Social Video

10 Reasons Why Professionals Should Be Using Social Video

1. Media relations / pitches and press releases. Videos make pitches and press releases infinitely more interesting and engaging.

2. Building trust and credibility with targeted groups. Nothing builds trust like video.

3. Raising brand awareness / promotions / working with celebrities. Videos that offer something of value like cash, prizes or 15 minutes of fame can spread like crazy and highlight a product’s involvement in a contest or promotion, raising awareness of the product, and by extension, the brand.

Creating and launching funny, edgy or cool video content involving TV, sports and YouTube celebrities guarantees a targeted audience. Launching a coordinated social media sharing strategy and integrating this effort with the marketing department allows teams to capitalize on that momentum, building and raising brand awareness.

4. Product launches. Viral videos and branded entertainment are high-profile ways to announce new products or refresh old ones. Video gives PR teams a visual, entertaining and engaging tool around which to center campaigns.

5. Crisis management / shifting public opinion / corporate and ceo reputation management.

6. Content development. Company newsletters, blogs, speeches and annual reports are being sprinkled with videos.

7. Social media marketing. If social media is UPS, video is the package. If social media is the rocket launcher, video is the rocket. Video can be branded as heavily or as lightly as the creative and messaging dictate, and the larger story can be shared and developed via social media. Having a message go viral across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other video sites and social outlets creates a new story that can then be pitched to, or organically picked up by, mainstream media outlets — enabling the message to reach TV, radio and print audiences as well.

8. Social and environmental responsibility. For brands, businesses and organizations, being socially and environmentally responsible can be a key way of differentiating themselves from their competitors. Video can bring the faces of individuals and positive actions of these companies to the forefront and help move brands closer to new and existing fans and customers.

Video can also be used to present a call-to-action, or as a rallying cry for public involvement in a good cause. Launching videos where fans are encouraged to submit a response in video form allows a call-to-action to be spread even faster and with farther reach.

9. Events. While a single live event reaches only the people attending, social video allows PR teams to share the event with everyone. This increases the exposure of both the event and the brand, product, organization or personality. Events don’t always have to be real, either. Flash mobs are types of events that are staged and shared on Youtube and via social media.

10. Political campaigns. Politics is about convincing people to trust a candidate, motivating them to convince others to trust the candidate and getting everyone to vote for the candidate. Politicians are often recorded publicly for videos that can take on lives of their own — but funny, emotional or serious original video content can be produced and launched in order to manage the direction and spread of both positive and negative conversation. Political attack videos and damage control videos can both contain humor, meaning or even shock value — and will be shared.

Social Video

Like any other form of advertising, the medium is more art than science, but there are a number of steps advertisers can take to raise their chances of success — without compromising the video’s effectiveness as a selling tool.

Following are some top-level best practices.

1. Take the time to develop a sound strategy. By now, most advertisers understand how to find their consumers online. Reaching them via social media, however, is a different endeavor. The bar is higher because the goal is viewer engagement, not just ad impressions.

A successful social video strategy, therefore, must consider the creative, the placement, and the distribution simultaneously. Where and how the video is displayed says as much about the brand as the video itself. Consider the difference between a video that auto-plays when you visit a page, versus one you discover in a social game or on a mobile device.

It’s also important to consider what you’d like to get out of your social video campaign. Social video is new for many advertisers and it’s important to set realistic expectations. Every campaign is not going to be the Evian Babies. Check this MediaPost piece by my partner for a look at what kind of performance you should expect from a social video campaign.

2. Speak to your audience – not to yourself. Social video is different from television commercials, pre-roll, or other interruptive media in that people’s expectations are higher. The medium is closer to movie theatre ads, where the audience is looking forward to a laugh, or to seeing a big star, or special effects.

With that in mind, the approach should be: entertain first, advertise second. This can absolutely be done in a brand-appropriate way. However, the viewer should feel rewarded for his or her selection.

3. Openly promote the brand, but respect the culture. Opinions differ on how much branding is appropriate in a social video, but we feel the brand should be prominently placed. People know that the brand is trying to connect with them, and there’s no reason to be coy about it. The brand can be the hero without being an interruption.

