Transcript:

Brad Powell: 0:00

Pamela Slim has spent decades helping entrepreneurs grow businesses rooted in their expertise. But in today’s noisy online world, even experts struggle with one thing overwhelm. And in today’s episode, I break down one of Pamela’s short-form videos to see if her secret weapon against overwhelm really works. Does her video stand out or will it blend in? Stick around to find out what’s working, what’s missing and what she could do to truly shine.

Brad Powell: 0:35

Welcome to the Standout Business Show, the show for expert entrepreneurs who want to make a bigger difference by showing up differently. I’m Brad Powell and I’m a video brand architect who helps experts turn one hour of their life into a whole month of trust-building video content, without becoming fuel for the content machine. Now we’ve all been witness to how the internet’s getting louder and more crowded than ever, which means that too many real experts are staying hidden. And this is where the real trouble is, because the world needs your voice front and center. There’s no shortage of expert voices online, but how many actually stand out Together? We’re going to discover what’s working, what’s missing and exactly how to turn your videos into trust-building, client-attracting assets.

Brad Powell: 1:34

Today, we’re looking at a short-form video from Pamela Slim. She’s a business coach, she’s an author, she’s a business ecosystem builder, and she was a guest back on episode number 127, where we talked about lighting your beacon, and I’ll put a link to her episode in the description Now. She is someone who I truly admire. If you haven’t read her book the Widest Net, you should go out, find it and read it right now. It’s one of the most helpful business books that I have ever read. But how does her message come across on video? Well, let’s break it down.

Pamela Slim: 2:14

Hey everyone, it’s Pam. I was wondering if anybody’s feeling a little bit out of control these days, certainly with what’s happening in the markets, but also there can be so many things happening simultaneously of trying to run your business and grow new lines of business and focus on operations and maybe you’re like me and you’re getting a kid ready for college for the first time in another country. So there’s a lot of things that are happening that can make you feel out of control, and the very best tool that I share in my tiny marketing actions class is to do what I call stop, drop and organize. So this is when you’re running quickly, you have too many things in your head. You can pause for a moment. It’s easiest usually to get a piece of paper, a pen, and just empty everything that is in your head and get it all out on paper. With that you can zero in and maybe circle the areas that you know you really need to focus on this week and then from that subset you can zero in on the things you need to focus on today, because it can be overwhelming when you’re looking at the short term and you don’t have things structured in a way that allows you to accomplish things that are the highest priority.

Pamela Slim: 3:25

I was doing a lot of this, just planning, as I am running my business knee deep and finishing some projects and doing a total website redesign, which is very exciting, but there’s multiple tracks that need to happen, and so I ended up, after taking a lot of small projects and kind of breaking things down through the weeks, I ended up spending eight hours yesterday here in my office which felt so good just organizing everything, redoing the files, doing kind of a macro stop, drop and organize, and so when I came in work this morning on Monday, I was feeling so in control and, despite everything that’s happening out there, I had a plan. I knew exactly what I was doing. So you can start very small by just exhaling, writing everything down, circling what you need to get done, but over time, maybe, given this month, you can zero in on those projects that might need a little bit of extra effort and by putting some focus time into them, you can make some big changes. We’ll get through this together. Focus on what you can control.

Brad Powell: 4:28

All right. So I’m gonna use my standout framework to highlight the strengths and the features in Pamela’s video. So the S in standout stands for story first, and Pamela opens with a question Is anyone feeling a little out of control these days? And that’s a really strong empathy hook. She’s leading with humanity rather than hype, and it’s really instantly relatable and it’s especially true for parents or entrepreneurs or both. The T in standout stands for truth telling and she shares something personal about sending her kid to college abroad. And this is the kind of detail that grounds her authority in real life. And I can relate because I have a daughter who’s about to go off to her second year in college in Quebec, who’s about to go off to her second year in college in Quebec. It’s like, oh, she gets me with this little bit of detail.

Brad Powell: 5:26

Now the A in STANDOUT stands for authority in action. She doesn’t just say here’s what I teach, she shows how she’s living it. She’s speaking from her lived experience and talking about her own eight-hour organizing session, which gives the framework that much more credibility. Now the N stands for natural delivery and I’ve got to say that this video is really natural. It doesn’t feel scripted at all. It feels like Pamela just dropped in to give us a pep talk, and that’s a real strength. It’s maybe even a superpower. If you can accomplish this in your videos, people are going to relate to you that much more.

Brad Powell: 6:12

So now let’s move on to what could be a little bit stronger, and I want to be very gentle here in that, first of all, this is a great video. Pamela is doing really great content. In fact, all of the examples that I’m planning on sharing with you are all really good content. But we all know, no matter how good we do, there are ways we can make it even better and greater, and so I’m just going to talk about a few things here which, if she chose to, if you chose to, these are things that you could think about as a way to enhance your message and make it even stronger.

Brad Powell: 6:52

So the D in standout stands for distinction, and while Pamela’s advice is very strong, the packaging of the video is very soft, and I know this is on purpose. She literally is just turning on her camera and talking to the camera. There’s no editing, there’s no visual overlays, and so there’s no visual context to what she’s talking about. She doesn’t do any text overlays. There’s no bold headline to anchor her takeaway. And if you didn’t already know, pamela, would you stop the scroll when you saw this video.

Brad Powell: 7:28

Now the O in standout stands for ownable point of view. Now she’s got a unique concept this stop, drop and organize. But it gets kind of buried in the middle of the video. What if this concept was the headline? What if it was brought right up front? What if the video opened with the phrase on screen and a visual of her desk before she got organized and talking about the overwhelm? Well, that might be a little stickier.

Brad Powell: 8:00

Now the U in standout stands for unforgettable moment. And while the emotion is there in this video, there’s no visual moment that is really burned into your memory. Even something simple like showing her writing the list or somewhere during the eight-hour session would make this stand out even better. And the T, last but not least, is trust signal. Now I did a whole episode on trust signals. That’s episode number 202. You can go check that out. I’ll put a link to the episode in the comments and you can get my trust signal framework if you wanna learn more about how to do this really well.

Brad Powell: 8:42

Now, pamela’s tone in this video is very warm and very trustworthy, but without a strong call to action or a next step or a way to engage further, this trust building that she’s done has really nowhere to go. So I think we can all agree that Pamela’s message is powerful and her delivery is deeply human, but in a world of short form video, even the greatest advice could use just a little bit of packaging. And if she restructured the clip to lead with her stop, drop and organize idea and gave us a visual to anchor it, this could make her video go from helpful to unforgettable. So what do you think? Does this video stand out or will it blend in? Drop a comment.

Brad Powell: 9:34

Please let me know what you’re thinking and if you would like your own video critiqued like this, reach out. We could feature it in a future episode. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with another expert entrepreneur who needs to hear this. And if you’re ready to start creating trust-building videos without the grind, you can grab my Trust Signal Framework PDF. It’s free, the link is in the description and it’ll give you the cheat code for sending trust signals to your audience. And thanks for tuning in. See you next time. So long.