notes:

Steve’s WebSite, Stevegarfield.tv, Steve’s UStream, SteveGarfield.tv on Facebook


Shop for Get Seen in Indie Bookstores

Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business on Indie Bound

@DavidWadeWBZ on Twitter, NetSquaredPhilly, ChrisPirilloUstream, ThePulseNetwork, Seesmic, Qik, Skype, Blip.tv, YouTube, SxSW, Wayne Sutton

Of Interest:
Skype and Qik:
http://qik.com/blog/qiks-acquisition-closed/

Skype CEO on Qik Deal All Things Considered.
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/133002370/Skype-CEO-On-Qik-Deal?ft=1&f=1049

PurpleCar Park notes:

music and intro provided by The Matthew Show: http://thematthewshow.com/

Transcript after the jump.

In pdf: PurpleCarParkSteveGarfieldtranscript

Here is the full transcript:

(Music)

Introduction (by The Matthew Show)

It’s time to put on the brakes and pull into PurpleCar Park, your stop for book reviews, author interviews, and thoughts about the act of reading in our super-digital, data-driven world. Hosted by Miss PurpleCar herself, Christine Cavalier.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Well, people the Internet has changed the world, and the Internet is changing. Posting live and recorded video is easier than ever. So, today on PurpleCar Park we’re talking with video expert Steve Garfield, author of Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business, published by Wiley. Based in Boston, Steve started his first regular video blog in 2004, and now lectures on new media at Boston University. He speaks and consults around the country. In Get Seen, Steve tells organizations how video can push their business into the world of new media. Welcome, Steve!

STEVE GARFIELD:
Well It’s so good to be here and talk to you again.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Yes. It is nice to talk to you. And let me first offer up some transparency to our listeners and say that you and I know each other.

STEVE GARFIELD:
We do.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
We do, we met at Podcamp Philly in 2007.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Yup. Which will always be, in my mind, one of the best podcamps ever, because back then it was when the podcamps were still kind of small. And that was a really nice little small one and you got to meet a whole lot of people. And there were a lot of great people there.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Yeah, I wish we could just have that again. (laughs)

STEVE GARFIELD:
You know, the meeting of people, and the smallness of it. And it was really a pre-cursor to how I like to run tweet0ups up here in Boston. I like to give people the opportunity to kind of mingle and give them a quiet space to talk. You know, that Podcamp Philly is something that I always think back on on how well it was done.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Do you think connecting locally and in person is important?

STEVE GARFIELD:
Oh yeah, I think that’s extremely important. It’s huge! It’s funny that you mention that, I wasn’t thinking of including that in the book, but that’s one of the main things I love about the social media sphere. Especially video.

So when I started video blogging, January first, 2004, there really was no video blogging. Everybody was doing text blogs, and I thought, why hasn’t anyone taken video and put it in a blog? That would make it so much easier to share. So, I made up a new blog and I called it Steve Garfield’s video blog, and I put video on there. All my stuff is at stevegarfield.com if your listeners want to find it.

And then I found Jay Dedman in New York who was doing the same thing. He reached out to me and we started a yahoo group. He started it. And we had two or three people trying to figure out how to easily put video on the web, how to do video blogging, and the group grew to 100, 200. YouTube didn’t start until mid-to-late 2005, so we were way ahead of the curve, figuring all this stuff out. And the point that I’m getting to is about how we were fooling around with video and putting it out and we were all watching every single video that each of us put up. And I was doing videos with my wife, what we did on the weekend, showing us cooking. And everybody else was doing the same kind of thing.

You really got to know the other people by watching their videos. And then when the video bloggers first started meeting each other, we had this really interesting experience, which was like, “Wow, I feel like I already know you.”

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
I agree, I feel like when you see a video blog, you really do get to know the person and their mannerisms, and how their facial expressions work. Just what they find interesting to put on the web, like you and Carol were doing cooking. You know, you like to cook and you do these things together and it’s not all that big of a deal, it’s just you know this is my everyday life. And the fact that people’s everyday lives are something to document is just so interesting. It’s storytelling in a very casual, very small way, and it can add up to a really big story.