4. Leverage stars, celebs, and big names if you’ve got them. Big-name musical artists, actors, athletes, and celebs don’t bring guarantees, but having one or more involved in your social video project can be a big advantage. Just be sure the star is current, and that he or she is popular with the consumers you want to reach. Also, it’s important to provide a script that your talent can pull off. Will the famous musician actually be funny? Can the star quarterback deliver a line on camera?

Most importantly, make sure the contract gives you full rights to distribute anywhere on the Internet – no restrictions! You may also want to negotiate for rights to use all b-roll footage, outtakes, etc., and while you’re at it, require your talent to send out a few tweets, speak to bloggers, and do a few interviews.

5. Use special effects. You don’t need space ships and laser guns to be successful here. Anything that creates a “wow” factor will help generate interest. Some of the most popular videos over the past few years (Kobe jumping the Aston Martin, for instance) looked like they were shot on cell phones, which made the clever use of computer generated imagery that much more compelling.

6. Make it edgy, dramatic, shocking, or otherwise memorable. Social video fans love everything from horror and shock to sexy visuals or dramatic content. If it’s brand-appropriate, edgy content usually has a strong appeal.

Online Video Marketing: Why View Counts Don’t Matter

a repost:

by David Murdico , Tuesday, February 15, 2011
A few posts back, I proposed, “If the message is the story, then video is the conversation piece.” Brands, businesses, marketing professionals and agencies have a tendency to get caught up in the number of views a video gets, and not see the bigger picture. You know — that picture that has the sales graph pointing upward and all the smiling executives eating Danishes at the conference table and laughing? Life is good when they’re laughing.

Some online video and social media marketing campaigns are launched to build awareness of a product or service. As in the case of video games that haven’t been released yet, the videos and surrounding conversation are intended to build hype for the game, and will be followed up with new videos and marketing initiatives as the game becomes available in stores or for download. Other video and social media campaigns have shorter-term goals, as is the case with limited time promotions and brand new products. The window for a call-to-action is compressed, and the marketing is typically more aggressive.

What both approaches have in common is that they are designed to get people talking and increase sales. That’s it. We can talk all day about soft measurements and hard measurements and click-through rates, comments, discussion, awareness and views, but the question that will ultimately determine each campaign’s success or failure is, “How much stuff did we sell?”

The value of conversation

250K views on a video indicate that, at the very most, 250K people watched at least part of that video. What the view count alone doesn’t tell you is:

• How many places the video is being embedded on blogs, publications and social networking sites.

• How many places only a video thumbnail photo is being embedded on blogs, publications and social networking sites, along with a brief story.

• How many brand-message-related tweets, Facebook updates, Diggs are generated as a result of the video — but don’t contain a link to the video.

• The quality and reach of those sites, meaning how targeted they are demographically, how many visitors they command per month and how many eyeballs they reach by extension.

• The quality of each view and influence factor of each viewer.

• How many people were exposed to the product or service offer without ever viewing the video.

• How much discussion is being generated and consumed by people who will never see the video.

• The next action taken by anyone exposed to the message.

Video is the catalyst

Given the right viral marketing strategy, online video has the ability to spark conversation. Just as an engaging piece of art in a house will beg questions like “What is that?” “Where is it from?” or “I’m so sorry I just dropped it… how much did it cost?” — a good video will inspire not only people who are in favor of the brand, product, service, topic, actors or video itself, but also those who are opposed — often enthusiastically so. They’re OK, too — because haters give fans the opportunity to show their loyalty and support.

A current example

My agency developed and produced a spot for a client to announce a very time-specific special offer. The video is a branded entertainment / commercial hybrid featuring a reality celebrity and was produced as a stylized version of her show with a loose, TV commercial feel. PR and marketing efforts combined with the celebrity’s existing audience served to get the brand’s message posted and discussed on social networks like Twitter and Facebook, as well as on blogs and publications in multiple verticals — including entertainment.

