Kerri on How to Get Comfortable in Front of the Camera
Kerri acknowledges that most realtors, particularly those just starting out, will not have her professional experience in front of the camera. Still, embracing video is vital to expanding your audience and your real estate business. To keep from feeling overwhelmed, Kerri advises preparation and lots of practice before you set the camera rolling. Use the time spent commuting in your car from appointment to appointment to practice the message you wish to deliver. Repeat words that are difficult to pronounce until they easily roll off your tongue. Kerri goes back to an old adage she remembers hearing often in her days as a broadcaster, “The best news anchor is someone you want to have a beer with.” Your videos don’t have to be perfect, but they must be relatable. Kerri’s advice is to remember that videos are intended to spark a social interaction. Kerri warns that when you sacrifice authenticity for an overly produced “perfect cookie cutter look, you're not allowing for that personal interaction to happen.” WANT TO CONNECT WITH YOUR AUDIENCE USING VIDEO?
PRACTICE You just gotta keep doing it. In television, you start at the lowest market and you go market to market and you get better and better as you go. If you're living in New York City, you're watching the best television talent and news anchors reporters that are in the game. It’s really easy to be intimidated by that and to say, “I can't do this. I'm not that good.” Well, those anchors have been doing it their entire life…. I tell people if you were to go and pull up my very first resume tape (which is a VHS by the way, so I'm not sure we could even find a way to play that!), you’d see it's bad. It hurts to see some of the mistakes. But you just keep doing it. Maybe that means you do it in your car, [outloud] to yourself, for a month until you feel like it's okay, and then you go for it. BE AUTHENTIC It's got to be relatable. You don't have to worry about saying it perfectly or going back on what you said; it doesn't have to be perfect. We're human. So just put it out there! The more and more you do it, the more comfortable it becomes. What's funny is that I have produced videos where I had a videographer and an editor doing them, and then I have my videos I did myself in the car. The ones in the car actually tend to do better than the produced ones! People want real authenticity, just: it is what it is. Act as if you're talking to a friend. You're going to have "ums" and "buts" and different idiosyncrasies; that does not matter at all. The more genuine you are, you’ll see how the videos actually work. BE CONCISE If you're going to do a video series, start thinking about what topic you're going to talk about and then brainstorm in your head. Outline what are the points you've got to make and be concise. If you look at my video analytics to see which videos people watch all the way to the end, you’ll see that If the video's too long, viewers start dropping off. People have no attention for that, so be concise. If you want to talk about one area of the real estate market, then hone it into one city: Here are the numbers. Here's what you need to know. Get in and get out. In television, most of our scripts are 30 seconds long. So when you tell a full story, even if you're talking about a topic that might have both sides of an argument, or you need to interview several people, your whole story is a minute and a half long. You've got to keep that in mind that people don't have time for it, so practice and make sure that your video is very concise.
SMART AGENTS | 35
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