A colleague of mine, Mary Jo Cranmore, owner of Client Cycle Marketing, which specializes in helping businesses tell their story through video, has a six-step process for generating ideas:

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   1. Set up a Google Alert—If you don't know what this is, just Google it. I send out a weekly newsletter called "Your Mobile Minute" and I use Google Alerts to generate ideas. I have Alerts pulling online content related to "mobile apps" and another targeting "mobile apps and Hollywood." Google curates into an e-mail articles and posts related to those terms every day.

   2. Subscribe to experts' or competitors' blogs—By checking out the competition in a social media setting, you can gather a lot of information around what consumers are talking about and what they're interested in hearing about. Participating on expert sites and contributing comments will establish you as an expert in your field (whether it's by line of business or particular vertical market risks) and grow your "know, like and trust" factor in your community.

   3. From your own experience, develop a list—This is a no brainer. Turn to your customer service reps (CSRs) and find out what the most-asked questions are that they receive, break them down into topics, and do a series of 60- or 90-second videos around each topic.

   4. Develop a list of content categories—Think of the process that every prospect or client first goes through with your agency when buying or shopping for insurance. Create a list of the steps, and then shoot a short video explaining it.

   5. Make a content chart—I particularly like this step because it's very visual. Cranmore recommends that you make a chart with X- and Y-axes. The X-axis would be the list of questions from your CSRs, and the Y-axis is for your content categories based on that list of steps your clients go through. Drawn lines along both axes for each data point and intersections produce solid ideas.

   6. Fire up curiosity to increase views—Now we're down to the weak link in all online communications, and that's getting someone to open the e-mail or click on the video player. You must give your videos and e-mails an enticing name.

Have fun with video and don't worry so much about the production values. By the fact that you're doing it, you're already ahead of the competition.