Many of the people who were made aware of the promotion and signed up for the offer may have never even seen the video, yet they were exposed to the surrounding conversation and followed the call to action as a direct extension of the video’s influence.

10 New Year’s Resolutions for Entrepreneurs

1. Do a little less flying by the seat of your pants
Measure as much as you can. This is one of my toughest personal challenges, even though I know that anything that gets measured is likely to improve. You don’t have to succumb to analysis paralysis, but find one or two things you don’t study closely and study them.

For starters: Do you know how profitable your key customers are? Most small business owners don’t, and many don’t know who their “best” customers really are.

2. Find even more ways to save money
There are always, always ways to reduce costs in any small business, and it’s incumbent on us to find every penny.

For starters: Take a close look at all transaction costs (bank fees, e-commerce charges, credit card processing, etc.). These things generally become more competitive every year. If you have a million-dollar business and reduce expenses by just 1 percent — not hard to do — you’ve just put ten grand back in your pocket.

3. Sell, sell, sell
As my father used to say, “sales cure all ills.” If you don’t already have one, make a plan for the year to find every way to grow your top line, and execute.

For starters: Don’t try to do everything and chase every opportunity (I’ve learned that lesson the hard way too many times). Identify the single biggest growth prospect you have — and have the ability and resources to pursue — whether it’s a new customer, new product or new market. Laser-focus on it until it happens.

4. Stay focused on your people and their ideas
Make sure you are getting the most out of your employees and they are getting the most out of you. You may have a formal process for this or a more casual approach (my preference is the latter, but it doesn’t work for all businesses).

For starters: Have open New-Year conversations with employees, either individually or in groups. Do the best you can to create a non-threatening, no-consequences environment for the discussions — these are not performance reviews. If you have a small group, do it over a nice long lunch. See what your people thought of the past year, and share as much as you feel comfortable about the business. Try to pick up a few ideas on what you can be doing better for each other in the New Year and plan/act accordingly.

5. Never stop paying attention to cash
You know that cash flow is the only thing that pays you and your bills. So are you doing everything you can to maximize it (payable/receivable management, improving inventory turns, proper use of financing)? The sooner you can get every dollar and the longer you can hold it, the better.

For starters: It’s business 101, but how often do you talk to your suppliers about payment terms? Perhaps if you agree to a minimum order level you can get an extra 15 days to pay. Or maybe your vendor will let you place a blanket order and draw from it as needed over time, to reduce your cash tied up in inventory. If you’re a good customer with a flawless payment history, chances are the good companies you work with will be open to finding ways to help each other out.

6. Analyze everything about your customers
Deal with problem accounts, find ways to reconnect with idle customers, and identify opportunities to grow your best prospects.

For starters: Take your top 10 customers and study every detail about their business with you for the year just-ended. Odds are you’ll find some problems and some opportunities. Build a plan for each customer for the New Year, and if possible, meet with them to discuss it. Customers know you want them to do more business with you, so put it out there. Tell them what you’re hoping for and what you can do to help make it happen (if you don’t know, ask). Always make it a two-way street.

7. Freshen up your marketing materials
Is all of your collateral material up to date? How about your Web site? If you’re like most companies, you’ve probably got boxes with old addresses on them, or Web pages that are way overdue for updates.

For starters: Get fresh eyes. Have a handful of people outside the company (friends, family) put your website through its paces. Ask them to visit every page they can, try forms and transactions, and evaluate the general browsing/shopping experience, as appropriate. I’ve never seen a website without glitches, so enlist some help in finding as many as you can. Give your testers something nice for their time.

8. Master your inventory and product line-up
Do you have the right products in the right quantities going into the New Year? Bad inventory only gets worse, so it’s rarely a good idea to try to inch your pricing down to move it. Solve inventory problems decisively — the sooner you can get rid of bad stock the better, so take your medicine and start with whatever markdown you think will sell it.

For starters: Build a list of companies that buy overstocks of products like yours, and send an attention-getting but to-the-point “special buy” newsletter every month or quarter. This can be very effective, but again you must be prepared to lead with a price that will solve the problem. Surplus buyers can be a huge help, but only with merchandise that is priced to move. That’s the nature of their business.

