Product Review: Hague Mini Motion-Cam Stabilizer

I did a little research on camera stabilizers because I found any moving footage was every choppy. I’ve known about Steadicam for years, they were used in both the MTV and Pantene commercials I worked on. I needed a Steadicam for my iPhone!

I had no idea if such a thing existed but lo and behold it did! Sort of. Most stabilizer manufacturers make a prosumer device for small, light weight consumer cameras, perfect for an iPhone. I checked out reviews, specs and videos for stabilizers from Steadicam, Hague, Lensse and some great DIY stabilizer videos. Seeing as how I don’t have a machine shop, the last option was out. The Lensse was reasonably priced but most reviews said it was difficult to balance. The Steadicam Smoothie looked good, but again, was reviewed as being difficult to balance. I also read up on the iStabilizer but with its name, it’s cheaper price, and it’s lack of reviews made me nervous. I looked at the Manfrotto 585 ModoSteady Stabilizer but a single review that compared it to the Hague stabilizer, with words and video changed my mind. I settled on the Hague Mini Motion-Cam Stabilizer. It’s a mouthful, and you can only get it from their site, so there are no Amazon reviews, but I saw a bunch of videos on YouTube for it and it seemed to fit the bill. It arrived today. Now, I should be clear that a stabilizer is not an easy tool to use, but it’s essential to smooth movement and motion shots. I remember a Steadicam operator telling me he had to be certified, I believe it. A camera stabilizer ads an immense about of professional polish to your video project, but it takes patience and practice.

Here are the undoing photos, I’ll be adding video to this post in a day or so.

The only complaint that I have is that the Hague site wasn’t clear about the fact that the stabilizer came with an iPhone adaptor so I ordered one. Now I’ve got a $25 adaptor that I don’t need. Let’s see how good their customer service is. Unless someone wants a heavy duty, weighed and stable iPhone tripod adaptor (@stevegarfield…)

A New England Love Story Documentary Part 5

I finally got a chance to do some lighting tests using my SIMA (SL-10HD) LED light. It connects via cold shoe to my AR-4i, OWLE, or my iPhone via its connector arm and iPhone tripod adaptor.
The SIMA uses 2 AA batteries, has no DC input. It comes with an arm that allows you to attach it to a tripod, or tripod adaptor-equipped iPhone. It provides 600 lumens for 45-60 minutes.

 

 

Here are some test photos and a test video.

 

My First Movie

 

Many of you who read my blog or have seen my portfolio know that I’ve done a bit of video work for my clients. There has been some video shooting, mostly editing and motion graphics. These projects were of course marketing projects with (usually less than adequate) budgets.

I got into doing video, and design itself, because I wanted to make movies. Unfortunately I lived in the wrong coast and was too practical, so web design became my career choice. I’ve always had stories in my head that I wanted to get out through movies, but didn’t have the money or the equipment.

A few months ago I picked up a side project doing a video for a major marketing event. The video was shot in and around Times Square. I used a big Canon HDV video camera for shooting, After Effects for animation, and Final Cut for editing. While shooting with the big pro camera I also shot with iPhone. In the end 50% of the final video was from the iPhone 3Gs. That device had a 3.2 megapixel camera and shot 640×480 VGA resolution video at 30 frames per second.

3 months ago the iPhone 4s was released with an 8 megapixel resolution camera that’s shoots 1080p HD footage.

It’s time to shoot a movie!

While I’m writing, testing, planning, I’ll use my 3Gs to record every step of the way. I’ll leave videos and photos here or you can see the videos on my YouTube channel and pictures in my Tumblr blog.

The 30 Minute Blog Strategy

My wife wants to write a blog but is struggling with developing the discipline to do it. Everyone will tell you that consistency in publishing is the most important part of a blog strategy, whether it’s once a day or once a week. People crave consistency, ask McDonald’s.

The idea of generating content can be overwhelming but it doesn’t have to be if you follow these simple steps:

1) Write what you know. Mark Twain knew what he was talking about. He only wrote about what he was an expert in; politics, childhood, and riverboats. Let’s face it, if you’re blogging about a topic that you’re not an expert in, whether it’s marketing, flower arranging, extreme couponing, woodworking or struggling to launch a business, then you shouldn’t be blogging, because no one will care. There are 2 caveats to that last statement: you’re funny or a hot chic. Both bring in traffic but both are things that many consider themselves to be regardless of the mendacity of the concept!
If you’re an expert, you will create content of great value, and you won’t have to do too much fact checking!

