Content Magic: Using SocialCam to Capture & Share Your Expertise

There is a new-ish app called Socialcam that lets anyone who has an Android or iOS smartphone easily capture and share content.  I've created a lifehack process using Socialcam to help anyone who has domain-specific knowledge share it with the world -- and especially with prospective clients.

I've talked before about the importance of building a personal brand and how sharing expertise can turn you into a superstar.  Using a tool like Socialcam to capture and share domain-specific expertise is a part of those very important initiatives.

Here's a video of me practicing what I'm preaching: I share in this Socialcam video how to do what I'm saying -- how to share content.  So watch the video and then follow the steps below it to learn how to do this yourself.

Here are some tricks on leveraging SocialCam specifically for sharing your expertise:

Put yourself in a position where it's easy for you to make videos often and on a regular schedule: For me, it's while I'm driving. I often have downtime in the car, and doing a SocialCam video while I'm driving is an easy habit to create. To facilitate this, I purchased a highly rated windshield mount (or dashboard mount) from Amazon which works extremely well to hold the phone.  You may chose something different.  For example, if you're a chiropractor, you may want to create a "booth" in your office where patients can step in and leave testimonials for you and your business.  Or maybe you just use a camera mount like this one, and you put an iPhone or an iPad on the counter, then ask them to leave a testimonial while you're doing their paperwork just after they see the doctor.

Put Twitter #Hashtags @User-IDs in the title of the video. This is a little hack that turns the video's title into clickable links when the video posts to Twitter, like this one did.  Although SocialCam just calls this a "title," the reality is that once your video is shared to social networks, that title becomes the content of the social action.  By putting # and @ into the title, you'll get more distribution via Twitter.  You can also use the "MTV Filter" when saving the video to have your title show up on the first frame of the video.

Upload to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Posterous, Tumblr and others with just one click. OK this is the real magic of SocialCam. After all, you can take a video with any camera -- even the phone's default camera. But when you take the video with SocialCam, something very magical happens. You get distribution. For example, I embedded the video I took above into this blog post. That's distribution on my blog. And I shared the video on Facebook. And on Twitter. And on YouTube. These are all opportunities for others to consume this content, and that's the true power of social media -- having efficient ways to distribute the content inside your head to the world, and especially to those who can really benefit from it.

Here's a transcript of the video above:

Hey guys! It's Daniel Odio. And, I'm trying to experiment. This is going to be the first of what hopefully will be many videos that I'm going to do on the road. For anybody who lives in San Francisco, you can often have really long drives between the city and South Bay, so between San Francisco and Palo Alto or Mountain View, that kind of a thing. And, really what I want to do is start practicing what I've been preaching which, I've been practicing a little bit but not enough and that's the capturing of content. I really believe in the power of capturing knowledge whenever possible and then sharing that. And, one of the things that I've been encouraging others to do that I have been remised on is using SocialCam as a platform to do that. And what I mean is, that for the first time, with these smartphones, we really have the ability to be like little, mini walking movie studios capturing all sorts of content. And it's still a pretty clunky process. There's not a super great way to do it. But there is an app that I absolutely love called SocialCam. That will allow you to take videos like this and then share them in all sorts of interesting ways. So for example, you can take the video and you can share it on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or all three, or you can share it via email or you can share it to your followers on SocialCam, you can also share it via text message. So, all of a sudden, you can take a piece of content, take a video and then share it to the world all in one step and that's what's so revolutionary about using SocialCam on your phone to capture content is not only the taking of the video but the ability to then share that with anybody who might be interested.

