The Blog.  It is so simple, yet so confusing.  When most people think of blogs they think of long-winded documents on-line that bore you by the 4th line…like this blog post, right?  I’ll keep it brief.  A short blog post can work wonders for your business.  It updates people and possible clients about what is going on in your company.  In other words, it draws them in.  We like to call this Inbound Marketing.  The clients come to you.

Blogs can be the base of social media marketing.  It is so simple and easy.  In fact, it can be done in a matter of minutes.  For example, why are you reading this?  I can tell you why: it is short, concise and is providing you with valuable information.  Your social media blog should be the base of any internet marketing campaign you pursue.

Social media real estate is the amount of space you possess with social media.  Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and others all represent social media real estate.  A blog is a simple way to gain more.  The more indexed pages, keywords and interesting topics you write about, the more people will notice…and every business owner wants attention, especially if it is free.  Attack your social media marketing plan with a blog backed up with decent consumer analysis. It’s an excellent long-term enterprise social-media strategy for just about any company.

People are different, and that is what makes them so interesting.  When we meet someone from another country or hear a good friend speak about a recent funny or odd event we find ourselves, often times, completely intrigued and buried in their story.  Why?  These people are interesting, and for the most part, genuine.  We enjoy hearing about genuine, real stories.  They make us feel that we have control over our lives; that we have the ability to make a great experience or story if we so choose.  You must take this approach when developing your social media plan.

The first step when using social media for marketing is writing a blog.  Your social media blog can be read by few or thousands but this blog can have great influence over your audience.  Be yourself.  Your customers or clients want to hear about the real you, not a false story or slimy sales pitch.  Relate to your audience by displaying the genuine you.  To often in social media seminars or courses people will tell you to use social media as a serious marketing platform, which it can be, but listeners get to hung up on the word “serious”.  If you relate to your audience your need for market survey companies or market research data will decrease significantly because your clientele will WANT to look at your site without being pressed to.

Do yourself and your clients a favor.  Be happy and be you.  If you were not a likeable person then you wouldn’t have gotten into business in the first place, or marketing for that matter.  An effective social media marketing plan can be simple if you display genuine traits and an overall interest in others.

Social media.  It connects old friends and college roommates with the simple click of a mouse.  Its ability to yield deep friendships is almost indescribable.  Websites such as Facebook and Twitter have created relationships among people faster than any conversation, meeting or phone call ever would.  This new and intriguing way of connecting with people around world does not have to be completely bound with social interactions outside the workplace.  Its uses can reach far past that of old friendships or picture tagging as it has the unique capability of growing your business exponentially almost overnight.

Marketing and social media can be combined to yield lethal results in not only your consumer analysis but your overall profits.  The quote above says it perfectly; people are more inclined to interact and speak with those who they have social relationship with.  Whether you’re an artist, TV commercial producer or create custom videos you can increase your client base, leads and overall connections through social media.

Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.  Competition analysis can also be made easy through social media.  Add them to your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn accounts to see what they are up to or attacking.  Social media makes it easy to create an effective marketing plan as well as optimize your market research.  Many companies bask in the fear that is the abundance of social media sites; don’t!  Embrace them!  There ability to minimize advertising and marketing costs makes them a no-brainer for all businesses!

Increase the strength of your market base and platform by utilizing the FREE social materials you have at your finger tips.  The development of a social media plan can have direct, positive results on your business!

In Social Media Marketing an Hour a Day, Dave Evans remarks on one of the reasons a company wouldn’t want to start an online social networking campaign.  Not enough happy customers!  In the online world, it takes seconds to share information with hundreds, even thousands of millions of people.  If your customers mostly don’t have good things to say about your service or product, opening the door to social media and the uncontrolled conversations that occur online could be costly.

Because small business owners tend to do a lot of the work themselves, and the customers often have direct access to the owner, it usually is easier to get good service.   Even custom service.  The result is that the customer tends to be happier and there is a better chance customers will be become Brand Advocates.  Compare this to a franchised operation!  The whole reason for franchising is so you can make a ton of money, in most cases.  Customized service tends to be a little lower on the list of priorities.

Ok, so as a small business owner you probably have more happy customers than your larger competitors.  And this is where your edge is over big business when it comes to social media.  The big companies tend to forget about the past customers and all of their efforts are on gaining new ones.  A great example of this are cell phone companies that give the best deals to the new customer, leaving their long-term customers out in the cold.

Why is this an edge for you?  Well, because in the case of a small business with a high ratio of happy customers, the customers can do the heavy lifting for you in the “new customer” department.  Remember, we are talking about happy customers here.  This edge doesn’t exist if your customers are mostly unhappy with your services.   The happy customers, however, by blogging and tweeting about their experiences, can affect the new customer’s opinion and decision to buy.  Do you research a purchase on Google before you commit?  Well, so do your customers!