STEVE GARFIELD:
You know, these are little moments that we’re sharing and putting up on the web, and taken all together they make a big story. And that’s one thing that Jay Dedman was also in the video group always talked about. He called it “moment showing” It’s capturing all these small moments, but then having them as an archive, he liked to say, for future generations, your kids, your grandchildren, they can then look back and see, “Oh, what was life like back then?” You get a real sense of what it was like.

A few years ago when we were going strong with this weekly video, Carol and I did the “Carol and Steve” show.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Uh-huh

STEVE GARFIELD:
The goal was one video a week. So we did one a week for a whole year. 52 episodes. We just, whatever we did on the weekend, we did a video on it. One of the ones I did was shoveling snow.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Yup.

STEVE GARFIELD:
And I was shoveling, and shoveling. And I had fun editing these things together. I was always practicing and learning how to shoot, too, as part of doing these things. I had a point-of-view camera from the shovel’s point of view of the show being shoveled.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
(laughs)

STEVE GARFIELD:
(laughs) That was just fun for me. But then I got feedback, and the comments, and this is part of where the community and the feedback, and the comments and the relationships all come together. People from all around the world, from different parts of the world, that don’t have snow, for some reason or another, it was the first time they had seen snow. One teacher showed it to their whole class.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Wow.

STEVE GARFIELD:
To show them what a snow-blower was like, and how it worked, and you know, just giving them a view on what life was like, let’s say, in America.

Another one that I just remembered was I did this one food shopping, and I stuck the camera on the shopping cart. Like I showed the supermarket and I went down the aisles and it was really kind of fun.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
And I saw one of those and I was actually on, I was talking to you, because you were streaming.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Oh I live-streamed from the supermarket? I do everything in the supermarket, it’s really fun. On that one, someone from Paris did a video of her little shop around the corner, where it’s like a little butcher shop, and all the food is hanging from the ceiling. She’s like “Here’s my shop!” And she showed me, you know, her life. And that’s what brings the whole world closer together.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
That’s why you’re kind of interesting because you can see the snow really is something to video. You know? Something so obvious to someone who lives in Boston: snow.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Yeah.

You make connections around the world with it. And actually turned out to be an educational thing. How did you see the world like that? How did you learn how to step back and look at the world as something interesting instead of something you just take for granted?

STEVE GARFIELD:
I had, so I had an interest in photography from when I was little. And you know, my father had the family camera and he just gave it to me one day. And so I started looking through the lens all the time. On our family vacations, and taking pictures, I just loved it. You know? And I just loved the whole process of taking photos so it started really from photography.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
I think a lot of us in new media are big photography hobbyists. It seems.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Oh yeah, especially now with the iPhone and sharing from the device you shoot with. You know? If you follow on me on Flickr, you know that I love beer. (laughs)

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
(laughs) Yeah.

STEVE GARFIELD:
You know. And I’m always trying to get the best shot of whatever beer I’m drinking. When I post my photo to Flickr from my phone, it automatically does a tweet, so anybody who’s following me on Twitter, and I have like, 23,000 people, there’s a subsection of those people who are also huge beer fans.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Right.

STEVE GARFIELD:
“Oh, look at that beer” or “That beer!” or “I like this beer.” And that brought me to stevegarfield.tv, and I’m doing it on this network called the Pulse Network, which is right here in Boston. And it’s a live show and that’s something new that you know, I’ve experimented with all different types of video like shoot the video and edit it, and then post it. And then I’ve done live-streaming with Qik on my cell phone. And I ended up becoming an investor in that company, and then I do live-streaming with Ustream and LiveStream, and now I’m doing this show. It’s stevegarfield.tv. Every Thursday at 2 on the Pulse Network.

I walk in, sit down, and do a live show. I’m totally loving this. It was called social shopping. I went to the local whole foods. I’m in the beer aisle. What kind of beer should I buy?

And then I got, like, at least 15 tweets back, within minutes.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Right.

STEVE GARFIELD:
All these different beer selections from you know, the followers, the people who know that I like beer. They know what I like. They’re all giving me suggestions. So I did a video. I bought about 10 different beers. And then I did some video of that. And then I came home and I did like an unboxing where I took each beer out, one after another, and I said, “Hey, this person suggested this beer.” And here’s the beer. I showed all the beers, then I showed the tweet of the person that suggested that beer.