9. Adjust your pricing to keep your business healthy

It does no one any good to boast about having the best price if the best price means you don’t make money. Have you kept up with pricing to keep your all-important gross margin healthy?

For starters: Model all your pricing and look at what your real margins are, after all discounts. If your gross margins won’t support your net profit goals, and you do a good job controlling expenses, chances are you need to raise prices. Better to raise them a little now than a lot later.

10. Think about you
Are you managing your time and life as well as you can/should? What can you do to make your work life and personal life better?

For starters: Take a few quiet days off, disconnect as best you can, and do an honest appraisal of how your business affects your life and vice-versa. Can you make the two mesh better next year and get more of what you want? You became a business owner for a reason — is it “happening” for you?

Have any resolutions of your own? Please share them. I wish you a happy, healthy and successful New Year.

Star’s

We’ve always maintained that organizations that were waging the war for talent were fighting the wrong battles and should have focused on performance rather than talent. High performers don’t rely on their talents, in fact in many cases their work does not even involve what they consider to be their greatest natural talent. Here are ten attributes common to people we can count on to perform, the stars of any workforce.

1. They know their weaknesses. There’s no doubt that high performers know their strengths; but they also recognize their weaknesses. They accept that they cannot rely on their strengths and therefore confront their weaknesses and attempt to improve them.

2. They envision an objective or two ahead of the one that they are actually working on. This is the most surprising and fascinating attribute. It violates the one game at a time mandate of many coaches, but a significant number of high performers do better when they’re thinking a goal or two out. One noted that “the project is only as important as the project it leads to.” Perhaps this makes the objective at hand even more important and critical to them.

3. High performers respect high performers at every level in every occupation. Rather than being hierarchical, there seems to be a society of mutual respect. One observer of this phenomena suggested that high performers in positions traditionally perceived as lower level feel good about themselves, and it’s that confidence that engenders the mutual respect.

4. They have a clear professional mission. They know what they do and when they want to do and it changes only slightly over time.

5. They’re realistic. They accept bad things, in their life, in their work, and in life in general. It’s part maturity, part not getting distracted.

6. They measure. They may not use standard comparable metrics but they certainly know the metrics associated with their field and also have a few of their own to monitor and track their own performance and external trends that may impact them.

7. They’re not too specialized. Although more and more of us are becoming more and more specialized, there is an element of diversity in all sustained high performers. They either entered their field after broad and varied experiences or they bring diversity into their life through avid pursuits of other interests.

8. They don’t play games. High performers don’t go along to get along. They have standards that exceed, and supersede those of the organizations they work for. This attribute clearly drives job changes for many of them; they either have to find an organization that is as performance oriented as they are or have find away to so good that they can ignore the socio-political implications of organizations.

9. They are perpetual students. We all expect the best performing physicians to keep learning but the best performers in every field are also perpetual students of their work. They think about their work a lot; they experiment and they look for ideas and applications from other areas.

10. They help others to become high performers. I’m not sure whether this is a pay it forward orientation or is related to the surgeons maxim – watch one, do one, teach one. Or perhaps high performers are just nice people.

Anyone can be a star.

Top 10 Takeaways from ARF’s Annual Convention

Top 10 Takeaways from ARF’s Annual Convention
By Dave Morgan
:
1. Multicultural Americans have $2.5 trillion in buying power. This from Guy Garcia, author of “The New Mainstream: How the Multicultural Consumer Is Transforming American Business.”

2. Powerful, emerging “creative class.” U.S. culture is now being driven by an emerging, 60 million strong, “creative class.” This group of folks, according to Garcia, is very creative, externally focused, open, younger and more risk-taking — and the majority are multicultural.

3. Multiculturals driving leading edge of media & entertainment programming. In an interview with Garcia, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes commented that the emerging multicultural and creative classes have long been a critical core of HBO’s subscriber base, which has enabled the premium cable network to launch critically acclaimed programming like “The Wire” well before more mainstream audiences were ready for it.

