A short live-stream monologue by TJ Walker (May 31, 2012) providing a personal and professional update: he returned from travel in Europe, has reoriented his business, and recently ran a small PRSA workshop (about six attendees). He describes building a lightweight, always-ready internet-video studio (HD webcam, desk Blue man microphone, lighting grid) used for breaking-PR clips and personalized new-business video pitches. He invites collaboration on media-training workshops and offers availability for meetings or trainings.
Questions this video answers
Six attendees.
Approximately $995 (some attendees); some paid $1,300.
May 31, 2012.
Chapters
Hi Jim, it's TJ in New York. Hope you're doing well. Just wanted to check in with you. We haven't talked in a while. Hope everything's going well for you. We've been going through some reorientation and restructuring here in our shop, but everything is good. I was off traveling in Europe for a couple of weeks, but I'm back now and really settling in. Just a little update on some other activities. We just did a public workshop with PRSA guess a month ago. We got six people in. Six at I guess 995. Some of them paid 1300. So we're not back to. No one's back to where they were six years ago when we were getting 18, 20 people in. But at least it is back up to be minimally viable. So I would love to do some media training workshops with Bulldog Joint Promotions like before. Here's the other thing that I'm doing that's new and I'm getting more and more requests from clients and that is how to do Internet video more successfully. Now, we did some things with you, the flip cam video and all that. The thing that's a twist now is how to have a sustained, regular studio. Kind of like what I'm doing right now. The thing I have now, this new backdrop. I've got several things you may notice. I don't have a microphone on here, and yet it still doesn't sound tinny. I have a new studio where I've got an HD webcam up. I have a special microphone called a Blue man microphone that sits on my desk. Much higher quality and I don't have to take the time to pin things up. And I've got a lighting grid around me. It's very inexpensive. My colleague Chris Gentile set it up. But the reality is I can see a breaking news story, let's say the CEO having a meltdown of the media. It can be at 9:30 in the morning. I simply see the story and what happens is I bend down and I push a button. My lights would be off like this. This is my normal work desk, by the way. I simply bend down, I turn on the light, one click and now I just talk. It's in one take. I do the video, I stop, I upload it to YouTube and I send it off to producers. So it's kind of a twist on what we talked about last year with the flip in that it's just basically always on. My camera's up, it's always on, the mic is always on. The lights are Always ready. One click, it's there. So it's a great, great tool for helping people with breaking pr. The other thing it's frankly useful for is I use this for every single new business pitch and for a lot of your customers, clients, followers who are doing PR for people that they haven't met. It's a great way of making that bridge between a good telephone call before you get to the face to face meeting. So every single new business prospect who comes to me, I do a personalized video just like this. And it really is helping the sales process and increasing the odds of turning a prospect into a paying client. And I just got off the phone from one of my clients, a city manager in a city in Florida. He loved the idea and has asked me to come down and do a workshop just on how his city officials, his communications department can get more comfortable doing video on a regular basis because they know about it conceptually, but they're still doing everything through tech. So maybe there's something there for a workshop, I don't know. Regardless, I would love to do just a traditional straightforward old spokesperson training, media training, crisis communications training. So let's talk. Perhaps I'm in a training all day tomorrow, but I am available today or next week. Perhaps we can chat. Hope you're doing well. I'll talk to you soon.