That’s like you asked a question about how do I see things. I saw that as kind of this really cool opportunity to film it, and video it, and incorporate into this show, and incorporate social media into the whole thing.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
That’s so much fun. I hope you didn’t drink all of your beer at once.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Uh, no. Some of these beers are, ummm, pretty alcohol-heavy. (laughs)

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
(laughs). I thought you were going to say collectors items!

What do you think is changed in the last four years about video online?

STEVE GARFIELD:
Well the number one way it’s changed is, the ability for people to record video is just like  on almost every device they have in their pocket, especially with the iPhone and the newer ability to just click a button and say “Put on YouTube.”

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Right. It goes quick.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Yeah, but you know, we never had that. I mean, for years, I was talking to Apple and asking them to make iMovie easier to be able to say, “Post to YouTube” and now it has it, but for like, 3 years, it never had it. Then it finally got that. So, the ability to shoot on a device and then share it. Like, online immediately, from the device you record with? That is, just totally huge.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
And that’s asynchronous, right? So that’s not live-streaming like Qik.

STEVE GARFIELD:
No. Just record and then post.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
So Qik is now, I guess, going to be integrated with Skype? What do you know about this whole deal?

STEVE GARFIELD:
Well, ummm,

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Skype just acquired Qik it seems.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Yeah. Skype bought Qik, and what they like about Qik is all of the archiving and social media sharing that Qik does. So when you think about Skype, it’s like, a phone call, you do a skype call, and it’s, and you can do a skype video call, but there have to be third party ways to like record these things. We had considered this as a video skype call, so you asked me, “Well, how would I record that?” Everybody has that same question, because it’s not really integrated into Skype. And what Qik has, is automatic archiving of the videos that you shoot.

So, what I would see in the future is when you do a Skype call, like if we were on video Skype together, when we hang up, that call would be archived. Then, Qik also has social media sharing, so when I go live on Qik, it automatically tweets out. So anybody could watch that live stream. And then it also has features where I can put in my YouTube username and password. When I’m done livestreaming, it will automatically put a copy over on YouTube. So all of those social media archiving in sharing features of Qik, Skype, is going to bundle into Skype. I think that’s some awesome features that’s going to make it easier for more and more people to do better video, and share it even more easily that you can today. It’s crazy.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Right. Do you think businesses will end up piling up the video? I’m wondering, umm, if Skype and Qik, do you think they are going to after that market?

STEVE GARFIELD:
Uh, either they are or third parties are. I actually talked to one recently and they have technology that transcribes all the audio of everybody that’s on the call. It captures all the topics and throws them into a database. Then you can go back and search, and you know, hear all, everything that was said.

So I think that’s going to happen. I think another big push is transcription of video. YouTube has something like that. There are some other sites. And there’s some laws that were just enacted for access that require transcripts to be made of videos, so a lot of this is happening now.

I’m sure it’s going to get a lot easier. In the book I talk about how to make your videos more easy to be found through SEO, search engine optimization, and one way is to do a transcript of everything that was said in the video. Put that in the description. So when people over on Google and they’re searching for things, your video will pop up. So I think all that is going to happen. Whether Skype and Qik do it, or third parties do it, it’s all being worked on.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
The transcription is such a logical thing. Of course the transcription is going to help you boost your search result numbers. Especially with the new Google algorithms, because they’re a little bit smarter, and they can see what’s real content and what is just SEO content.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Sometimes I’ll go to a video.  Or it’s like, hey I’m on Twitter, and someone tweets something out. Maybe this week it’s something about CES. “This company announced this cool new blah blah things. Click the link” and all it is is a video. I’m like, Well, you know… can’t I just? Why don’t even say what’s in the video? They don’t even give me a little description.

That was one of the early, early, early benefits of video blogging. Because you would put video in a blog post, and then be able to write all the text along with it. That was like the whole beauty of it. That’s why I always think, transcript is obvious idea for me. It just makes total sense to have really great descriptions for people who visit each visit video blog post.

