Monday, October 27, 2008

Hey Wow: YouTube101.TV PPT Featured on SlideShare's Home Page Today!


The slideshow sharing site SlideShare is featuring the YouTube101.tv presentation from Saturday's Biz Tech Day conference on its home page - driving page views up from 61 yesterday to 688 today (and counting). Seven people have even favorited it. Wow - so this is 2.0 in action!

(11/1: it's up to 1100+ page views...)

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Sagas.com Launches New Low Cost Video Advertising

You heard it here first! Sagas.com offers low cost video advertising for your small business. Check it out right here.

For those of you who were at BizTechDay.com, this was one of the companies I featured in my talk...these are the folks who are offering $800 and up video packages. What differentiates them from turnhere.com/yellow pages package is that you can OWN the Sagas video 100% and can place them wherever you like.


Sagas has very nicely provided four types of videos including (as you see in the frame grab):
1. A first person pitch
2. A product demonstration
3. A location tour
4. A customer testimonial

Truth in advertising: I consulted to Sagas.com in 2007, but about an unrelated line of business.

I would love to hear from anyone who uses the service what the experience is like.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Poladroid

Do you remember Polaroids? Well a new software application, Poladroid, lets you take your digital photos and turn them into Polaroid-like images.

It simulates the old Polaroid experience by making the photos like this:



Might be fun to pop a few of these into some video.

Poladroid is free and you can get it at http://www.poladroid.net/

Want To Upload to Many Sites at One Time? TubeMogul's Your Tool



Want to put your videos up on many different sites without sitting through the process over and over, uploading on each individual site? Then tubemogul's for you. Check it out and then traipse on over.

You must already have a user name and password for each site and enter that info into tubemogul. Here's the way it works:



Thanks to Paula Sorti of WorldWalk Media for this tip. At yesterday's BizTechDay genius bar (where I was allegedly a genius), someone asked me what site did this and Paula had the answer.

Friday, October 24, 2008

Presentation at BizTechDay.com for YouTube101



A few photos have been omitted in the process of uploading this to SlideShare.net - namely some Jeopardy screen shots.

Classes and Consulting Services: Conference Handout

Want help sorting out how to use web video for your startup or small business? I'll be presenting an overview of some options in a 30-minute talk Saturday...but if you want more in-depth help, consider these options:

Classes: The Saturday Series
3 Daylong Classes, 1 Webinar, Book
Focus on small business web video and learn how to use it for your business.
Location TBD: SF, East Bay, South Bay and/or Marin locations
Dates TBD: one Sat. each in Nov., Dec. and Jan.
Cost: $295 (includes all three sessions, webinar and book)

Session 1: Web Presence for Small Business
• Site: Web, Social Media, Blogs, Audio and Video Plan
• Advertising: Social Media, Online Ad Campaigns

Session 2: Do It Yourself Video Production
• Simple web videos and great online tools

Session 3: Outsource It! Free or Cheap Video Productions
• Don’t do it yourself ($0 to $1,600ish)

Coaching
• Personal trainer style, i.e.1-2 or more hours/week (phone or online webinar meeting, or in person in Oakland)
Cost: Packages: 10 hours, $1,000; 20 hours, $1,800
[Conference 10% off special: 10 hours, $900; 20 hours, $1,600; must send check postmarked no later than Monday, Oct. 27 to Strayer & Co., Inc., 6007 Majestic Ave., Oakland CA 94605]
• Can also include blogs, podcasts and social media


Consulting and Production
• Strategy and planning
• Collaborate, co-produce, co-create or have us do it for you
Cost: Project or hourly rate

Questions? Call 510.336.4067 or visit pamstrayer.com for more contact info.

Book Extra: Create Your Own Digital Movies, The Business Chapter

The book I originally wrote in 2005 for making personal videos, Create Your Own Digital Movies, originally included not 5 but 6 projects, including this chapter on business videos, which was cut from the book.

But I've dug it up, hoping it might be of some help to the BizTechDay.com audience...so find it here. I thought the example sites in it might seem old and out of date, but I think they actually surprisingly still stand the test of time! :)

Slide Show of the Day on Slideshare: Great Video Overview

Need to get up to speed on the current web video landscape? Here's a great place to start:

Look Smart, Be Smart: Make Your Leaders Come Alive

A how to tip: want to make your team page look smart, be smart?

Here's a tip from Market7.com, maker of video collaboration software, where the team page comes alive, thanks to Shannon Newton.

First, see the page.


Want to know they did that? Here's Shannon's how to, which you can pass along to your programmer or video professional (or teenager).

Step 1: Record your video, no more than 10 seconds.

Step 2: Export your video in flash video (.flv) format using flash encoder.

Step 3: Create a SWF file that simply loops the using Adobe Flash that loops

Some notes on Step 1 - You will want your loop to seem continuous so record 10 seconds where the first frame is the same as the last. The entire loop should not last more than 10 seconds but can be shorter. Not only do you want your loop to be short, you want there to be a moment where they believe it is a still photo. The first frame shouldn't have any motion blur. Also, the motion can either be the subject or the BG but avoid both. You want the picture to go from still to subtle but noticeable movement, not suddenly EXPLODE with movement.

