With the Canon HDSLR 5D Mark III now available, there’s likely to be a lot of questions and demand for training on this near perfect camera. Fortunately, Fletch and the Canon Boot Camp Team are back from shooting with the Mark III in the Prague Boot Camps! Canon Europe was very helpful in providing the Mark III for our use, and let me tell you, the Team was all over these cameras. So in our next boot camps we’ll have the answers to a lot of your questions:

1) What are the new compression schemes, ALL-i and IPB?

2) Can the Mark III really deliver 90 Mb/second?

3) What’s the blurring effect in the DPP software and is there a work-around?

4) Recent videos showing it’s low light performance.

The next Canon camera classes are at the end of April. We’ll be doing our usual Pro Level I and Pro Level II classes back to back on April 28th and 29th, respectively. During Pro Level I, the Chief Instructor (and Founder of the Boot Camp) Fletch, will go over his experience with the 5D Mark III in detail and answer all the questions he can. So he’s basically the featured guest speaker this month! For those not familiar with our Canon Certification training, Pro Level I is for anyone at any level that wants to learn Canon DSLR technology (beginner and Industry Pros), and Pro Level II is the advanced class where we shoot a scene (specifically scripted for the class) from start to finish. Both classes are very hands-on, but only Pro Level I (Sat the 28th) will feature the Canon DSLR 5D III segment by Fletch.

We are SO excited to be able to teach about the Mark III and we hope you’ll join us on the bleeding edge of technology! Stay tuned for the amazing edited footage of the Prague Boot Camp, coming soon to a monitor near you.

Simplifying Corporate Blogging

A primary barrier to a successful blog is creating enough content. A close second is managing the content! For those who work out how to create a decent volume of content, they can easily get buried under plain old content logistics. So when we launched our blogging system here at The Association, I was careful to choose a platform that would simplify the work required after the content was created. Thus, we choose Compendium.

As they say on the Compendium website, “Whether you’re managing 300 authors in 50 locations and generating 5,000 customer stories or just a small team, Compendium’s hosted platform will simplify your blogging program.”

How does it simplify the logistics? Well, if you have multiple authors submitting content via email, that alone can drive you crazy just keeping track of changes. What if more than one person needs to approve the content before it gets submitted? What if, horror of horrors, online searchers find your blog and actually start leaving comments? Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the spam bots that leave non-sensical blog spam. Those have to be “managed” as well.

 

Spend Less Time Managing

Automatic categorization is a prime feature in the Compendium system. Categories of content are worked out in advance, usually around specific keywords, to increase “findability” of the online content.  By simply mentioning the category by name in the content, the article is automatically assigned to that blog. This feature alone makes your Compendium blog exponentially more powerful than an ordinary blog, because even with just the basic Compendium package, you have 25 categories to organize your content around. If your content is going to show up on the first page of Google search results, it’s important to “pick your battles” by selecting specific categories to write about. Writing without establishing niche categories can be fruitless, as there isn’t enough focused content with keywords around specific topics to create visibility. Compendium is neatly built around the idea of niche categories.

Approval layers are already built into the Compendium system. Each author in The Association has their own account on Compendium that helps them create content. A nice extra feature is that authors may email their content into Compendium’s system, then log in later to modify and submit it for approval. There are two possible layers of moderation available. There can be a single Moderator who approves all authored material and comments, and a second layer of approval may be added (for example, a technical or Executive approval layer could be added prior to content reaching the public view). Authors may also be approved to just publish directly to the blog without moderation if preferred.

Customers provide the best kind of content. Feedback and testimonials are very worth capturing, but it can be difficult to accomplish. Here again Compendium has a feedback loop built in. Customers and clients fill out a simple web form, and the content is sent to the Moderator. Once approved, the Compendium system alerts the contributing customer that their content is live on the blog, and gives them the opportunity to share it on their personal Facebook account. This kind of referral marketing can substantially improve a company’s bottom line by validating them as an excellent source of service and/or products.

