I’ve already talked about how consumer generated content can help create relevance for a company.  It’s not any different when it comes to employees, except that employee-generated content is probably even more relevant! Who else knows a company better than it’s employees?

Corporate social media campaigns might seem like a hassle if you have a lot of employees, but actually more employees might make a large campaign even easier. When you have a lot of employees, you can spread the reponsibility for creating content out across more shoulders.  This is a good thing if you are able to weed out and control the runaway trains. By that I mean employees who don’t use good common sense when blogging as part of enterprise social media.

I’m assuming here that your company has great products and service, and treats employees well.  A company with poor service and disgruntled employees should not get involved in social media without a comprehsensive plan that includes fixing those points.  Such a company may not escape alive.

That said, here’s the deal.  An Edelman Trust Barometer study asked people, “Who do you trust?” ANSWER: People like me. Search engines determine relevance based on whether or not you can engage people. Employee generated content is writen by real human beings, and thus should be more engaging. Engagement on a blog (or any social media profile, such as Facebook) is exactly what you want.

When was the last time you had a strong urge to connect with a corporate logo?  Yeah, I didn’t think so. Well, if you had 20 employees, and each once wrote one 3-5 paragraph per month for the company blog, you’d have plenty of decent, relevant content to choose from.

Investing in some long tail keyword research to guide your employees on what to write will also help increase your relevance.  The office “mom” might want to write about the last brownie recipe that was a hit at the office, but if your company produces car parts, it won’t do much to increase your company’s relevance in the eyes of your consumers (or Google).

The Canon DSLR is revolutionizing video production in both film and television and is becoming more popular by the day. More and more TV pilots are shooting with the Canon DSLR 5D.

The Association has teamed up with Snehal Patel, a veteran of the Canon DSLR 5D in production and post-production, to run intensive 5-hour BOOT CAMP workshops for industry professionals who want to use the Canon 5D and 7D cameras for film, television, or custom video production.

This is a real hands-on workshop, on a professional sound stage with set and an actress.  We will have a green screen, monitors, lights and plenty of gear, including the latest DSLR accessories.

This Training 5D workshop teaches such things as:

• Basic setup of the camera
• The best lenses to use
• The best support rigging
• When to shoot “”flat
• The affect of an overheated CMOS on image quality
• Shooting out through the HDMI to Cineform or uncompressed 4:4:4
• Setting exposure, histogram, viewfinder, and waveform monitor
• Using Auto Lighting Optimizer
• Mixing DSLR footage with higher-end cinema footage
• The transcoding process
• The Post workflow (different codecs and frame rates)
• Sync issues come up in post and their solutions
• Using de-noising features in post
• Stabalizing solutions
• Add-ons to get better sound
• Setting the type of audio quality (bit rate, frequency, impedance, channels)
• Using Follow Focus with any lens
• What to use as a gear ring for the lens
• Use of different memory cards (speed/capacity)
• When not to use HDSLR
• Essential accessories for making an HDSLR cinema capable
• Addressing moiré and aliasing issues
• Managing the rolling shutter issue

Working professionals that are filmmakers, cinematographers and still photographers have taken the Boot Camp and rave about the training:

“I highly recommend (this Boot Camp) to anyone who is even going to dabble in this world.  Digital SLR is clearly the direction a lot of work is going to go…” – Geary McLeod, ASC Cinematographer, ‘The Mentalist’

PLUS!  You’ll receive a Certification from The Association of Film and Video Producers that you completed “Pro Level One: Canon DSLR”. This certificate is good for rental discounts as well. Classes fill up quickly, so RSVP today at the following link: http://www.theassociation.tv/canonbootcamp.php

When you get right down to it, getting some choice real estate on the 1st page of a Google Search is critical for just about any business. Creating relevant content on a blog can help give you a lift and get your name in the right location. The location part is easy to think with. But what’s with this relevance thing?

I wish there was a super simple answer.  If you want to be super technical, here’s a super link: http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html

Otherwise, let’s pick up relevance on the human side of the story.

Are You Like Me?

Consumers (your target market, whatever niche that might be), tend to want to connect to people just like them. See, I just gave away the whole secret. You can be relevant to your consumer, if you give them the chance to meet your other customers online, and let them see that your existing customers are just like them.

