All Entries Tagged With: "video"

“FaceTime” with Steve Jobs, don’t mislead your customers…

Some FaceTime with Steve Jobs

Dear Steve,

I love Apple. I have a Macbook Pro, an iPad and now a fancy schmancy iPhone 4…I’m wondering if I can get a little “FaceTime” with you now…have a minute?

After a full day spent with the iPhone 4, one of the best features your new phone has is its HD camera. It shoots VERY well in HD (720p) Your device can easily replace the Flip. Why buy a FLIP for $200 when you can get HD video, a camera, a phone and amazing technology for the same price as a brand new iPhone 4…?

Ok, so that’s the good news, here’s where you completely drop the ball….For a company that’s made it’s money on the user experience and simplicity of use, there is NO way you can easily share your HD video you just shot on your iPhone 4.

The ONLY way I can share my HD video with the world is by simply (!) taking the following NINE steps

• Shoot video
• Plug iPhone 4 into your computer (hopefully a macbook, I haven’t figured out how a PC can do this)
• Open up iPhoto (hopefully it will recognize your iphone)
• Select video to download
• Open up iMovie (again, hopefully you have this, or something similar)
• Import Movie from iphoto- create a new “event”
• Create a new “project” in iMovie
• Drag your new event into your new project
• Then (and only then!) you can Share your movie via YouTube and be given the option to choose “HD”

Easy huh?

Ok Stevie, here’s what you need to do…

1. Tell people that you can’t share HD movies with your iPhone 4. Because, well, you can’t…
2. Tell people that the brand new iMovie App ($4.99) doesn’t do this either. (can i get my money back please?)
3. Talk to YouTube and tell them that it’s your problem so that other YouTube users don’t blame it on you…

Thanks for listening!

Tyson

Eat, Drink, and Be Social….

The best way to teach social media is to find a topic that a person has a passion for. Adam Cohen of Rosetta spells this out perfectly in a recent (ok- a year ago) blog post.

So I thought to myself, I LOVE food (my waistline will prove it). Why not bring together other passionate foodies (restaurants owners, chefs, caterers and food bloggers) and help them learn even more about how to combine their love of food with social media.

Sure, there’s Twitter and Facebook, but there’s much, much more out there….

Foodspotting: A terrific new application. Find dishes, not just restaurants. Let’s say you’ve just arrived in Maine and are looking for the BEST Lobster Roll. It may be at a roadside shack,a food truck, or (gasp) Red Lobster. Why not go to Foodspotting first, take a look at some pictures (with user-generated “Noms” or Likes) and find yourself the best Lobster Roll in Maine..

FourSquare: Geolocation meets retail. Let’s say you’re a frequent customer at a local restaurant. Use your mobile phone to “check in” at this restaurant. If you’re a regular there, wouldn’t it be nice to be recognized as the “mayor” of the establishment? If you’ve checked in more than anyone else, bingo, you’re the “mayor”, and if you are a smart/savvy restaurateur, you’d reward them with something, right? Starbucks is doing it, Harvard is doing it, and a local establishment here in Boston, Boloco is doing it. And doing it very well actually. They’ve actually turned this into a cause-related marketing campaign to reward the mayor AND a local non-profit.

Video: Bring your food/dining experience to your customer. If they haven’t been to your restaurant yet, why not bring it to them? Create a video, interview your chef, highlight your special of the day. Heck, take a picture of it and upload it to Foodspotting..

So much more to talk about it here, but if you’re a foodie and you live in the Boston area, I’d love to meet a fellow foodie at my May 24th Event

Some of the best social media minds in Boston (and fellow foodies) will be there to guide you through it all. They are: Mike Langford, Jeff Cutler, Justin Levy, Mike Schneider, Aaron Cohen

Explaining Social Media Visually-Does this help?

We are constantly refining the social media education process, and there are scores of ways to describe social media to your boss, your team, your mother and father, or your 10 year old. We like to use metaphors, examples, and stories of successful companies, right?

Yesterday, Jordan Schaffel, co-founder of “Say it Visually” shared this video with me. What do you think? Does it tell a story, use metaphors, make sense?

Would love to hear your comments.