A lot of the places that I put my video now are YouTube and on Facebook, too. One thing I’ll do is post a video to YouTube and then I’ll grab its link and go over to Facebook and post it. Then maybe say a little something about it. I find that the interactivity and the community and the comments and the feedback that I get on Facebook are great. It’s just, there’s so many people who I’m connected with over on Facebook as opposed to my blog. I think a lot the community and interaction is happening over on Facebook these days.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Do you think with Facebook and just generally online, you talk a little bit in the book about citizen journalism.

STEVE GARFIELD:
So, actually, I’m not really using the term “citizen journalist.” I was in the beginning because that’s what everybody was calling it. But I tend to call it now more “citizen reporter.” I called it “reporting by wandering around.” (laughs)

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
(laughs) Right.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Because all I was using was a cell phone and :happenstance broadcasting” I even called it was another thing. Because Journalism is important. You research things, and you add your opinion, you craft the story, or you don’t add your opinion, depends on what kind of story you’re writing. But you’re there, something happens, and you’re like, “Woah, I have a way to accord this, like, right in my pocket!”

So you whip out your camera and you hit “record.” And then, you don’t even have to pass it to the TV crews or the local TV stations, you can take that moment and then send it to YouTube and send it to Facebook. Then it can be shared. You can email a link to the news and say “Hey, this happened. I was there. I captured that moment!” So–

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
But wait. Let me interrupt you there for a second if you allow me. What about people keeping track of their content there though? What happens when a major news organization that are ad-sponsored, like an NBC or a CNN, takes your video that you’ve put out online. What do you suggest that people do with that?

STEVE GARFIELD:
That’s a huge issue. We even, I think, had a big blog post back and forth with that, didn’t we?

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Yeah.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Maybe it was about photos. Because that’s a huge issue right now, about compensation and content. Can they use your video and how much of it could they use, and do they need to compensate the person who shot it?

One of my huge pet peeves is when they, someone does exactly what I just said, they take their video and they put it up on YouTube. Then I’m watching the nightly news, and then the nightly news comes on and they say “Oh, and look, here’s a picture of that fire, and this video’s from YouTube.”

Ugh. I was so mad because they never said the person’s name at least to give credit, you know, for capturing it.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Let alone paying for it. Just some credit.

STEVE GARFIELD:
I know. Let alone. I know! But I just finally found out the reason. What this one person who works at a news station told me. There’s some type of regulation that says whenever you show content on TV, you need to say the source site that you got it from. So, the requirement is that they have to say, “From YouTube” or “from Facebook” so that’s something that they’re required to do.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
But they’re not required to do any more than that.

STEVE GARFIELD:
They’re not. It would be nice if they additionally said, “From YouTube, shot by Steve Garfield” to give credit. So now that I have my weekly live show, I can totally see the, how fast-moving this whole thing is, and how hard it is to get everything together, and get your whole team giving enough credit.

What we do on the Pulse Network, when we show a YouTube video, we don’t just show the video, they show the YouTube site too, so the YouTube person’s name is there. You know, right above the video, where it says their username. So it’s always giving credit for the content when we show it.

So, you know, at least we’re doing that. I think that broadcast TV has a way to go. I know that I worked for, well I didn’t work for, but we had a local newspaper here. And they were encouraging bloggers to send in articles and stories and photos. They couldn’t really compensate us for doing it, but what they would do is, they’d be able to get tickets to like, sporting events and things, or shows. So the people who were interested in covering sports, they would give you, like, tickets to an event, then you could go cover it. Or, they would get access as media to certain events. So the different bloggers that started in stories, they could let them get into things that they normally wouldn’t get into. So it was more of a partnership between the blogger and the media outlets. So, I think those things can work really well.

One of the really great examples of that is the CNN iReport. Where you choose to send your stuff in to CNN and then they can put it on air. But you’re giving them, you know, permission to put it on TV.
The local stations in Boston here, a lot of them are embracing social media and have social sharing sites where you can submit your stuff. But I mean, that’s cool, and I like that they’re doing that, but I think the even better way to do that is for you to just tag your content with the station name. During our recent storm, one local station, WBZ, did that really well. They just said, just hashtag your stuff #wbz and we’ll see it.

The anchor, he was on the air for 8 hours straight, during this last, the big blizzard we had. @davidwadeWBZ, that’s his Twitter name. And he had his phone on air and he was just reading tweets out. And people, and so I was tweeting him, people were tweeting him, he tweeted me back. It was really engaging the audience in a way that doesn’t always happen on local news.

