Social Media allows slightly interested prospects to gradually become interested enough to contact you.

Compare this to the encyclopedia salesman, who used to go door to door peddling his wares. My father did this for a time, and explained the procedure. I don’t recall what the pitch was, but the salesman generally walked out with a sale and probably a few referrals, all in one visit. Probably he’d never see the family again. Why would he? Neither he nor the family expected to see him again. The sale was done.

These days we have lots of options. Asides from the fact that we’d probably think twice about allowing a stranger in our home, we are probably going to resist buying right away until we have had a chance to “Google” for the real scoop.

By properly engaging in a corporate social media campaign, you can provide the backup data needed for a prospect to verify you are for real, and validate their purchase with you. From the viewpoint of the seller, social media also provides a kind of consumer analysis through the feedback customers tend to leave behind on sites like Facebook and Twitter. By consistently dripping out your latest news, articles and relevant information, clients come to know you and your company. Once they are comfortable you are for real, they may reach out to you, virtually closed on doing business by the time they request an appointment.

Skip the Pine-sol. That’s the power of social media, baby.

While I was wildly deleting spam emails this morning, Chris Abraham’s blog post title caught my eye, just in the nick of time. I found it to be a great article, and wanted to share it with you all. It has to do with the importance of blogging.

For many small business owners, blogging is a little more than scary. If they even had a marketing department to help them, it’d probably take a ransom note and the threat of their website disappearing into the “Internet ether” for them to really get involved. Well, I’m here to deliver that note, because if you’ aren’t blogging, disappearing is probably what a website faces as a result. Well, disappearing of the first few pages of Google searches, anyway.

Chris brings up some great points in his article, titled, “8 Reasons Why Now is the Best Time to Start Blogging,” and anyone interested in blogging (or social media in general) would find it worthwhile. One of the points that really resonated with me is how much dedication and work is involved! Blogging and leveraging corporate social media really takes discipline and hard work. But that’s just part of being in business, and always has been.

The good news Chris brings is that those who take a business-like approach and are disciplined about blogging will probably beat out their competition. There are so many tools available now that make it easier to handle the logistics of blogging and leveraging social media. The Association is using Topic Optimized Marketing, but there’s no lack of tools.

Now’s the time to start blogging! If your company hasn’t started taking advantage of long tail keyword research coupled with today’s’ blogging technology, it might be time to write your own ransom note. I suspect a lot of company websites will be held “hostage” by those companies who start (or have already started to) engaging in blogging. Where will your company show up?

Having a restless spirit has led Snehal all over the world in search for a better way to tell his stories. He grew up in Chicago where he worked in television and film from the age of seventeen. He spent a number of years in Mumbai, India directing commercials and working on features. Snehal now resides in Hollywood, working furiously.

The Association’s resident expert on the Canon DSLR 5D camera, Snehal is a featured instructor at our Canon Boot Camp, providing training and certification on the 5D (and other models) to both still photographers and seasoned cinematographers alike.

Should you become part of the Facebook movement?

The real question is, are relationships important for you to develop new business? If the answer to that question is “yes,” then absolutely, sign up for Facebook and be part of the “club.” The benefit from online socializing can be quite dramatic.

Besides, isn’t it more fun to conduct business on the golf course or by the pool, than at a stuffy meeting with all sort of rules? Facebook is that golf course or poolside conversation that can lead to something like a business deal.

There are sure to be exceptions. If you don’t own a business, and you don’t get extra credit (commissions) for bringing in business from your relationships, Facebook isn’t going to do much for you as far as your income goes. It is possible you will get a job if someone “discovers” you on Facebook, but that’s a different topic.

Worried that your particular target market isn’t represented on Facebook? Perhaps they are somewhere else. Everyone isn’t on Facebook. Yet. But because Facebook provides incredible visibility on Google (done the right way), and the folks connected to your target market probably are on Facebook, there’s no real reason to skip having a Page representing your business.  Facebook “Like” Pages are also great place to include your long-tail keyword research phrases.