P.S. I like the kiwi/aussie accent- good touch.

The Buzz on Google Buzz

Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past few days, Google just entered the Social Media World- here are some quick initial thoughts. (and if you haven’t heard about Google Buzz, it’s ok, because being under a rock isn’t always a bad thing)

What is Google Buzz?
Combine Gmail and the status updates you find in Facebook. Throw in a photo and link sharing, and you have a real-time update of what your friends (who need gmail accounts of course) are doing.  There is obviously much more functionality here, but those are the basics for now, we’ll cover the nitty gritty in a later post.

The Pros
- Relatively easy customer interface that sits alongside your gmail inbox. For heavy users of gmail.com, this is a good thing. If you push your gmail to your phone or Outlook/Mac’s Mail, well you might not use it that much.
- No limits. Unlike Twitter, you aren’t limited to 140 characters. Who knows, people may begin to start blogging via Google Buzz?
- Mobile. Seamless integration with your mobile device with geo-location as well. So you can see what people are saying and where they are saying it.  Fairly similar to FourSquare and those who use Twitter with geo-location turned on.
-Content aggregation. Not surprisingly, Buzz allows you to integrate with other products, so when you add photos to Picasa, share something on Google Reader, watch something on YouTube or blog about something, your friends on Buzz, will get “buzzed”. Note that you can’t sync with Facebook…

The Cons
- The Buzz “stream” isn’t chronological. For those of us used to Twitter and Facebook, updates are chronological, but not exactly in Buzz. Google adds the latest comment on anything to the top of the Buzz stream. So, if one of your friends posted some great pictures on Buzz 10 minutes ago, But  if you have 13 people (and complete strangers mind you) commenting on someone else’s buzz, then your friend’s post gets slowly moved to the bottom. Google- pay attention here!
- Giving people so much room to say something and share  something may really clutter things up. That’s what makes Twitter so good….
- What makes a Google Buzz “friend”?  You may now get followed by other people using gmail/buzz. Does that mean you should follow them back? Twitter users probably will, but facebook-only users (vast majority of people) probably won’t. They’re comfortable with their Facebook friends because they share a common friendship around something. The only thing that connects fellow buzz users is a gmail account..

General Thoughts

-Nice early entry by Google. I think Google is still in the “test and learn” phase.
- Don’t jump on the bandwagon quite yet- Google will (should) probably tweak things in the next few months to make the user interface better. The lack of a chronological stream is quite confusing
-I think success of buzz will be directly related to not how many people use it, but simply how people use it. If people start adding all of their content to buzz, it will be a lot of content for the everyday user to digest- like drinking from a firehose.
-Don’t expect integration with Facebook- ever. I can’t imagine Facebook every letting them “in”. Remember that Facebook has 400 million users, and Google only has 176 million gmail users.

Video Description of Buzz
Still want to learn more? Here’s a quick video for you.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Social Marketers- Steve Garfield

Ok, Interview #7 of the “7 Habits of Highly Effective Social Marketers” series. Today’s interview is with Steve Garfield.

About Steve
Hey this is Steve Garfield from SteveGarfield.com I’m author of the book Get Seen: Online Video Secrets to Building Your Business, and founder of Boston Media Makers. Through speaking and consulting I teach people how easy it is to put video online.

1. What one trait or habit got you to where you are today?
My favorite habit is Stephen Covey’s ’seek first to understand then to be understood.’ I love learning things and then sharing what I learned. I’ve been doing that for years, in person and on my blog, and that led to writing my book.

2. Your work day just started, what’s the FIRST thing you do and why?
First of all I have say that actually don’t have a work day our work schedule. I’m working all the time so I could be working maybe 4 AM, 6 AM, 8 AM. Time doesn’t matter. First thing I do check mail, then check twitter.

3. What makes you efficient with your day?
What makes me a fission is a deadline so for example if I’m editing a video I know I have to get it done by the end of the day I will focus on getting that video done and what I do is try and exclude watching all types of social media.

4. Your Favorite Business book of all time?
My favorite business book of all time is 7 habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey. I love that book and I try to be values based and as I said earlier, seek first to understand then to be understood.