4. 80% of research time and money is wasted. Stan Sthanunathan, Coca-Cola’s vice president of marketing strategy & insights, took researchers to task for wasting 80% of their money on backwards-looking, “rearview mirror” projects — and 80% of their time arguing over data quality and score cards, rather than looking toward the future and directly supporting the missions of the businesses they should be serving.

5. Researchers need to provide inspiration and provocation, not insights. Sthanunathan was straightforward about the need for marketing research to transform itself. “We have way too many insights,” said Sthanunathan. “Insights are only a means, not the end.” Researchers need to focus on delivering ROI for the business, not insights.

6. Most CEOs are clueless about running customer-centric companies. According to McKinsey’s John Forsyth, most CEOs of U.S. companies are clueless about what it takes to run a truly customer-centric business. He tasked researchers to try to take a stronger lead in changing their companies, since they’re much better equipped then their bosses to understand what that future holds.

7. “Tomorrow” is a powerful word. We learned from Dr. Duane Varan of the Disney Media and Advertising Lab that using the word “tomorrow” in on-air program promotions, instead of mentioning a specific day of the week, was much more effective in driving viewership of the spot.

8. TV advertising significantly undervalued. TRA Global’s Bill Harvey and CBS’s David Poltrack showed us single-source ad-effectiveness studies that demonstrate that not only is the TV ad industry’s focus on “sex/age tonnage” obsolete — but it significantly undervalues TV and its ability to drive measurable sales and brand lift, by targeting advertisers’ heavy swing purchasers instead.

9. Set-top-box data can transform TV research. Not only did TRA’s Harvey demonstrate the new power that set-top-box viewing data can bring to TV advertising, but Google TV showed how the company measures audience drop-offs during the airing of ads on a set-top by set-top basis. Though, ironically, since Google is the world’s highest-profile technology company, it didn’t seem any more advanced than the “tune-away” research that Kantar Media has been showing us for years.

10. Simultaneous, multiplatform TV viewing has big future. NBCU’s Alan Wurtzel reported dozens of finding from the company’s “billion-dollar” Olympics media research project. Among them: 32% of Web and TV viewers used those platforms simultaneously, and represented the heaviest TV viewers of the Olympics.

Keep it simple!

Today, I’ll share 140-character-or-less responses from 19 marketing gurus regarding the most important thing they learned from search marketing:

Aaron Magness — Director of Brand Marketing and Business Development, Zappos

“Find your brand promise and live it every day!”

Alan Charlesworth — Lecturer and Author, University of Sunderland, UK

“With the right product in the right place at the right time, starting with a niche market and building from that foundation can work.”

Avinash Kaushik — Author of “Web Analytics 2.0″ and co-founder, Market Motive:

“Launch early. Iterate. Fail Faster.”

Chris Copeland — CEO, GroupM Search:

“Only you can define yourself. Never let others tell you who you are or what you can be.”

Damian Blackden — President – Digital, EMEA, Omnicom Media Group

“Simplicity and relevancy combined can be equally magnetic as compelling content.”

David Berkowitz — Senior Director of Emerging Media and Innovation, 360i:

“Don’t be evil, unless you want to.”

Gian Fulgoni — Executive Chairman & Co-Founder, comScore:

“It’s staggering how much data can be processed in just a fraction of a second and delivered back to the searcher.”

Gord Hotchkiss — President, Enquiro Search Solutions

“Listen to your customer (user) first, everyone else after.”

Janel Laravie — Co-Founder, Chacka Marketing

“Deception gets you nowhere, unless you are Google. Only Google doesn’t have to follow Google’s rules.”

Mark Goldstein — Vice Chairman/Chief Marketing Officer, BBDO North America:

“If you build enough interest, the business will follow.”

Matt Spiegel — Global CEO, Omnicom Media Group Digital:

“Smart people with smart technology can accomplish great things.”

Michelle Prieb — Project Manager, Research and Communications Organization, Center for Media Design, Ball State University

“Provide quick, easy, accurate, reliable and safe results, and people will trust you with their lives.”