So, on my show, that’s what I’m trying to experiment with is, engaging the viewers live. We have people Skype in, or tweet in, and I’m just experimenting with the whole thing. And it’s still all really, really new. The whole idea of compensation is really cloudy.

I think it’s easier if the media is paid for. Like, if someone says, I want to buy this YouTube video to show it on my station, if news station do that. Or they want to buy the rights to the photo. They want to buy rights to show it on their station. Or they want to buy rights to distribute it. I know that on Flickr, Getty is now on there. You can click a little button, “If you want to use one of my photos” and Getty will help get you money.

I don’t think any of the TV stations are really thinking about how to compensate people for their content.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
No.

STEVE GARFIELD:
You know, that’s something that I think we’re still working out, figuring it out.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Yeah. We’ll get there down the road.

We just had a Netsquared Philly meeting that talked about public access television. Some public access stations here in Philadelphia actually offer people training on video.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Yeah.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
People can look this up in their local area. Yeah, free training, on editing software, video shooting, the airing time.

STEVE GARFIELD:
That’s a great place to get trained in your local community, is these public access stations. And that’s the where I learned a lot of my video. I went for years in public access, and they taught me camera, editing, lighting, sound, directing.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER: Really? I did not know that. I just thought you were always just “Steve Garfield!” (laughs)

STEVE GARFIELD:
(laughs) Oh, yeah, I had, over on public access, actually I have to dig out the tapes and put some of this old stuff on, but that’s where I learned. I was there for like, 10 years. This was, you know–

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Really?

STEVE GARFIELD:
I learned everything. I had this show–

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
In Boston?

STEVE GARFIELD:
Oh, actually, yeah. Well, it was in Peabody up on the North Shore, and then when I moved to Boston, I did it in Boston, too. I had this show called “The Steve Show.” That’s funny, because now it all comes back around at some point all over again.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Yeah.

STEVE GARFIELD:
But I learned all that. It’s a great way to learn stuff. And then when I moved to Boston, I ended up teaching some public access classes on how to do video.

But in the book, it’s a step-by-step guide on how to do things. A lot of times you’ll see articles or books where it’s like, “OK!” and it’s all theoretical, or all just like “Blah, blah blah,” all talk, talk, talk.

In my book, it’s a little bit about that, but then it’s practical advice. Like, “Here’s exactly how you would use iMovie. And here’s exactly how you would save it. And here’s exactly how you take that movie and you put it on YouTube” with the Step by Step guides. One, Two, Three, Four. “It’s 4 steps to do this. Go do it.” Here’s like, 6 steps to livestream with Ustream.

In the book I have a ton of interviews of people who are successfully doing this things. Like Chris Pirillo. He livestreams on UStream all the time. So if you read his chapter and you’re like, “Wow, I might want to do livestreaming.” You can go to the Ustream section and learn exactly step by step.

And then I give examples on how to shoot, how to do interviews, some examples on how to edit, and then where to put it, and then even if you don’t want to shoot with the camera, I give examples of how to screencasting. How to record your screen. Right?

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Right? And that would be very useful, I would think, for businesses.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Yeah. There’s just like a ton of great stuff in there. People love it as a really good guidebook or handbook or workbook you might call it, on how to actually do things.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
And I like the fact that you don’t forget about the archiving too. Like, that’s kind of important. Because you know, you don’t want to lose your work. This has come up for people like you and me who have been early adopters, because Seesmic has shut its video-chatting doors. You don’t realize how important it is to keep these things somewhere locally on your harddrive, or on you know, an external harddrive, until you realize you can’t get to them.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Yeah.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
So, and there’s a lot of video on there that I really, really want with my daughter very young, and she’s talking. There’s one that I actually did take time to download where she’s talking about this cute boy in her class. She’s in 2nd grade or something at the time, maybe even first, very small.

And I just realized, wow, you know what? There’s a flotsam and jetsam that I left on Seesmic, but there’s a lot of gems, too.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Yeah.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Go ahead.