Some notes on Step 2 - When you export your flash video, you want the file size to be very small. As a result, 15 FPS and a small image size are key. Smaller file downloads keep this fun and not annoying.

Some notes on Step 3 - When you set up your flash video, make the first frame the best looking one. shift the frame sequence so that this is the case. The reason for this is that while the SWF is loading, the first frame will be the one you want to display. It's ok if there is a pause because there will be something to look at until the whole thing starts moving. You can use the video swf template that comes with Flash. No controls, keep it simple.

The last thing you want to do is embed this SWF into your page.

Again, this is not something I would recommend for beginners, and I probably couldn't implement this myself, but you can send these instructions to your own Flash person to create this for your site.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

iPhone WebCam Madness


Super fun...WorldView lets you watch webcams on your iPhone. You can even save photos from them to your iPhone, too.

It's worth a visit to the Buzzworks site to see their demo video.

I've been trying to figure out how a business might use this...got any ideas?

One way would be to have a webcam inside your business somewhere...somewhere interesting?

HelloHealth - Startup Video, Nicely Done


MYCA's Hello Health is a new health platform for cutting edge doctors who want to run their medical practice using email, IM, cell phones - i.e. what a lot of people would consider to be "normal" as in this feels like 2008.

The company is doing a very nice job of presenting its messages in short varied videos on the site (which are not embeddable on this blog.) Take a look.

Very good for giving you an immediate sense of what's different about their company and what they have to offer.

Where Should You Host Your Video? Wikipedia Knows...

Want to compare video hosting sites? Check out the video online hosting services comparison chart on Wikipedia.

Better yet, get an understanding of which sites get the most video traffic, also courtesy of Wikipedia.

Or if you really want a deep dive into this subject of online video distribution, check out this blog, from Larry Kless.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

The Ultimate Eye Candy Maker: Animoto

This USA Today blog post says what's best about Animoto, which bills itself as "the end of slideshows."

This amazing online tool lets you crank out captivating, compellingly watchable videos. I call it the ultimate-eye-candy-maker.

I like their video on Techcrunch. But you'll have to go there to see it [since the embed tags aren't available].

Don't miss the Animoto case studies videos. The Barker Lounge one is a fun one to look at. The pet owners paradise sends out a weekly video via email to its customers featuring a photo montage of the dogs who have been boarding there the previous week.

Totally Awesome Collaboration Tools: OpenACircle

Get the beta now! You'll get addicted.
And it's free, free, free.

It won best of show at DemoFall08.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Super Low Cost Web Video Ads

Both Jivox and TurnHere were featured in an August 2008 article in the Wall Street Journal on low cost video online ads. If you can't access the article online, it's available at the Jivox web site (pdf).

Reading the article and looking at the ads below gives you a good idea of what to expect from various vendors who offer different pricing and placement options.

See the ads:



TURNHERE

The first ad you'll see below is from TurnHere

Chris Smith, president of Cresco Equipment Rentals, an equipment-rental company based in Livermore, Calif.. He paid TurnHere a flat rate plus a monthly fee of $100 to $1,000. A camera person videotaped Cresco products, local customers and local employees.

The videos appeared on Cresco's Web sites and in search-engine listings, increasing soared web traffic from 14,500 hits a month from 4,000 in less than a year.

JIVOX

Jivox lets customers create commercials at no cost, but charges about $5 to $20 per 1,000 views of the video. You can make your own ad, using stock footage.

A bed and breakfast owner, Mr. Boruta targeted California, Nevada and Washington viewers looking at local television and newspaper Web sites on Wednesday and Thursday nights, when he suspected they were making weekend plans. Once his ads launched, he saw dramatic and verifiable results.

"Our Web traffic tripled instantly, from 10 hits a day to 30," and soon "all of our rooms were booked solid," Mr. Boruta says. The cost of running the ad for 40,000 views (measured as how many times a user watched the video through the end): $500.

Mr. Boruta says 85% of customers brought in the online coupon, so he knew the ad was working. "We're a small bed and breakfast, so tripling the visits to our Web site and having to actually turn customers away is a big deal," he says.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

YouTube Inspiration

What better place to look than YouTube's annual award nominees?

Look here.

I personally like the entries in the Instructional category.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

YouTube: Video Interactivity (Just Like The Old Days, Only Better)

In the olden times of CD-ROMs, people were pretty excited about video interactivity and by this I mean being able to let people make selections on screen while a video is playing.

Thanks to Google's acquisition of Omnisio this summer, you can now do easy video interactivity using these features on YouTube.

Because they call it video annotations, a lot of people might miss out on how exciting this feature can be. (Annotations makes it sound like a homework assignment footnote or something.) But it's way cool, as you can see in this here video:



Want to know how to use it yourself? Get started here:



For more specific instructions, see the YouTube Help page for Video Annotations. I wish they had their own how-to video about using these features, but...for better or for worse, the way of YouTube HQ is to let users make the how to videos about their features. Viva la community.

Do It Yourself News Coverage: AmTrekker

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Record, Stream Live Video from Your Nokia Phone? Wow



Right now it only works with Nokia, and with specific Nokia phones, but it's really amazing. Got some real eyebrow-raising attention at Streaming Media conference. For good reason.