Paul Gunning — CEO, Tribal DDB Worldwide

“You still can change the world.”

Rishad Tobaccowala — Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, VivaKi

“Think Big. Move Fast. Revere Talent. Measure Everything.”

Rob Griffin — SVP, Global Director of Search and North American Director of Analytics, Havas Digital

“Reinvent a belabored industry with a new model, simplicity of design, & form function.”

Sean Cheyney — VP, Marketing and Business Development, AccuQuote

“Don’t over think it. Sometimes simple creates the best experience.”

Sean Finnegan — President, Chief Digital Officer, Starcom MediaVest Group

“Focus and simplicity can lead to widespread adoption.”

Scott Hagedorn — CEO, PHD U.S.

“You can learn a lot from a failed experiment. But not experimenting will make you a total failure.”

Scott Shamberg — SVP, Marketing and Media, Critical Mass:

The Long Red Road (A new Play by Brett C. Leonard)

Today I went to “The Long Red Road” written by Brett Leonard and directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman. BTW I saw Hoffman in person just out side of the Blue Frog the other day. But I wanted to find out what the play was about and try to understand how the play was written and produced. This is the first professional play i’ve been to and I was blown away by the performance. The lighting and transitions between the scenes keep everything right in tune. There were small mistakes and minor acting flaws. But when it all came together it was wonderful. The craziest part of the whole experience was the relationship between the plot and my own experiences. Maybe this happens to anyone who deals with alcoholism and broken dysfunctional families.

So you walk in and you are with mid to upper aged higher income folks and you walk into a room and watch a slice of life which could have been any given day of our families life. And then you over hear the reaction of the crowd and their analysis of their observations, and you know what they think of that craziness. We must have all dealt with it to some degree or another, but watching the story on fold I found my self checking to make sure that when the actors put down a cigarett I wanted to make sure they put it all the way out. Just like when I was growing up. You could tell people in the crowd were uncomfortable but it just brought me back.

The “Basic” brand of cigaretts. The chandelier, the kitchen table & Chairs, the bathroom medicine cabinet, the TV, the low quality art, the mixed construction of the set, the yelling, the swearing, separated relationships, the promises that were never kept, ..etc.. it was if I could have given the words to the writer and now all of downtown Chicago was watching my show.

The greatest part of the show is that unlike life they were able to get through some of the toughest choices in only a few hours and once its done its done… The long Red road is not for the actors but for the audience. Its long and as they explain filled with blood, but worth taking because its healthier then what was shown on stage.

Top Information Technology Predictions

Gartner continues to investigate the changing balance of power from across its research areas, and selects Internet Technologies as the focus of this year’s crystal ball gazing.

Here’s our future according to Gartner:

By 2012, 20% percent of businesses will have no ownership of IT assets. Fueled by technological developments in 2009, such as virtualization and cloud computing, there’s a movement toward decreased IT hardware assets and more ownership of hardware by third parties.

By 2012, India-based IT companies will represent 20% of cloud service providers in the market. Gartner attributes this to companies leveraging their market positions and R&D efforts in cloud computing, resulting in cloud-enabled outsourcing options.

By 2012, Facebook will lead the pack in developing the distributed, interoperable social Web through Facebook Connect and similar mechanisms. The interoperability will be critical to survival of other social networks.
Other social networks (including Twitter) will continue to develop with focus on greater adoption and specialization. However, they will all revolve around Facebook.

By 2014, building on server vitalization and desktop power management as savings in energy costs, more organizations will be driven by the need to be responsible for carbon dioxide emissions and will include carbon costs in business cases. Vendors will have to provide carbon lifecycle statistics for their products.

In 2012, 60% of a new PCs total life greenhouse gas emissions will have occurred before the user first turns it on. In its lifetime, a typical PC consumes 10 times its own weight in fossil fuels, but around 80% of a PC’s total energy usage occurs during production and transportation. Buyers will be paying more attention to eco labels.

Online marketing by 2015 will control more than US$ 250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide.