STEVE GARFIELD:
No, exactly. Archiving’s important. And you know, I, it came, it was important to me. When I just had this dinner for Councillor Tobin and his chief of staff emailed me and said, “Hey, can you just put all his videos on a disk?”

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
All of them?

STEVE GARFIELD:
I thought, does he know what kind of request that is? (laughs)

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
(laughs)

STEVE GARFIELD:
I can’t just– It’s gonna take me like…

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Days!

STEVE GARFIELD:
8 hours, I mean this– or more. This is like, a huge request. Then I thought, well, how many years have I been doing this? 5 years. How many harddrives have I had over the past 5 years?

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Oh, dear.

STEVE GARFIELD:
I have them like, on the floor. I have 3 that I’m using now, but there are 3 on the floor in my office, and then there were 4 more in the back bedroom, and there are probably 5 down the basement. All old stuff. So, that would be a crazy, crazy job. My wife was like, “You’d better archive your projects, because other people are going to ask for theirs.”

So what I did was, in this case, I had them all on Blip.tv.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Oh, interesting.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Which is where I hosted all those videos. Over on Blip.tv, I can go to my dashboard and see all my videos. Then I can click in there, and I can just save the original file.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Right. Are you doing that every single time? We didn’t realize that Seesmic wasn’t going to be around forever. What’s your contingency?

STEVE GARFIELD:
Where unlike YouTube, where you need this like, 3rd party little plug-in thing to get you videos, the point here with Blip is that you have access for all your original files.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Right.

STEVE GARFIELD:
I went through, and you know, downloaded them all to this external drive, and I had them all on a dvd and it worked out for me fine, pretty easily, and it only took me a few hours. And for Seesmic, which was a video conversation site, which you click a button to record, say your little thing, and then stop, and the video went out there. Then people could reply to you with a video. It was brilliant and it was a video conservation, and there was a whole community and relationships that were built there. So when I heard that Seesmic was shutting down. I was like, Woah, there’s some videos on there that I would like to save. Actually, what happened was, at the time when I was working with Qik, to do the livestreaming, I also talked to Loic over at Seesmic and I had them hook up together. I don’t know if you remember, but you could do –

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
I do. Yeah.

STEVE GARFIELD:
You could do a Qik video and have it save over on Seesmic. When I was doing some of that Obama campaigning in Boston, Qik lost a couple of my videos when they switched servers.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Ouch.

STEVE GARFIELD:
And I emailed them over there, “What happened to those?” And they were lost. So then I went over to Seesmic and grabbed them from there, so they had them.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Oh, that’s a really good point.

STEVE GARFIELD:
So I went over to Seesmic, so what I did was, I downloaded the ones that were important to me down to disk. That’s how I did it. So I guess, I would say, when you’re done with a project, a good thing would be to just burn your videos to a CD and then file them away. For some clients, I’ve done that. Actually, a lot of clients. I used to use mini dv tapes. So, when I was done with all the whole project, I would save back on to mini DV tapes, their final thing.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Ah.

STEVE GARFIELD:
So I have drawers full of mini-dv tapes. But the thing is, over the years, hardly anyone ever asks me to go back for an archive. Now, my main archive place would be, sad to say, the online sites where I have saved things just once, so Blip, or YouTube, are where they are.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Right. Well, you know, you have to be willing to let them go. The things that are important, you have to definitely make time to put them externally somewhere.

STEVE GARFIELD:
I had a client, where I went in, this is a good project for a business: What they wanted to do was use video blogging to share the expertise of their company. They have all these different disciplines in there. I went in and interviewed like 50 people. What they do is their a non-profit which helps other non-profits. They help them in human resources, accounting, fundraising, green practices, all these different things.

Under each discipline, they have a person that would consult with a non-profit to help them. So I went in to each person and they would give me, like, you know, 4 or 5 to 10 tips and they would do these, these were all little video blog posts. They said, “Hi, I’m this person, and when you’re thinking about End-of-year records keeping, here’s the different things you need to think of.” Those were each of the videos we did.

Part of this experience of video taping, all these 50 people for businesses for thinking and doing something like that, was kind of a secret audition. Like, they after seeing all the 50 people on camera, then they could pick, OK you did excellent, we want you to be the video person for the company.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Oh, interesting.