5. 3 things on your desk right now/ 3 things you can’t live without
Three things on my desk so the first thing right front of me MacBook Pro totally runs everything I do all day long every day. Second thing is a nice external hard drive. I finally found a good one. I like it to Seagate external FireWire drive and the other thing that I love that I have a my desk is Sharpies. I love keeping lists and then crossing things out when I get them done with a nice black line big thick black line

6. Habit you want to kick in 2009
I want to get rid of this insane check-in check-in everywhere.  It’s crazy.  What would love to see is new technology that would auto check me in.

7. Habit you want to form for 2010
The habit I want to form in 2010 is actually get out of habits. I’ll look for some new opportunities or new things are are new ways of doing things . I’m going to try and keep an open mind on new possibilities and then try and stop the pattern of doing the exact same thing over time. Otherwise I love what I’m doing and look forward to new opportunities in 20-10. I’m not going to call it 2,010 either. 20-10!

BONUS- here’s a picture of Steve in his office…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevegarfield/376681198/
Photo credit-  Melanie Stetson Freeman

Why You Won’t Need Cable TV…

Last week, how much time did you spend on the computer? How much time in front of the television? How does that compare to five years ago?

It’s my hunch that in the next five years, your internet bill will go up, and your cable television bill will go down.

More and more people are being entertained online, and the following statistics from  comScore paint a pretty interesting picture from November 2009.

• 84.8% of the total US internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 12.2 hours of video.
• 128.1 million viewers watched more than 12 billion videos on YouTube.com (94.3 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 4.0 minutes.

As online video continues to grow, you are going to spend less time in front of that television.  Why be beholden to cable/networking programming? Do it on YOUR schedule. Just head online your for news, weather, and sports highlights or head to hulu.com or netflix.com to stream some video.

It’s not just me thinking about it, the New York Times wrote a compelling argument last month in favor of “cable freedom”.

Think about it, why did Pepsi back out of its 23 year advertising relationship with the Super Bowl in favor of a year long CRM campaign.?

If you’re a sports fan, don’t worry, the networks are catching up to viewing games online. NBC’s Sunday night Football can be viewed in HD on your laptop (and you get SIX different camera angles) and just wait until the Olympics show up online…

So, before you go out and get that new flat screen TV, maybe wait a year or two. The next generation flat screen tv will just plug into the internet, not cable tv….

Hospitals Getting Social and how the Supreme Court Changed Video

Two weeks ago, I attended the Massachusett’s Hospital Association’s event-the New Wild, Wild West- Social networking for Hospitals. Some brief comments and reflections on the day….

The room was packed- terrific job of the MHA marketing the event and spreading awareness about this through the Boston area.

A good overall presentation by two people from TMP Worldwide-Alissa Story and Lori Charest, about social media. A quick word of friendly (and constructive, I hope) advice for Alissa and Lori. If you are going to talk about Twitter, please make sure that you, a) have a twitter account and b) don’t protect your updates.

My favorite part of the presentation was listening to two lawyers talk about the legal ramifications of the use of social media. The best nugget of information was not hospital related, but profound nonetheless..

Did you know that the Supreme Court in 1984 barely ruled in favor of Sony’s Betamax VCR in a case against Universal City Studios?  Big deal. What did this mean?

Well for one, it allowed people to record videos at home and watch them at home. It took the power of media creation and distribution out of the big studios’ hands and began to start handing it over to other businesses, like, say, Blockbuster, your local video store, and now in today’s world, companies like Netflix, Hulu.com and more.

Fascinating to think that this almost didn’t happen. Would we still be going to the movies in droves? Probably not, but it stirred up the video world back in 1984 and perhaps it’s probably why we consume so much video online now. (In one week in January 2009, 97 million Americans viewed a clip online, as many as tuned into any major network….)

The day finished up with some terrific presentations of hospitals in the field who are walking the talk in Social Media. One of them was Lowell General Hospital (disclosure- they are a client) and Beth Israel Deaconess here in Boston. Rhonda Mann, their Dir. of Marketing and Communications gave some fine examples of what they’re doing in her brilliant deadpan voice and presentation- (you should hear her speak). I won’t go into detail here, but let their “Healthy  is” campaign speak for itself here.