Honestly, I’m not trying to talk in a riddle. Here’s the answer explained another way: get your customers to participate in your marketing campaign.

By inviting past customers and other consumers to participate by telling their story, and sharing it on your blog(s), you can create relevance.  It also shows you value your customers for more than just their money. Such a sign of respect can generate appreciation and often all you have to do is ask for feedback.

Tips

• Make it easy to share by providing a landing page with a form to capture the customer’s story, feedback, testimonials, etc.
• Give your customers an incentive to tell their story. A weekly or monthly drawing, contest or just an automatic prize such as a Starbucks Gift Card will go a long way.
• Make sure you have a way to moderate content.  Sometimes spammers or generally grumpy people will get a hold of your blog and use it as a platform for their message. If it isn’t relevant (or appropriate), there needs to be a way for it to be removed.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just read something, and it would be applied in full in your company by the time you got to the end of the article? Alas, somehow it never works out that way. But if you still don’t know how to be more relevant to your target market, that just means you don’t know enough about them.

Any marketing campaign suffers without some kind of consumer analysis. It is well worth the money to invest in effective market research data collection, regardless of whether you are writing simple blog posts or engaging in direct response TV ads.  Really understanding the minds of those you are trying to communicate can increase your relevance (in their minds) many times over.

I can’t say I know a lot of marketers who really enjoy spending thousands of dollars on Pay Per Click Google Ads.  Actually, I don’t know of any at all. And until recently, I thought of PPC as a necessary evil in order to get new leads in the door.

Some months ago I came across another way of capturing leads.  In essence it’s a PPC ad. Except that there is no charge when someone clicks! Too good to be true? Well, to be more accurate, there is a cost involved, but it’s not based on the number of clicks.  It’s a one time set-up cost (someone has to pay the programmer!).

Similar to renting a car, you always have to pay something just to rent it, and then there’s the mileage. PPC is having to pay for the mileage on top of all the costs to research the right keywords to use. This other method is like having unlimited mileage for a year.

Which one would you want?

The other method is the use of Call To Action buttons, or CTAs. Here’s how it works:

The Association shot a short PSA using the Canon DSLR 5D.  This video (link below) not only sends the message of the importance of effective communication between parties, but also displays the spectacular video quality of the Canon 5D.

The video stars Jim Meskimen and Billy Tyler. The Canon DSLR 5D is revolutionizing the film and video production, in that it renders a picture so gorgeously, that several production companies have replaced their 35mm film camera with this DSLR. In fact, the video production crew of the Emmy-award-winning TV series “House” used a DSLR on the 2010 season finale.

The Association has been training Hollywood’s finest in how to shoot with this amazing camera in our Canon Certification Bootcamps.  For more information on upcoming classes, click on the banner below.

For a business, getting leads and increasing sales to improve the bottom line tends to be high on the priority list. Initiating a comprehensive and systematic corporate social media strategy is a key element to getting online leads, and should be coupled with highly effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  After all, is it going to matter how much content you have online if it doesn’t match in any way what your customers are searching for? SEO will help connect your online presence to your customers.

Any really effective marketing plan could be called a Lead Generation Machine. In this post I’d like to briefly outline the main elements for a simple plan that automatically puts you in the room with the most potential customers.  That is, in the organic search results section, as opposed to the sponsored ads area of a Google search results page.

Here are the main elements you would want to be sure are included in an organic lead generating strategy:

2. Blogging: Shows up in organic search results, increases the number of indexed pages for your site (potentially increasing your rank in Google’s eyes), and gets you in front of more people than just using PPC would allow.

3. Unlimited Content Contributors: Be able to allow an unlimited number of contributors so the heavy lifting of providing content is leveraged among as many people as possible. Allowing your employees to contribute their personal views, opinions and stories will also help you build relationships with your customers.  Employees tend to know their company on an intimate level (possibly better than the owner), and clients like to connect with real people, not a corporate image.

4. Call to Action Buttons: Instead of cluttering your blog with Google PPC ads, create “Call to Action” buttons that encourage the potential lead to take the next step. Usually that would include giving up an email address so you can continue to send them relevant information over time. Think of it as a Pay Per Click ad, but minus the “Pay” part.

