If we were playing a word association game and I said “B2B webinar promotional video,” what’s the first word that might come to your mind?

“Boring?”

“Dreary?”

“Ho-hum?”

In most cases, you’d be right, I’m afraid. Most companies create promotional videos that are all of those things, plus maybe “mind-numbing” and a “waste of time,” too.

But every once in a while, someone decides to have a little fun. I’ve talked about this before: ExactTarget brought a sense of energy and fun to its Connections 2010 promotional videos, too. And here, FOCR (Friend of Content Rules) DJ Waldow brings more of the same energy to a promotional video we shot for an upcoming webinar C.C. and I are doing in a few weeks with Blue Sky Factory.

If you watch closely, you’ll see that this video has all the hallmarks of a solid promotion.

Short? Yup.
Tie-in to live event? Check.
Call to action? You bet.

But what it lacks is something valuable, too: That deadly boring bit.

What do you think?

Our friend, and fellow Wiley author Scott Stratten , took some time out of his busy life to crank the tunes and review our little old book.

If you have not read Unmarketing yet, I can’t recommend it enough. I wrote a review for it when I first read it and still quote him all the time. Every marketing and PR professional needs to read it.

The Content Rules Book Tour might have taken a break for the holidays, but it is about to get in full swing as I am headed to Las Vegas, Orlando, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver. Then both Ann and I will be going out to San Francisco for an event. ALL of this in January!

But, before we hung the stockings and popped the champagne, I headed out to Portland, Oregon to give the opening keynote for the Portland State Digital Marketing Conference.

While there a couple of interviews were shot and both of them hit the web today.

Up first was an interview backstage immediately following my keynote. They were filming them with all the speakers and I was still wired from being on stage and that energy carried forward into this.

The second was filmed as a short interview with both myself and Brian David Johnson who is the futurist for Intel, the author of Screen Future and was the conferences closing keynote. I’m still glowing from what he had to say about Content Rules.

We are really looking forward to all the people we are going to meet on the tour and are psyched to hear that so many of you are enjoying and learning from the book.

We love when friends create great content. Especially when that content involves us or the book!

Special thanks to our friend Ron Ploof, author of Read This First: The Executive’s Guide to New Media–From Blogs to Social Networks for this very cool test of the new Google Goggles technology.

While attending Blogworld Expo 2010, I took part in a panel discussion titled “The Blogger Killed the Author & The Publisher Hid The Body.”

The session description reads:

In a world of 140s, shrinking screens, and ‘after-the-jump’ readers, how do we make books people want? Are books just ‘content’ in a dead format? Does tweeting, posting, and IM’ing make for better or worse writers? What 5 things should every author being doing to get published? This session is for publishers, and authors who still want to make money on books. It can be done. Come learn how.

In addition to myself, the panel also included other great speakers from both sides of the author and publisher equation including Hadji Williams, Ellen Gerstein, Justin Branch and Susan T Spencer.

The team from Wiley (our publisher) filmed and assembled this highlight reel of what I had to share with the audience and now we can share it with you.

I’m really hoping someone captured the whole panel to share because I think a lot of great resources and information for aspiring authors was shared by all.

We are both big fans of Grammar Girl and the empire she has built around herself. Truth be told, Ann is a bit of a fan girl, so when she found out that C.C. actually knew Mignon and would be getting on camera with her, you should have seen the flurry of text messages. *grin*

But, we were excited to be part of her Behind the Grammar podcast and to talk a bit our decision to not give away lots of free copies of the book while marketing and what we decided to do instead.

Did we make the right decision? What do you think? We’d love to hear your opinion.

I have a pretty clear definition of what content is in my head. But, I also know that it is something that is hard to put into words when you need to so I was curious how others might describe it.

While attending Blogworld Expo last week I carried around my video camera asking friends and strangers to complete the sentence “Content is ____”. I had a blast sitting down this morning and pulling out some of the nuggets to share with everyone. It was fascinating how many different directions people went with their answers.

You might see some familiar faces in the video like Scott Monty, Todd Defren, Maggie Fox, Steve Hall, Jenny Cisney, Ewan Spence and Steve Garfield. Thanks to everyone who allowed me to film them. I ended up with so many great answers I couldn’t fit them all into the video.

Now, if I asked YOU the question how would you answer? What is content to you and how do you describe it? In the comments answer the question: Content Is _____

Update 11/19 – Adding links to content that people in the video are creating. If I forget someone, please let me know and I’ll add them.

• http://www.averagebetty.com
• http://foodieslive.com
• http://www.adrants.com
• http://tpnrock.com
• http://jennifercisney.1000words.kodak.com
• http://thecampdirector.com
• http://jeremyvaught.com
• http://jessicarmurray.com
• http://socialmediagroup.com/category/blog/
• http://www.scottmonty.com
• http://www.stevegarfield.com
• http://www.pr-squared.com
• http://fororchestra.com

If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought someone slipped a copy of Content Rules to our friend Chris Brogan early based on this video he posted earlier this week.

In the video he is talking about his approach to building new business across his channels and as you watch you’ll notice that a variety of content is at the core of his ecosystem. He discusses his use of his newsletter, webinars and a mix of free and paid content to attract new customers.

Of course, as much as I loved this video, it reminds me of the old Disney animator videos. I kept waiting for him to flip the page back and forth with a dollar sign or something.

Way to go Chris and thanks for confirming what we are trying to tell people.

Can you believe that September is already here? Where did the summer go? We spent most of ours with our computers putting the final touches on the book and we wanted to update everyone on the status of the book with this video update.

After a nice curry lunch we found a bench in the shade and recorded this for you.

Thanks again to David Meerman Scott, author of the hit new book Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead (and several other awesome books), for taking time out of his busy schedule to have lunch with us and talk about marketing for the book.

As we mention in the video, we are putting the final touches on ideas for how to schedule a book tour and yes we would love to come to your town, but we have to figure out how to make that happen. Details will be coming soon.

Until then please pre-order a copy from your preferred online bookstore and we’ll be back shortly with more great content.

This week we hit the very big milestone of turning in the completed manuscript so I figured it would be a good time to update everyone and to answer some questions that we’ve been getting asked over and over. Thanks to everyone for all the words of encouragement you’ve been sending lately. We appreciate each and every one of them.