Big Projects: Good Riddance!?

I always love/hate big projects. I have been working on a large video project for the past six weeks and it is coming to an end. It entailed all of my production skills: writing, scheduling, shooting, editing, recording, mixing, and nearly endless tweaking. This project is the kind that has many management types contributing their opinions, and only little old me to carry them out. The piece is quite good and I am happy with it.

So now, I am moving on to another project that I have to have to manage from start to end. What this next project will hopefully lack is the layers of approval the previous project required. What I have been learning about video production lately is not how to make an effective three-point edit or how to trim a clip by three frames but how to get the client to tell you what they want. The client needs to understand that what they want is not the finished product, but the intended consequence. That is a major difference.

If your client walks in and wants a seven minute video, you will have a hard time pleasing them no matter what you give them. If what they want is clearly defined such as a marketing video that will appeal to an 18 - 24 year old male that will increase direct traffic to a website promoting a sports drink you have a definite strategy that is measurable and attainable.

The hardest part is still having your client understand your vision. There is no way around it. Non-creative people just don't get it. Their brains are not wired to understand creative people or creative things. They may nod their heads in agreement, but you might as well be speaking a foreign language. They just don't get it.

Twitter a Passing Fad?

I have recently become bored with Twitter, the social networking site that gives you only 140 characters to tell your story. Although forcing one to 140 characters has added succinctness to web correspondence, it limits you to speaking in "teasers". In news terms, a teaser is a when you set up a problem for the viewer right before a commercial break in the hopes of the viewer returning to the program after 2 minutes of mind-numbing marketing. An example of this would be "Stayed tuned to see if this tornado wipes out a school bus filled with second graders..."

You can see that if you set up an expectation in your audience then fail to meet that expectation you disappoint them and they will move on to another channel. The same thing happens with Twitter. Who really cares what you are doing at the moment? Why should I care that you found something cool on StumbleUpon and want to reTweet it?

I guess that I really don't care what you are doing. If you have created something interesting then tweet it. If you have nothing to say that is interesting or personal to you then don't.

I think this is the reason that so many tweeters are giving up on the process. Check out this article for more details.


http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,,25406742-36418,00.html

StumbleUpon as a Marketing Tool

Yesterday after implementing StumbleUpon tools including the Firefox toolbar I decided to do a little test. I picked one of my photo from a trip I had to Cannon Beach in January of this year. The light was great and the Nikon D60 performed admirable for its first time out of the box. I clicked on the "I like it!" button on the StumbleUpon toolbar. The results the next day were remarkable.



One great thing that flickr does is analytics on referring websites. This makes StumbleUpon a unique marketing tool that is measurable and trackable. You can clearly see just how effective StumbleUpon can be below. Similar to YouTube in it concept of channels, a user can tailor their stumbles to their own likes. Similarly your online content that you refer to StumbleUpon will be viewed only be users who have made a conscious decision to see content similar to yours.



The process I am developing is to incorporate this involves creating interesting, compelling assets then throw them out to social networks via facebook, twitter and StumbleUpon and ba-da-bing you have a pseudo-viral marketing campaign.

Stainless Steel Eagle Logo

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Originally uploaded by ewuphoto

Here's a photo I took yesterday on a campus photoshoot. I cropped and color corrected the photo in Lightroom 2. I think the added vignette and intense yet muted highlights compliment it well.

StumbleUpon Buttons

I've recently been turned on to StumbleUpon by a co-worker. It is a website that is truly web surfing at its best. Instead of surfing by keywords or by links on a webpage, you surf by recommendations. Basically it's social networking where someone else does the surfing and you reap the benefits.

There is a toolbar you can download for Firefox that is utterly simple. Just click on the "Stumble!" button then you are off to some of the most interesting sites on the web. There is a log-on and a profile that you can create where you can tailor your stumble to different criteria. Mine include graphic design, photography and guitar. You can also send a stumble to your contacts which I have use quite a lot. Another feature is the "I like it!" button. It works rather like Pandora's thumbs up thumbs down feature and tailors future stumbles to your liking.

I found another tool to integrate StumbleUpon into other applications. I found it as a stumble from StumbleUpon itself. The Buttons & Tools is a another simple code generator that gives you many great options on the size of the button you wish to add to your blog. As you may have noticed I put a StumbleUpon button on the bottom of each of my blog entries. Now an interesting blog entry can be contributed to the global pool of stumbles.

2009 Spring Flowers

Spring flowers have survived the flowers at Eastern Washington University.

Flickr, the Future of Broadcasting?

Flickr can possibly have a actual real-world application?!

Let's say you have a number of large displays situated around you business. On these displays you show photos, events and marketing messages through PowerPoint. Now you can feed these displays through flickr. Shazam! Flickr is now something more than just an easier way to share photos with your friends.

Simply put your favorite photos in a set, click the slide show button, go full-screen and violá you are broadcasting you photos. The beauty about this is that you don't need the PowerPoint application on every computer you just need an internet connection and a browser. Updating is also supremely easy. Just drop an new photo in the set and arrange the order to your liking.

All this would be total awesomeness if only the slide shows would loop. Flicker built the best slide show solution on the web but forgot to put an option to loop. I wrote flickr a flickrmail. I got several responses, one of which I believed was actually from a person. I hope that they really consider this added functionality.

Is Twitter the Be All End All?

The integration of social media is the next leap in computing (human) evolution. I have always said that content means nothing without context. That being said, up until now the concept of creating digital media has been absolute, meaning it is a stand-alone entity. We create a photo to be put on a discrete website, we create bit of copy to be put on a discrete website never to be seen by anyone but the intended user.

Now we can create a photo or bit of copy that can be used and shared by millions with each use being referenced back to the creator. With that, context is king. It not what we have... but how do the things we have relate to other things. It is not enough to have a story, a map, a video, a photo, a graph, a pdf without their reference to other pertinent assets. That's where the rub comes. What is pertinent to the message?

Twitter is a great simple tool, but being simple it lacks serious functionality. Where Twitter shines is its ability to integrate itself into other media. That is the key to being viable in the future. How open is my network? How easy is to share my information with other? Why would anyone ever want to use me?

Pat McManus speaks at JFK

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Originally uploaded by ewuphoto

I shot this yesterday at the Pat McManus reading in the Kennedy Library on the Cheney campus of Eastern Washington University. The turn out was exceptional with approximately 350 people in attendance. The lighting in JFK is horrendous. Mixed lighting with overcast daylight streaming through the windows and a nasty mix of tungsten and fluorescents. I just picked a white balance that would give him the best skin tone. Pat McManus to see the rest of the set. for more photos.

Slideoo is the BOMB!!!

This handy slideshow from Slideoo is simply awesome. I can think of all kinds of marketing and branding opportunities for this puppy.