5. Long Tail Keyword Research: If you don’t know what this is, but you are involved in online marketing, better crack open the books. Or Google Search, anyway. Long Tail Keywords open a door onto the 1st page of Google searche results pages, if you know how to use these keywords effectively.

5. Fresh Content: Content is where most blog strategies die on the vine. Creating new content can be a lot of work. But if you’ve been in business for a while, and have been utilizing online newsletters, you’re probably half way there to a LOT of great content. Take your old email newsletters and turn them into blog posts!

Time is not on your side if you haven’t already gotten started with your own online marketing campaign. Get started today and make the most of today’s modern lead generation capabilities.

It’s trite to say things are changing, but they are.  The Internet is slowly edging the brick and mortar store toward extinction, although people’s desire for community still prompts them to “go to the mall and hang out”.  And the malls get more and more beautiful. I call them the Cathedrals of Commercialism.

All this leads to the quandary facing many of our clients who want a piece of the web sales revenue. They’re needing successful methods to engage the consumer and make a sale without having to pay through the nose for Pay Per Click.

Long Tail Keyword Research can help help lower your PPC bill. Not many understand Long Tail Keywords. A good example is the difference between searching for “man” to searching for “tall English-speaking single parent wanting single woman with children”.  In other words, Long Tail Keywords are expansions of the core keyword into more specific descriptions.  LTK’s are used by shoppers who are closer to making a purchase. So their searches are for “healthy organic weight control products” and not just “weight loss”.

2) Optimized Market Research™ on your target audience.

Also, unlike traditional market research that focuses on everybody, Optimized Market Research™ zeroes in on the 20% of your customers that produce 80% of your revenue.  The survey is not interested in grouping them into pie graphs, but in listening to what they think and say about your product.  These results are then statistically represented and translated into information that can be incorporated into your marketing mix: verbal content, each person’s emotional profile, the imagery they associate with your product or service are all collated and tabulated.  This is how OMR lets you think and talk like your audience, so you get their agreement to listen to your message.  You’re singing their tune, in other words.

Most all campaigns fail because they don’t use OMR.  In other words, a company that uses OMR is at the advantage over their competitors. An example of launching a campaign without OMR is the famous story of GM being completely out of touch with their Spanish-speaking customer when they introduced the Chevy Nova.  “No va” means “won’t go” in Spanish.

Another example – we thought we knew our customer. We’ve been in business for 24 years. Grudgingly we implemented Optimized Market Research on ourselves.  Things we considered our top priority were ranked #4 by our customers. “Obviously” our customers wanted top professionalism. They did, but the #1 response to the question “What is the most important thing about The Association?” was “They’re easy to work with.”

Knowing what your consumer is looking for is the key to marketing success. Unless you prefer marketing blindfolded, we suggest marketing with Optimized Market Research.™

My friend James Wvinner of www.YTCfilms.com needed a Canon DSLR 5D rig that was good for both lock-down shooting on sticks and for handheld.  He was preparing a custom video production for some heavy-duty multi-cam shoots and wanted something that had a lot of possibilities for expansion and space for add-ons.  I contacted Brian Valente from Red Rock to help us out, and he put together a custom rig configuration in no time flat. The way we had the battery plate mounted in the back balances out the rig for shoulder-mount applications, plus the AB batteries can power both the camera and the on-board monitor at the same time.  With a quick release, the rig come apart and plops right into place on the fluid head.  Gotta love it!

I’ll ask James if he can bring the rig into The Association’s next DSLR Boot Camp on August 21st: www.canonbootcamp.com

Here’s how Brian put it together:

From RedRock Micro store http://store.redrockmicro.com :

DSLR Cinema Bundle

microShoulderMount Deluxe Bundle

microBalance Plus plate

microLensGears

microArm short

microMount for monitor

Anton Bauer battery power http://www.antonbauer.com :

AB Plate is either AB part number QR-SP200 or QR-SP400A

You need specific AB screws – the AB part number for the screws is 6120-5522Battery

Connector cables:

Canon DC coupler http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/590425-REG/Canon_3352B001.html

Plus switronix Dtap adapter http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/655669-REG/Switronix_XP_DSLR_C.html

Misc:

Bogen quick release  for between shoulderpad and cinema bundle

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/554151-REG/Manfrotto_357_357_Pro_Quick_Release.html

While making lunch today at home, I happened to catch a re-run of some “news” by CNBC. The story, titled “Coca-Cola: The Real Story Behind the Real Thing,” originally aired, as far as I can tell, November 2009.

