Morgul Marketing

    What a Nashville HVAC company can film, and who has to say yes first

    An HVAC account in Middle Tennessee runs into problems that have nothing to do with what to write. The unit you are working in is somebody's revenue property, and the person who can approve a video lives out of state. The trench you are digging is in rock, which is loud and slow and far more watchable than the finished pad. Music is playing almost everywhere you point a phone, and a platform will mute the clip for it days later, usually right after it starts traveling. Settle permission, sound and subject before the truck leaves in the morning and the rest gets easy. Get them wrong and you will shoot a week of material nobody can use.

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    The owner who can approve a video lives in another state

    A downtown unit is somebody's business, and the person with authority to say yes is rarely the person who let you in.

    A guest opens the door in The Gulch. A cleaner opens one in Donelson. Neither can give you permission to publish anything, and the manager who booked the call often cannot either, because the property belongs to an owner who bought it as an investment and has never seen the mechanical closet.

    Ask the manager to get that approval in writing once, for the whole portfolio, rather than chasing it at every call. Managers handle worse paperwork than that before lunch, and an operator who trusts you with a lockbox code will usually say yes to a camera pointed at equipment.

    The occupied unit is the harder question and the answer is simpler than people want it to be. If a guest is in there, do not film. A paying guest agreed to a repair, not to appearing in a contractor's video, and a complaint about it goes straight to the platform the owner depends on.

    Shoot what you were called for. A rooftop condenser on a downtown building, an air handler in a closet nobody designed for service, a filter that has not been touched since the last turnover, the return that somebody framed a headboard against.

    Do the talking later. Narration recorded in the truck afterward sounds better than a whisper in a unit being cleaned around you, and it keeps a stranger's voice out of the clip entirely.

    A post about a downtown rental lands in an argument you did not start

    Short-term rentals are a live political fight in Metro Nashville, and a cheerful post about servicing one gets read as taking a side in it.

    Metro Council has been going back and forth on short-term rentals for years, and neighbors in East Nashville and Germantown hold opinions they will type into your comments without being invited to.

    Keep the post on the mechanical work. The unit, the failure, the fix, the turnaround. Say what the building is only when a reader needs it to follow the job.

    Avoid the word choices that pick a side. Celebrating an investor's occupancy and complaining about a neighborhood's rules both cost you customers, because some of the people watching sit on the other end of that argument from the people you were writing for.

    If a thread does turn, answer once about the work you did and then stop. There is no version of a contractor winning a zoning argument in a comment section, and the attempt is what people remember afterward.

    Operators notice the restraint. Somebody choosing a vendor is watching how you handle a public disagreement, because his own listing lives or dies on the same kind of thread.

    Shallow limestone turns a trench into a rock job worth filming

    Digging here is a rock problem as often as a soil problem, and the day the saw comes out is the most watchable day this trade gives you locally.

    Bedrock sits close to the surface across much of Middle Tennessee. A lineset run, a condensate line, a pad footing or a geothermal loop field that would be an afternoon with a small excavator somewhere else becomes hammering and sawing here.

    That day is a shoot. The saw, the dust, a spoil pile that is gravel instead of dirt, the finished trench with clean rock walls. It needs no explanation, which is rare in this trade.

    The audio is unusable and there is no point fighting it. Film the work silent, record the talking afterward with the machine off, and let captions carry the sense.

    It also settles the question every geothermal quote in this area raises, which is why the price looks the way it does. A homeowner in Brentwood who has watched a crew cut a loop field into rock stops asking anybody to justify it.

    Bank the excavation footage while the machine is still on site. Nobody is reopening a trench because the phone was in the truck, and there is no stock version of this to fall back on.

    In a town this full of professional video, the sound is what gives you away

    Nashville audiences watch produced work all day, and the two ways a contractor's clip fails here are both about audio.

    The first is trying to clear a bar you do not need to clear. A four truck shop with a brand film looks like a template because it usually is one. A phone clip of a rusted coil under a Sylvan Park bungalow looks like the truth and costs nothing to make.

    The second is background music. Something is playing nearly everywhere you point a phone in this city. On Broadway, in a bar you are servicing, in a shop, on a truck radio, through a speaker a guest left on. Automated rights matching finds it, and a clip can go silent or come down days after posting.

    So kill the sound at the source. Ask for the music off before you film, and when that is not possible, plan from the start to strip the audio and narrate over it later.

    Captions do most of the work anyway. Anybody watching from a job site or a checkout line has the volume down already, and a clip that reads with no sound is one you never have to think about again.

    None of this is the whole picture. The parts that do not change between cities, from picking where to post to deciding what deserves money behind it, sit on our national HVAC social media page, and this page assumes you have read that one.

    Questions we get

    An operator will not let us name the property. Is footage from his units worth anything?
    Yes, and often more than the named version would be. Equipment, access and turnaround are what the next manager is looking for, and a clip that shows you working cleanly between a checkout and a clean says all of it without an address appearing anywhere. Ask once for blanket written approval covering the portfolio, then shoot inside those limits and stop worrying about it.
    Our clip got muted a couple of days after we posted it. Why?
    Almost certainly music in the background that a rights match caught up with, which happens constantly in this city because there is nearly always something playing. Reshoot with the sound off if the job allows it, or strip the audio and record narration in the truck. A muted clip with captions still works. A clip that gets pulled does not.
    Should we say anything about the short-term rental rules Metro Council keeps revisiting?
    No. You have customers on both sides of that argument, the rules keep moving, and a contractor's opinion changes nobody's vote. Post the mechanical work, answer questions about equipment and access, and let the fight happen without your name attached to it.
    Is geothermal footage worth the trouble when hardly anybody buys it?
    The excavation day is a single shoot that earns its keep for years. Limestone makes the footage specific to Middle Tennessee, and it explains a loop field better than a page of writing could. It also does something quieter, which is showing a homeowner in Franklin or Brentwood that you take on the version of the job plenty of companies here would rather talk their way out of.
    A guest is in the unit while we work. Can we film the equipment anyway?
    Skip it. The manager's approval covers his property, not somebody's stay, and no clip is worth a guest complaining to the owner about being recorded on a trip he paid for. Note the building, come back on a turnover day, and film it then.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing. Updated .

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