Social Media Tips from Emily

Check out our latest video blog featuring Emily Forgason - our social media director. She'll give you some tips on facebook plus explain how facebook almost cost her her job back in the day...

December Video Blog

Here's an update of what's going on at RHD.... P.S. I know I look awful in this video, it was a freezing cold day here and the video was taken at the V8 bull pens. :)

New RHD Promo Video

We are really proud to unveil our new RHD promotional video! Thanks to Ideal Video Productions for making this for us. Take a look and meet the RHD team, plus learn a little more about our services.

What makes a great livestock ad?

Ever wonder what makes a great livestock ad? Since 1999, we've designed some of the cattle business's most memorable and well known livestock ad campaigns for the various clients we have the honor to work with. Rachel Cutrer shares the RHD philosophy on the four most important components of making a great livestock ad!

Thanks to Ideal Video Productions for working with us on this project!

Cattle In Motion

Here at RHD, we are so fortunate to work with so many great professionals in the business. From time to time, we like to showcase some of our professional partners and tell others about how RHD and these businesses work hand in hand to give our mutual customers the best possible exposure and service.

Cattle In Motion is one of our preferred partners for online sales, internet auctions, and cattle video.

We work with them on numerous sales throughout the year with clients who are using their online sale service. Cattle In Motion was started in 2002, when they began filming cattle and giving breeders across the country new ways to market their products. CIM Auctions was created later in order to help livestock customers sell online. CIM Auctions gives qualified buyers with broadband access the chance to purchase cattle from anywhere in the world.

Here are some ways we work hand in hand with the CIM team.

• Integration of your online sale through CIM and your existing web site. In the month of August 2011 alone we are currently working with four of our clients who are having sales with CIM (Heritage, V8, JDH, Schneider Brahmans). When we know you are having a sale with CIM, we can easily link your web site sales page to the special page for your internet sale in one easy step.
• Integration of your videos to your web site. The CIM Team is so great to work with whenever they film video footage for our mutual clients. Basically they will work with RHD and the client to showcase the video in any format you prefer. Some of our clients like to post their CIM videos on You Tube. We can link or embed from your YouTube video to your web site. Others, like Heritage, prefer to link the video to CIM's video player directly from their web site. Whatever you prefer, we can do.

This year we also worked with CIM on a partnership broadcast of the Kickoff Classic Brahman Show. We paid for the broadcast service, and CIM did the rest. They also provided us with highlights videos to post on our web site. We got so many compliments from this service that we plan on doing it again throughout the years at different shows.

We've worked with CIM since they opened their doors in 2002. On every occassion we have been so pleased at their professionalism, high quality product, and the fast service they provide. Never once have we had a client sitting waiting around to get their videos from the CIM team.

We are honored to work with many professionals in the business, like Cattle in Motion. We invite you to check out their web site at http://www.cattleinmotion.com/ or call (888) 554-VIDS, to send your auction around the world.

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Video: How to book a website with RHD

We've joined the video blogging world! A few weeks ago we worked with Ideal Video Productions on a promo video for RHD (still to come) and then we also worked on a special video blog with Coleman Locke of J.D. Hudgins. After my own little video blog with Ideal made the cattle.com top 25 videos of July (I ranked #17 by the way). OH, and I would like to point out that my video was added on July 25, meaning I only got 5 days in the "July rankings" category. Not too shabby for a video that had been up for 5 days.

Anyway, we got a huge response from our video interview and so we decided to start a video blog as well. Now I have to say, this video blogging is HARD! For someone who is very modest like me, it's very hard to get used to the thought of yourself being on You Tube for the whole world to see.

I would also like to preface this video with the fact that literally 30 minutes before we shot this video, I was at the big V8 Ranch grass fire of 2011. So...so much for a nice hairdo. My first thought was to cancel the video blog since I smelled like smoke, all my makeup had melted of, and the hair was in a pony tail. But then I figured, what the heck, I wear a pony tail 99% of the time anyway and usually don't wear much makeup at all, so this is probably more close to an accurate representation of my normal attire as you can get.

We hope you enjoy these! We're still working on our general corporate wide promo video, and we will continually be adding new short little video tidbits little by little. Thanks for watching! More coming soon!

If Someone's Gonna Brag on My Daddy....I'm Gonna Brag Right Back On Them

I hate to admit, but I haven't been able to watch much of the Matt Lautner TV posts over the past few weeks, because we are so busy at work, and I just can't make time to log on to You Tube and watch. I was honored to do a guest phone-in interview for the MLC TV show last week while driving home from work one day....and that was a lot of fun.

However, since my favorite judge was judging the Illinois State Fair steer show this past week, I tuned in to watch the Matt Lautner TV video of the champion drive....http://youtu.be/LEoJGjl5j9I

I have to say that I greatly enjoyed watching this video clip. Doing something like this type of production isn't easy, and isn't free either. There is a lot of time and effort and technical support required. I wanted to commend the people involved in this effort for doing a service that many can enjoy.

Years ago, Cherie Carrabba used to tell me how she wished we could get cattle shows broadcast on TV like they do the dog shows. The challenge is the down time, and that shows can drag on and on.

I like this format of showing the videos in short segments. I think the MLC team did a good job of keeping the videos short enough that they don't get boring, but also long enough to show the important highlights. We worked with Cattle in Motion on a similar project last week where they broadcast the champion drive highlights from the Kickoff Classic. The Cattle in Motion videos had background music, as opposed to commentary. (Oh and by the way you can see my handsome husband showing the reserve grand champion heifer in this video....which is owned by us!) After we posted those videos we had a ton of great response from people saying how they greatly enjoyed the Brahman show video highlights especially with the music like "We are the Champions" playing in the background.

To me, the commentary is where you could get into some trouble, if you had someone doing the commentary that didn't do a professional job. Clearly there are things that may be said or overheard around a makeup ring that wouldn't need to be broadcast on the internet.

In this video I watched, Chris Terembes and Matt Lautner (the hosts) gave the perfect commentary I thought. He obviously knew the inside details about the different steers but he presented it in a way that provided factual information like sires, dams, breeders, showmen, parents names, etc. It gave a bit of a personal touch so the viewers could know what was going on, but they avoided saying any personal opinions. Hats off to Chris and Matt for doing such a professional job. I also know from my experiences with the Cattle.com videos in Denver a few years, it's not as easy as it looks to be on the videos or tv. Chris and Matt did an exceptional job of making sure there wasn't a lot of downtime, they spoke clearly, they were easy and pleasant to understand, and they were very professional. And trust me, when there is a video camera rolling, it's easy to get nervous.

The MLC TV clip also gave ample time to allow the viewers to listen to the outstanding judge's comments too. So in my opinion, this particular clip had a perfect mix of introduction, commentary, judges comments, and good views of all of the steers in the lineup.  Again, I give it a great review!

If I was a sponsor of one of these segments, I would also be very pleased at the sponsor recognition. I'm not sure how much MLC is charging for these, but they did a great job of recognizing the sponsors numerous times, and I also noticed the sponsor name was built into the video's title. All extra incentives to the sponsor.

I thought this was a great example of Matt and his team pooling together the combined resources of lots of people in the show steer circles to produce something all of us could enjoy. Thanks again to this crew and I'm looking forward to watching more.