By 2014, mobile and Internet technology will help over 3 billion of the world’s adults to electronically transact. Emerging economies will see increase in mobile and Internet adoption through 2014. Worldwide mobile penetration rate will get to 90%.

By 2013, mobile phones will replace PCs as the most common device for Web access.

“A Manual on How to Rehearse”

“A Manual on How to Rehearse” throws emphasis on how to take care of yourself, because the reality of both film and television acting is that most of the time you are on your own, either with little or no direc¬tion or with direction given to you entirely in terms of results. An actor in television or films must learn to achieve those results immediately When the camera is ready, the actor has to be ready. The aim of our Scene Study Workshop is to teach you how to be ready.

This means you have to learn how to work on your own, with¬out the director, without the other actor, even without rehearsal time. You have to learn how to make specific choices quickly and economi¬cally, which means you must be able to draw on your own life and emotions readily

Since the art of acting is the art of creating relationships, use your workshop rehearsal time fully to learn how to work with real people in a real rehearsal process—so that you will know what to do when there is no rehearsal process and you meet the other actor for the first time in front of the camera.

Here is one essential difference between stage and screen acting: the camera picks up what you think. A good screen actor is one who is always thinking (which is the communication of feelings through silent dialogue) and whose thoughts are always specific.

Don’t believe that screen acting is “taking it down” or “making it subtle.” You need the same life-force important impulses that you need for stage acting, so the adjustment you make is o i i ly because of the physical proximity of the camera: the person you are relating to is right next to you, lying in bed with you or sitting so close to you on the sofa you can actually feel the warmth of their body

How to Rehearse
1. Reading the script.
Don’t start to read from the point of innocence. Instead start to read, .for the first time, from having this foreknowledge: This is going to be about me involved in a love relationship.

Ask: What do I want? What am I fighting for in this love relationship? And what gets in my way? What interferes with my getting what I need? This is finding the conflict.

At the same time, find the opposites of what you are fighting for. As an example—if you are fighting to create a love relation¬ship with the other person in the script, then the opposite is wanting to be independent, to be strong enough not to need a relationship so you can stand on your own two feet.

So do not come to the first rehearsal with your partner with an open mind, ready to read through the play with a “Let’s see what this is about” attitude. Come to it prejudiced, with your mind made up about:
n What you are fighting for in this relationship
n What creates the conflict
n What the opposite is

Remember: the opposite of having your mind made up is having an open mind to changes based on new information you may find out. This might lead you to make a more basic, therefore deeper, choice, and will also allow you to add many different ways of expressing what you are fighting for.

Figure out in advance what your partner in the scene
is fighting for. Then find out in the first rehearsal what your fellow actor has decided he is fighting for. Remember: you do pot have to agree on what you are fighting for. In life, people don’t agree—and they manage to have scenes together all the time!

2. Don’t talk; do.
There’s far too much talking and analyzing in the usual rehearsal process. One improvisation is worth ten discussions.
When I ask, where is a missing element in the scene, actors tell me, “We talked about that,” which proves that talking about it doesn’t get it into the performance.

Do It. Put what you’re talking about into the scene. If it doesn’t happen in the rehearsal, then improvise to make sure it is there.
Improvising is one of the most important elements in the re¬hearsal process, Improvise about the past, about what happened

in earlier incidents between the two of you. Improvise about the future, about what you wish could happen; about what you fear may happen.

Rules about improvising:
Seek confrontations, rather than avoid them.
Operate on needing something now and refuse to postpone your need.
Once you face a confrontation, seek to explore its conse¬quences, which will then lead to another confrontation.
Insist on making events happen. An event is where there is new knowledge that creates a change in a relationship.

3. At your second rehearsal, read the scene together a different way. Read the line as written; then, before your partner responds with his line as written, say aloud what you are really thinking and feeling.
Proceed through the entire scene this way

If you get stuck later on in the rehearsal process, do this method of reading the play again. This method, like improvising, is better than discussing and analyzing the script: it is another way of doing rather than talking.