Any way you look at it, Facebook should probably be part of your market development strategy.

Are you ready to get the party started? Because that’s what Facebook is. It can be any kind of party, but what I really mean is that it follows the rules of being at a party.

If you attend a birthday party at the home of a friend (or even if you’re just tagging along with another friend), a certain amount of trust can exist just because you are under the roof of a mutual friend. When you meet someone at a party, how do you greet them? For example, let’s say you sell insurance for a living. Imagine this scenario:

Joe: “Hi, I’m Joe, do you know when you’re going to die?”
Guest: “What?”
Joe: “Do you know when you’re going to die? No, of course not. No one knows. You might die tomorrow! If you did, do you have enough life insurance to protect your family?”
Guest: “Uh, I need to use the restroom, urgently. Nice talking with you.”

Now, of course, no one would really start with that kind of conversation right off. It would be more like this:

Joe: “Hi, I’m Joe.”
Guest: “Hi, I’m Bob. Nice to meet you.”
Joe: “Likewise! How do you know the birthday girl?”
Guest: “Ha ha. Well, I’m an Ex, actually. Long time ago from school.”
Joe: “No kidding? What school?”
Guest: “USC.”
Joe: “I went to USC!”

Before you know it, you’ll be exchanging cards and that can eventually lead to a business deal. But first the friendship was established.
Following a similar conversational pattern on Facebook, building relationships with the tacit trust that Facebook provides can help bring in business the same way word of mouth does. In fact, that’s exactly what Facebook is made of. Word of Mouth between friends.

It’s less effective if you only try to “friend” people you don’t know. No trust = uphill battle. Try to stay under the roof of your friend’s house, virtually speaking. In other words, express who you are personally on your personal profile so others have a way to “meet” you and know a little bit about you, via the friends you already are connected to on Facebook.

By the way, not only friends are important on Facebook. More than likely consumers are chatting about your competitors, and your competitors themselves may be on Facebook. You can party with them while doing a little competitors analysis, and they’ll be none the wiser. And they can do the same analysis on you, so it’s not spying. Everyone’s in the same room.

It’s said you are only 6 degrees of separation from the rest of the world. On Facebook, you can see if that’s actually true! And every one of your friends and contacts could potentially refer you if they “know” you and what you do for a living. In other words, being a party animal (on Facebook) can be part of an effective marketing plan!

Facebook has a corporate social media version of a personal profile page, called, simply, “Pages.”

Also known as Fan Pages, Business or Like Pages, these profiles allow you to feature your business without violating the trust factor outlined above.  There is a very important difference between personal profile pages and Business Page:

Only the Business Pages are fully indexed by search engines like Google.

Personal profiles are personal.  Why would they be indexed as part of public content? While a couple of pieces of data (like name and bio data) will be indexed from personal profiles, on a Business Page, everything is indexed. A business page can actually function as a website if you have nothing else. They are quite versatile, and even have a built in blog called “Notes” as well as other built in ways to spread content virally.

And it’s all free. Great place to start.

Keep in mind that because it’s free, Google is also free to delete your account at any time for any reason.  Get a little friendly with people who don’t know you, and your account might disappear. But only if people are complaining, or you “friend” people too aggressively.

Because Pages are indexed, and with Facebook being such a large presence online, these pages can rise rapidly to the first page of Google. My very first social media client, who to this day does not have a website, rose to the 1st page of Google in 4 months, and has been getting regular sales (phone orders) as a result of having a Fan Page, with zero overhead to worry about.

While there is no guarantee that being a part of Facebook will net you more sales, it’s certainly not going to hurt. Actually, let me amend that statement.  If you have terrible service, and your customers would rather not refer you as a result, stay as far away from Facebook as you can. Good works travel well on Facebook, since it’s so easy to share with friends, but bad service travels just as fast, if not faster.