So let me tell me what some of the different news cases are for using this. Just last weekend, I was back in Washington DC where I'm from, and I was talking to this gentleman named Sean Adams. Sean purchased the real estate company from me that I used to run. And Sean and I were talking about all the expertise that's in his head and in the heads of his realtors, all the realtors that worked for him and how hard it is to get that out to the world and we talked about using SocialCam as a platform so that when Sean is in the car, driving to see a client, he can do a video like this. And I thought, "Heck, I should also be doing that same exact thing that I'm recommending that he does." So I purchased a little stand. I'm not going to show it to you now because I'm driving but actually I've got the box. So, I'll just show you the box because I literally just took it out of the box. So, this was 20 bucks on Amazon and it's a great, highly rated secure way to hold the iPhone, it has a suction cup, and I'm literally just doing a SocialCam video as I drive, the video's right next to where I'm watching the road, so it feels like it's pretty safe and I can share contents.

So this first piece of content that I really want to share with you is just kind of at a meta level to tell you what I'm going to be doing on a real basis which is to use SocialCam to share content and the first thing in that kind of series is, if you have expertise or knowledge in your head, you should use SocialCam to get it out of your head and into the hands of people that can benefit from it. That is the true power of Social. It's not to put ads on Facebook. The true power of Social, in my definition, is to get the knowledge out of the heads of the experts that have it and into the hands of the people that can consume it and use it and gain value from it. And, I hope that Sean does that with the real estate company. I was also talking to my brother-In-law who's a chiropractor, he's name is Dollio Betty, and I was saying, you've got a lot of very specific domain knowledge as a chiro, you can and should be doing videos like this to talk about what some things are that have been happening in your field, so what some new technologies are, some new treatments are, things like that. Also, it would be awesome for somebody like Doll who's the chiropractor to have something like this, a set of like this in his office, so that his clients could take videos about what their experience is like. So, obviously, it's not something to force on a client and Sean can do the same thing as a real estate company. But to give clients the opportunity is to just rave about how great their experience has been, another beautiful thing about using SocialCam, specifically as the app to do that through, is that then your clients can share the video on their Facebook walls. They can authenticate their Facebook with their credentials. And then, when they take a video like this and they talk about how great the real estate service has been or how great the chiropractor service has been, they can share that right through SocialCam, right after they're done with the video, on their Facebook walls. And now, all of a sudden, their 200 hundred friends are seeing them talk about how great you are as a realtor or as a chiropractor or whatever specialty field you're in and that's where Social gets really interesting.

Another nice thing about SocialCam is that you can embed this video on a blog which I'm going to do, I'm going to embed this video on my blog and what I'm looking for next is a way to transcribe this video into text, that way I can get Google SEO credit from this video that I'm doing. Google is very thirsty for original content. It doesn't have a really good way to get into the content of videos today. So I'm sure there's some kind of an automated transcription service out there that will allow me to get these videos quickly and efficiently transcribed into text and then what I'll do is I'll embed the video on a blog post and below that video I'll put basically a transcript, all the text of what I said, Google will then SEO all of that original text and my blog will get the credit from Google for that original content. So, by the way, I'm surprised that there isn't a start-up that's already doing this. If there is, I'd love to know about it where I could literally just upload the SocialCam video or even better, the SocialCam video would be automatically found and transcribed for me. I'd be happy to pay for a service like that. So if you're an entrepreneur, I think that transcribing video to text is a really great opportunity simply because Google gives so much value to original content and this is such a great way to make a lot of original content.

So that's really it for today. The kind of main lessons for this first one are: number 1, if you have domain specific expertise and knowledge in your head, find a way to get it out to the world, SocialCam is a really great video or app to use to do that it just, it runs on the iPhone and it also is great because it allows thus content to be uploaded, hosted by SocialCam and then share it out through Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and all sorts of other authentication methods. And, it can be embedded into a blog and then if you can find out a way to transcribe it, you're golden. So, hope this is interesting. If you don't know my blog, again, I'm Daniel Odio, my blog is just DanielOdio.com, D-A-N-I-E-L-O-D-I-O.com, I'm an entrepreneur, CEO of community called Socialize out here in San Francisco, great to do this first one, I'm excited to do more. Ciao!