Using Compendium has allowed us to effectively increase our visibility for our Canon Boot Camp classes. Half of our class signups consistently come from internet searches, which was not the case when we started the blog in July 2010. This graph illustrates the increased blog visits from July 2010 to March 2012. We produce an average of 4 blog posts a week (on a good week).

Using the Compendium system has enabled me to keep track of blog posts more more easily. I handle everything inside the Compendium system platform. No emailing blogs back and forth for approval. I can send comments and decline articles as needed, and approve them to become visible. It’s seamless and easy. One moderator could handle as many as 250 blog posts a week without much strain, assuming he was full time. But most companies don’t produce near that much material.

Interested in finding out more about Compendium? We’re an authorized reseller of the platform, and I’d be happy to give a tour of the system and explain it in more detail. Compendium is the Bentley of blogging platforms, in my humble opinion. We are happy to recommend for any effective marketing plan.

Ever wish you had a few hundred salespeople that worked for free? Well, you can! 

Every client and customer you have could potentially be the source of a new client or customer. It's commonly held that referral marketing is the best possible marketing available. But if it's free, why is it that so many companies don't have a plan in place to take advantage of such a marketing program?

It's a heck of a lot of work, that's why. Ok, there's probably other reasons, but for small and medium sized businesses, establishing a referral marketing program beyond just letting it happen naturally can be difficult. Hey, we're already overloaded as it is with  just the regular list of chores and customer service actions! Now we have to proactively create a referral program? I don't think so.

But Compendium, the corporate blogging platform we use here at The Association, has made it much easier for businesses to leverage good customer experience into a referral marketing program. They took care of all the logistics. Watch the video above to see the overall flow of their system which works like this:

1. We provide excellent training on the Canon 5D DSLR or corporate video production services.
2. Afterwards, we invite our clients and customers to provide feedback via a web-based form.
3. The content is fed automatically into our Compendium blog system, where it is edited and approved by a moderator.
4. Once approved and live on our blog, Compendium's system automatically emails the client/customer and lets them know the content is on our blog.
5. The customer/client has the option to share the story on their Facebook network.

This simple system makes it easy and efficient to leverage customer generated content at no cost and spread it through one of the biggest social networks available today. Compendium's already easy-to-use blogging platform does require some time and work to manage, but it's literally a few minutes a day.

How much is one customer worth to your business? How much more would be added to your bottom line if your marketing costs decreased over time and the number of customers gained through referrals increased? There are very few businesses that wouldn't benefit from such a system! If you'd like to learn more about content marketing and how the blog is best equipped to be the hub of the future, send me an email.

Canon’s rolled out the camera we’ve been waiting for….the new Canon 5D Mark III. And we are incredibly lucky that our Prague Canon camera classes are occurring this month, because we were able to get our hands on this new Canon DSLR 5D (thanks to Canon Europe) and get familiar with it.

In out April Canon Boot Camp we’ll be sharing all the exciting new features and capabilities Canon’s come up with to make the Canon DSLR 5D even more friendly to video shooters:

• Does the brand new, 22.3 megapixel sensor look better than the Mark II”s?
• What is the new “safe” noise level in the ISO settings from 100 – 25600?
• What’s the new procedure for using the movie mode control button?
• Does the DIGIC 5+ image processor, with 
•  enhanced noise reduction & speed, overheat when shooting 60 fps?
• Does the DUAL Card Slot system (for 30 min continuous) work flawlessly?
• Does the Hotswap card really work?
• What  CF cards and what  SD cards should you use?
• Which new compression schemes (“all i-frame” or IPB compression) should you use?
• Does the Manual audio level control during filming work as promised?
• Is the embedded timecode “friendly” to editing platforms?

We’ll have the answers to a lot of your questions, plus we’ll walk you through the operation of the camera with our patented, “ACTIVE LEARNING” methods so you get your money’s worth with data you can use and apply.  Columbia University says active learning is the best form of education there is. 

Come by and join us at the Canon Boot Camp in April. Get trained. Get Certified. Get Certain you can run with the Canon HDSLRs.