Most small businesses have good reputations because they can deliver such personal service. If that’s the case for you, jump in and start a Facebook profile today, and branch into a Business Page if appropriate.

The truth is, Facebook is an incredible tool for enterprise social media. Really, nothing has changed in business just because the Web is part of the scene. What the Web has really done is made connecting for business faster. Relationships that lead to the close of a deal are still important. Can’t live without those, right?

Facebook can help build those relationships faster and through multiple channels all day long, even while you are sleeping. That’s the difference. But it has to be done the right way. Relationships can be slow to build, and fast to lose. By taking a long-term view, building organically by providing useful content centered around the needs of your potential market, a company has a better chance of creating sustainable income from their corporate social media efforts.

The first step is to truly understand the target market you are trying to reach. There is no substitute for this step, and an in-depth consumer analysis will save thousands of dollars in useless, ineffective marketing down the road.

Facebook is for Friends

In business, a lot of success is based on who you know, who you went to school with and who your friends are. That hasn’t really changed.

Facebook is a major force in the marketing and advertising world today. Will it remain so? We’ll just have to wait and see. In my opinion, it become such an incredible force because it caters to people’s diverse needs by singling out relevant information based on relationships, and customizing the experience based on the actual actions each user takes inside Facebook. As long as that trends continues, Facebook is here to stay.

Likewise the advertising platform it offers can be uniquely targeted towards specific ages, likes, gender, location, etc., more so than Google Adwords. This alone makes it worth including it in a company’s enterprise social media arsenal.

Facebook isn’t just another advertising and marketing tool. It’s relationship leveraging tool that leads into advertising and marketing through word of mouth. Confusing Facebook with magazine ads or tv-type advertising and marketing techniques will not be as effective as leveraging it for WOM Marketing.

As a side note, Facebook is a great market research data collection tool, since so much of the content and banter back and forth is visible. If nothing else, get on Facebook for the ability to do a surface-level consumer analysis.

I’ve heard many rumors that you can’t get a good key shooting green screen with the Canon 5D.

Nonsense.

The key, (no pun intended), to shooting good green screen in any format, is lighting.

I’ve shot numerous green screen projects, whether they be corporate video productions, direct response tv ads or commercials; and in many different formats. As long as you and/or your gaffer know how to light for green screen compositing, then the format is not an issue.

Many would say that the Canon 5D’s  4.2.0 color space prohibits a “good key”.

Well, we recently completed a project for Brain Zoo Studios shooting live action on green screen to be composited with animation for a spot promoting Disney’s new “Phineas & Ferb” game.

We hired a great gaffer as part of our video production crew, and shot with the Canon 5D because we love the images it produces, and because we needed to move fast to make the day on time and on budget. We trancoded the native H.264 files in 4.2.0 color space to Apple Pro Res 4.2.2 and handed the footage off to our client.

The footage composited beautifully. The client was happy and therefore, we were happy. So don’t listen to the critics who say you can’t shoot good green screen with DSLR systems like the Canon 5D.

It can be done.

Are you shooting in 3D?

Thinking about it? 

Confused by it all?

For a format that’s been around a very long time there sure is a lot of buzz about 3D right now, and I think Mr. Cameron has a lot to do with that. But what if you’re not a big time feature film or TV guy?

What if you earn your living delivering high quality corporate video production services?

Is 3D right for you and your clients?

Absolutely!

It’s no secret that 3D is the future, and the future is here. All content, from TV shows to home movies on the web will be 3D in the not so distant future. Flat screen 3D TVs will soon be in every household and, more importantly, every board room.

You need an effective marketing plan that includes delivering 3D projects to your current and future clients.

So you, the corporate video producer, need to educate yourself and your clients about all things 3D, and there is a LOT to learn. Fortunately, there is a wealth of information out there, and also companies that already specialize in 3D production and even training. Take advantage of the all the resources available, so that you can make a successful transition into the third dimension.