Here’s a really simple strategy almost any business owner can use:

1.  Create a Facebook Fan Page for your business.

2.  As you come into contact your leads, prospects and customers like you normally do, work out a way to capture their email address with the purpose of inviting them to your Fan Page. This could be as simple as a sheet of paper on a clip board for their name and email address.  Tip: When a customer is interested but declines to purchase “right now”, mention you have a Fan Page on Facebook. 9 times out of 10 they are on Facebook and will agree to be sent a link to the Fan Page.

3. Schedule time each week or each month to email the Fan Page URL to these specific customers.

4. Keep updating the content on the Fan Page with news, photos, event dates, etc.  Make sure to add the “Reviews” application to the Fan Page!

5. Ask customers to write reviews and have promotions from time to time that give an incentive for your customers to share your company with their friends. Facebook has applications for that too.

A really, really good reason to have a Facebook Fan Page for your business is because it is completely indexed by Google.  One of my smaller clients has only been on the Internet for about 4 months, if that.  She doesn’t have a website yet, but she has a Fan Page.  With minimal content, she is now on the first page of Google when you search for her product by name.  Ever since we started that Fan Page her phone orders have been steadily increasing as well.

There is a lot you can do with a Fan page, and it’s free so it’s a good place to start!  As long as you keep your customers happy with good service, keep inviting people to join your page, and interact (read “listen”) with your customers, you’ll find that in most cases, your customers start marketing for you.  At the very least, you can improve your ranking on Google.

Having a Fan Page doesn’t mean you should avoid getting proper SEO done, or avoid getting a website or even avoid doing marketing and advertising.  All of those tried and true actions are valid and should be done if you can.  But if you can’t afford them, Facebook Fan Pages are a great way to get started.

Anyway, the point is, as a small business owner you have something the big guys don’t have.  YOU.  As long as your customers can easily “share” you with their friends (who are likely in the same demographic as your customer!), they can pioneer in areas you couldn’t reach for lack of a budget or other reasons.  I can’t think of any other medium where it’s easier to share than Social Media and online Social Networking . Ok, maybe preschool.   But 4 year olds are probably not the right demographic!

Written by: Trevor Eisenmen

No matter how prepared you are, whenever you shoot on location something is going to come up that is totally unexpected. I don’t know why this is, I only know that it’s never not happened to me in over 25 years of production. Often this unexpected occurrence can be a “shoot threatening” emergency that is totally unforeseen. For instance, I can recall my sound man informing me, “I’m worried, I’m peeing blood” as we sailed away on the Royal Princess from Acapulco toward the Panama Canal with our next stop five days away. (Fortunately there were great doctors onboard.)

Other times this can be just a little glitch, such as the time we were shooting a custom video production that required a water slide.  As we were ready to lock and load, we discovered we had the wrong tape for the camera we were using. It literally would not fit into the carriage. And it was Saturday.  The nearest resource for the correct tape was twenty miles away.  And they were closed. At the time this seemed like more than “a little glitch” but we solved the problem and got everything done, though we chased the sun all day because of the delay.

Knowing that a curve ball is going to come my way every single time, I’ve developed several policies to “prepare for the unexpected”. The best one is to be thoroughly prepared for all the normal contingencies. But on any shoot at least one thing will come up that is totally unexpected. So I’ve come up with a corollary to the “be prepared” motto, and that is “be really flexible”. So much of location production depends on keeping a cool head and being able to come up with creative solutions to unusual situations. Experience helps, but only as a calming influence. The problems do need to be solved. Which brings up my third policy for location shooting, “never get complacent”. Even when you feel you’ve got every fire put out and every weird event handled, don’t stop watching for more. A recent direct response TV commercial shoot we did for a toy company really brought this home to me.

The company wanted to shoot two spots, one featuring a toy digital camera and the other a stuffed pony that kids could actually ride and scoot along by bouncing on the saddle. We really needed three days to get all the shots on the storyboard, but the budget only allowed for two. We decided to shoot over a weekend so we wouldn’t have to deal with school issues for the kids. Still, it was a pretty tight schedule and one that made me nervous. As luck would have it we found a location in Studio City with the perfect house interior and, right next door, the perfect driveway for our ponies. This would allow for maximum production time as we could prep one area once we were up and shooting at the other.

Oops! I was 30 minutes away from the crew, the clients, and the kids coming over for lunch with no where to go to the bathroom and raw sewage flowing onto the lawn just a few feet from where that lunch was being set up. It was Sunday. Way too late to call the honey wagon folks. Fortunately I had a very resourceful Production Coordinator who was instantly on the phone and with offers of money and food enticed a Roto Rooter company to make an emergency stop.