Feel free to check out the video of the machine at the link above. For the quick Reader’s Digest version:

“CNBC also looks at the company’s latest hi-tech contribution to beverage technology: the Freestyle Jet Machine-a next generation “soda fountain on steroids” that puts buyers in the driver’s seat. With a sleek design and touch screen technology, consumers can custom-make drinks to satisfy their own taste buds by blending up to 104 variations of Coca-Cola’s sodas, juices, teas and flavored water. And, while buyers are filling their cups, the Freestyle is funneling priceless data to Coca-Cola headquarters about how much and even when each drink combination is being poured. It’s marketing treasure for Coke.”

This was the first I’d heard of the “Jet,” as it’s called. My first thought was how customized the soda machine was for the consumer. It provided exactly what each person was looking for, without having to look anywhere else, which is just brilliant. That got me to wondering where the word “customized” came from. I have a thing about understanding words, and a side hobby is checking out the etymology of words we all use every day.

From Dictionary.com:

cus·tom·ize

“to modify or build according to individual or personal specifications or preference: to customize an automobile. “

Curious as to how that related to “customers,” I looked that up and found a passage of interest from Wikipedia:

“The word derives from “custom,” meaning “habit”; a customer was someone who frequented a particular shop, who made it a habit to purchase goods of the sort the shop sold there rather than elsewhere, and with whom the shopkeeper had to maintain a relationship to keep his or her “custom,” meaning expected purchases in the future.”

Obviously the whole goal of marketing and advertising is to acquire customers who continue to come back, i.e, to create ongoing relationships with customers. Coca Cola has done a great job of making it easy for the customers to participate with their product by creating the Jet, which also reports back excellent marketing data (what sodas customers are requesting from the machine). This kind of consumer analysis helps dial Coke right in to the minds of their best customers.

The question is, is there a way other companies can create similar relationships without spending millions of dollars? Why yes, there is.

It’s no secret that The Internet has connected the world. And a lot of us get our information from searching online. This has resulted in consumers educating themselves right up to the point of purchase, before a call is made or before a visit to a brick and mortar, credit card in hand.

Here’s the key word: Search.

Help a consumer out. Create content your consumer wants (the drink). Organize your content so it’s easy to find and access (bright colored soda machine with a display of everything that’s available). Luckily we already have Search Engines like Google to help consumers find the content. Whether or not they find your content depends on a lot of factors, not all of which I will try to cover here.

Suffice to say, organize your content in such a way that the Search Engines can easily serve it up (make it easy for Google, in other words), as well as match what the consumer is looking for (match their search phrases), and you’ll give yourself a leg up over the competition. And no, I’m not referring to expensive Pay-Per-Click campaigns. I’m talking about something we call “Topic-Optimized Marketing” that utilizes long tail keyword research.

For more information on this market development strategy, click on the button above to join The Association’s mailing list, or request a free consultation with me (or both, hey, I’m easy). We can help you come up with a custom and an effective marketing plan to fit your company’s budget.

The Association is here to help business owners who are tired of promoting like crazy, making 100′s of phone calls and end up getting stonewalled by the deflector shields of their target audience.  Wondering if there is another option to expensive Pay-Per-Click Campaigns? There is!

Qualifed and educated customers new customers CAN be acquired with less effort and cost.

This blog explores different options available for new customer acquisition. Fortunately, one of my jobs at The Association is to “translate” online advertising and promotional tools (and other related elements) into plain english.  I deliberately avoid being over-techincal with terms and try to use lots of stories or analogies.  Pictures and charts too if I can get them!

Confused about all the online options available? Check out our other blogs and get some answers.  Can’t decide what to do? Then get more information! Call us, we can help.