4. Play Ping-Pong.
Most scenes are too slow. They are much slower than the usual life pace.

Therefore, every third run-through you do with your part¬ner should be an effort to add the game of Ping-Pong to what you are doing in the scene.
Think of what the game of Ping-Pong means:
It means immediate response: return the serve or you lose.
It means there’s no time to stop to think: you have to respond immediately.

It means expressing joy when you win and dismay when you lose. It also means willingness to express admiration

when your partner does well. This score-keeping is an important element in anyone who plays the game well. No one likes to play with someone who won’t revel in the wins and losses.
Ping-Pong doesn’t mean just going faster (although picking up cues always helps); it means making the stakes higher and more important.

5. At each rehearsal, explore and add two more of the Guideposts (which you will find explained in Audition in the section called the Twelve Guideposts):
The Moment Before
Humor
Discoveries
Communication and Competition Life and Death Importance
Find the Events
Use the Place
Game Playing and Role Playing t. Mystery and Secret
6. Humor is the most essential ingredient in any relationship, and it is the one most often left out by actors.
The more serious the stakes, the more necessary it is to find humor.
Find humor in every scene, in every event, in every relationship.

7. The Moment Before is what you start with. Therefore it is important that it be specific and emotionally charged so that it will throw you into the scene to accomplish what you are fighting for.
Don’t ever start any rehearsal or performance without re¬creating your Moment Before. What you do in the Moment Before will affect every moment you do in the scene.

8. Conflicts and problems will normally occur between actors working on a scene. Expect them; they are not unusual.
The only solution to conflicts and problems is the deter¬mination to keep communicating.

There is a tendency to pile up injustices, to become a collec¬tor of injustices. This is easy to do. The hard thing is to keep communicating even when you’d like to kill your partner or the director. Even when you feel you’re not being dealt with fairly, even when you feel your partner isn’t communicating at all, you must keep the channels open. Listen. Be willing to hear what the opposite side’s view really is; be willing to consider it even when you disagree.

Communication is hard. It takes determination and skill. Develop both. You’re going to need them for every scene you ever rehearse or perform.
9. Do the majority of your work outside of the rehearsal process, so that you are ready to perform when it comes time to rehearse with your partner.

Most actors fool themselves: they don’t really work outside of the rehearsals. Don’t just vaguely “think” about the scene: do actual concrete work on it. Ask Guidepost questions; write down your answers.
Force yourself to:
Be specific.
Make concrete choices.
Relate everything you do to your own life.
Don’t limit your choices and feelings to your concrete everyday realistic life: always tap your fantasy life as well.

10. If you only rehearse the words of the script, then you haven’t ex¬plored the relationship between your life and the life of the script.
Don’t go to the first rehearsal like an empty blackboard
ready to be written on. Go to the first rehearsal with half your
rehearsal work already done: start out way ahead of the game.
There’s a highly prevalent but mistaken conception that an actor should come to the first rehearsal with an “open mind.”

An open mind in this case just means you haven’t done your preliminary work. Instead, come to the first rehearsal filled with decisions and prejudices, with your mind made up. Only then can you be open to changes that are worthwhile.
11. Think of the difference between stage and screen acting this way: on stage, your partner is always on the other side of the stage; in screen acting, your partner is right next to you.

12. TAKE RISKS. Safe acting is dull acting. Learn to take risks. Learn to make every situation one that has life-and-death stakes.
Taking risks is not a separate operation. Take risks in every guidepost you apply to your scene. Do more than you would in ordinary life. Do more than you think you should.

13. Learn to physicalize all your choices. Even if you end up in a small office doing your audition, or even if you end up in a tiny set squeezed up close to your partner or the camera, the fact that you have conceived of the scene in physicalized terms will make your acting stronger, more specific, and more emotional.
Find out always what the physical actions are that extend the emotions you are feeling. Put them into the scene.

14. Darn your lines early. The sooner you are off the book, the sooner you will (a) physicalize, (b) take risks, and (c) create relationship needs.

Have your lines learned by the second or third rehearsal. Otherwise you’ll never make it in television or film.