They were there and gone within twenty minutes with the problem handled. When the cast, crew and clients showed up for lunch, the only evidence was a slight lingering smell. No one was the wiser and we went on to produce a great commercial spot which ended up selling out all the Giddy-Up Ponies for the 2008 Christmas Holiday Season. But as I said earlier, you just gotta remember that “Sh!t Happens”.

Snehal Patel is the visual director at The Association.  His film roots date back to the age of seventeen when he hosted, produced and directed his own television show “Digital Basement”.  He worked in Bollywood, India following graduation from film school in Chicago.  After four years in Bollywood Snehal settled in Los Angeles and now trains professionals about new camera technologies and digital post production work flow for The Association.

The Association is hosting Canon camera classes in the form of Boot Camps throughout the summer to train new Canon users on its abilities.  In these classes, Snehal teaches participants the technical skills that are required to use the camera and many of the attendees can participate in a live shoot! All attendees are given a Canon certification for the Canon 5D/7D.

Snehal recently shot an action short titled “Flawless” with director Kevin Shahinian.  He served as a producer and a second unit director.  The Flawless team actually consisted of many Boot Camp graduates that came on to volunteer and use the HDSLR’s in action.  The cameras were used for the all the principal photography and Snehal said that “we got the shoot done because of the cameras…we did two and half weeks of shooting in just a few days”.   The Flawless team was composed of Canon pros so it made perfect sense to bring on graduates as well as Snehal, the HDSLR expert.

“FLAWLESS” The Official Trailer from PACIFIC PICTURES on Vimeo.

The cost effectiveness of the Canon cameras can reduce budgets by 85%.  Week long shoots can be minimized greatly and new footage can also be extracted.  The camera worked great for “Flawless” Snehal explains: “We were on a low budget so saving costs was huge” and the Canon certainly did the job.

Motion control and Multicam techniques are being explored in the upcoming Boot Camp.  These effects are most commonly attributed to the hit film “The Matrix”.  The advantages of the camera are vast and its amazing abilities are revolutionizing the film industry almost overnight.

Multicam is an array of Canon DSLR and still cameras that are computer controlled and can be programmed to snap an image all at once, or in a linear or non-linear sequence.  The resulting images are put together to make motion that is unbelievable!  Reel EFX has been working with these rigs since 1996 and provide full-service shoots and post for commercials, films and TV shows with multicam shots.

During our June 25th Canon Boot Camp, we will be using Reel EFX’s multicam system to get a shot for a high-end commercial that will be filmed during class. We will also use a motion control rig and various other setups for the Canon 5D and 7D. Sign up now and learn how the pros do it! Our Canon camera classes provide Canon Certification on the Canon DSLR 5D and 7D.

Students attending The Association’s canon camera classes receive our Canon certification on the Canon 5D/7D. This next class is the Pro Level I course and is open to both industry pros and new videographers/cinematographers alike.

At the Canon Boot Camp this Saturday, May 21st we’ll be giving away a Redrock Stealth nano DSLR Rig , a couple of BeachTek DXA-SLRs, Cam Caddies and demoing a lot of new lenses, equipment and even shooting a scene with actress Laureen Trujillo.

Sign up now! The class is nearly full! http://conta.cc/hJZgSQ

Even my largest clients are on the run from high-cost advertising.

Probably I don’t need to find a graph showcasing how consumers don’t respond well to interruptive marketing such as cold-calling. I know I’m not very fond of being interrupted. Sometimes I yearn for days spent on a farm with nothing but family, friends and maybe a goat – until my phone rings or I get a text – breaking my reverie.

Of course, there’s more to an effective marketing plan than just Inbound Marketing. It’s going to be a while before a company can just cut out all their traditional channels of advertising and just rely on an Inbound approach. Especially if a new company is just getting started or if a new product is being launched. Let’s face it, it’s hard to beat the awareness direct response TV ads can create over a short period of time. Currently I reccomend companies continue whatever traditional marketing they are doing now, and back it up with an online campaign.

Starting out with an Inbound Marketing campaign? One of the first to-dos on your list needs to be understanding long-tail keyword research and getting a long list of keywords to design a blog campaign around. Today’s enterprise social media plan must include blogging, so make that a priority!

Although this is probably not a surprise to many people, The audience for news moved online up 17% over last year. In effect, the Internet was the only major news platform that did not decline in 2010.

The above graph illustrates the need for an effective marketing plan to include a corporate social media element. I have to admit, I hear less and less of the older generation complaining about the Internet and I hear more and more questions about how to utilize this amazing tool.

Although it may seem like there is an endless array of choices, those just starting out in the Internet Amazon should start with a blog and a Facebook business page. Then create tons of unique content centered around good keyword search terms.