STEVE GARFIELD:
But they didn’t tell them ahead of time.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Right.

STEVE GARFIELD:
So no-one’s really pressured to to be good, but then, obviously some people are …

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Stand out.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Yes, stand out. So we did that. But the point of this story is that recently they came back to me and they said, “You know, ummm, we have a new guy in here and he’s an editor and we want to grab all those videos, and some of them we want to re-edit a little. Can we have all that?”

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Oh, wow.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Like? I mean? That was a lot. This is what I did for them: I said, “OK, what I can do is give you everything, all the raw footage, all the final edited pieces, all the graphics, everything. And I will include in it the cost of buying the firewire one terabyte disk.” Which was $197. Which is really nothing.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Yeah, it’s pretty cheap.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Because otherwise I would’ve had to take each thing and back it up to a DVD or a CD. It’s a mess. All I did was buy a firewire drive, and I took all the things off of a — I had it strung over a number of different drives. I just hooked each of the drives when I was working with when I was working on it, and I dragged everything and dropped it over to the new drive and then I gave them the drive.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Yeah.

STEVE GARFIELD:
And that was great. They were really happy. And off they go. So now they have all their final footage. The way drives are so inexpensive now, I just would just keep buying more drives, and put stuff on there.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Right. You know, they’re cheap and they’re small, and honestly, years later, you will definitely want the footage, whether you’re an individual or a business. So, it’s not like the web or text that you can just kind of archive and, or other third party sites archive the web as well as Google. I agree, I think it’s just best to buy the terabytes. Disk is cheap, as they say, right?

STEVE GARFIELD:
Yeah, exactly. And it’s getting cheaper. It’s like, so cheap, it’s unbelievable. There’s also this thing, it’s like a toaster kind of thing, where you hook it up to your mac, and you just take the raw drive and you plug it in to the top.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Oh right, so you can just keep the raw drives. Yeah.

STEVE GARFIELD:
You can just buy cheap, yeah. I haven’t done that yet, but a friend of mine does that. It’s kind of a fun idea.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Yeah, that is kind of fun. Plus the fact that the smaller the drive, the better it is, in terms of keeping it, physically in your house.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Yup.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
But anyway, thank you so much. Where can people find you?

STEVE GARFIELD:
People can find me at stevegarfield.com

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Are you going to be anywhere speaking sometime soon?

STEVE GARFIELD:
The next really big thing is SouthbySouthWest (SxSW). I’m speaking at these — it’s Wayne Sutton, he’s organizing this whole section on video. It’s the 15-minute talks.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
That sounds fun.

STEVE GARFIELD:
I’m going to be down there, and I’m going to be talking about 6 ways of recording video that you probably never thought of. (laughs)

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Oh! That sounds informative, actually.

STEVE GARFIELD:
SxSW is the best.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Awesome! Thank you so much Steve Garfield, author of Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business. Thank you so much.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Christine, it was great talking with you. Hope to see you soon!

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
I hope to see you soon in person.

STEVE GARFIELD:
Ok, Bye.

CHRISTINE CAVALIER:
Ok, Bye.

Outtro:
PurpleCar Park theme music and announcements provided by The Matthew Show. Critically acclaimed original and independent music. Please check it out at TheMatthewShow.com

(music)Lyrics, Office Part II by The Matthew Show
The doors stay open but the seats stay filled,
the lid is childproof, but the people stay pilled,
the price has gone up for the prison yet to build,
The doors are wide open but church stays filled.

Work out.

SHOW NOTES

Show Notes:

Steve’s WebSite, Stevegarfield.tv, Steve’s UStream, SteveGarfield.tv on Facebook


Shop Indie Bookstores

Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business on Indie Bound

David Wade, WBZ, Twitter, Net Squared, Philly, Chris Pirillo, Ustream, The Pulse Network, Seesmic, Qik, Skype, Blip.tv, YouTube, SxSW, Wayne Sutton

Of Interest:
Skype and Qik:
http://qik.com/blog/qiks-acquisition-closed/

Skype CEO on Qik Deal All Things Considered.
http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/133002370/Skype-CEO-On-Qik-Deal?ft=1&f=1049

PurpleCar Park notes:

music and intro provided by The Matthew Show: http://thematthewshow.com/