2) Summarize your thoughts. You’ve been awake for 12-16 hours. You’ve had approximately 230,000 thoughts today. Take 15 minutes to jot down 1-6 things that occurred to you today that would make interesting and relevant topics. You can do this anytime but I recommend doing it right before you go to sleep. Why? The last things on our minds before we sleep are the ones our subconscious chews on all night. This means your inner secretary is working through the night to form thought and opinions, even clear up in-discrepancies. True multi-tasking!

3) Get up and get on it! Plenty of research points to the fact that our minds are most creative and productive first thing in the morning. When you wake up, look at your list. Pick one or to topics you want to cover and start writing. This can happen over coffee, using voice-to-text apps while driving to work or in the shower, waiting to buy a donut, on the train, etc. there is no standard length for a blog post, make it as long or short as you need to make your point. Whether you’re clear and concise, tend to ramble, like lots of pictures, this doesn’t need to take more than 15 minutes.

4) Build an archive. You don’t need to publish every day. You may have multiple epiphanies in a day or have a month-long dry spell. However, if you write every day, you’ll generate a backlog of good stuff to hold you over when you’re stumped or too busy. You can always store them on your blog unpublished or…

5) Stick to a schedule. Blog platforms allow you to schedule the publishing date of a post. I was out sick on Tuesday but already had a blog post scheduled for publication that day from 2 weeks before. My company has a backlog of blog posts to last until next week, which gives me a week and a half to generate another one.

Now, these rules aren’t hard and fast but give you a framework. Perhaps you come up with your topic list in the shower then right on your lunch break or before bed. Maybe you just keep a running list like I do (which, to be honest, I only go back to in emergencies). Numbers 2, 3, and 4 can be modified to fit your lifestyle but give you a good idea how to manage blog writing easily. Numbers 1 and 5 are absolute must-haves for any blogger looking to generate readers.

For those with more time to write, add a relevant photo, quote another blog or source if relevant. Do some research to dig out official numbers, spend some time on dictionary.com looking up alternate words. I did both in the 30 minutes I took to write this, while stopping to talk to my wife about her business plans, dinner, tonight’s TV viewing and getting her input on the post.

2 last things:

I don’t have to tools to write: I call BS! If you don’t have the tools you wouldn’t be able to read this. I’m typing away on my smart phone. Even feature phones can use email to publish to your blog as can any computer with Internet access. Don’t have a blog? WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger are free!

I don’t know how to write. No problem, read a book, a blog, a magazine or a news story. If you can read and speak you can write. If you have trouble forming your thoughts into words, use the resources I just mentioned or just talk it through out loud.

For any bloggers reading this, please share your tips and tricks.

For non-bloggers, feel free to ask questions!

The Real Legacy of Steve Jobs

In a recent article from FastCompany (http://bit.ly/nnYNwX), author Greg Lindsay talks about innovators losing their ability to innovate as they outsource manufacturing. Almost every technology leader out there send their manufacturing responsibilities overseas. This has had a negative impact on everyone from GM to Apple. These mammoth companies lack the ability to create what they design. Perhaps this is the real reason behind Google’s acquisition of Motorola; to gain control of the entire ecosystem. As Steve Jobs begins to cement his legacy by building the enormous and eco-friendly spaceship headquarters, he made an interesting statement to the Cupertino zoning commission:

“We’ve used our experience making retail buildings all over the world now, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world for architectural use. And, we want to make the glass specifically for this building here. We can make it curve all the way around the building… It’s pretty cool.”

This is a rarity in America, where this kind of innovation is beginning to disappear. Unfortunately, Apple may now how to make the biggest piece of glass in the world, but can they make it? If Steve Jobs really wants to create a legacy that will see him mentioned in the same breath as Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, he needs to rethink Apple’s manufacturing policy. The company has purchased a massive piece of land and is building an enormous building on it, but it will only take up 25% of the space. This building will house some of Apple’s staff, but some will remain in Apple’s original office down the street. What Apple needs to do is take real control of their device ecosystem and bring manufacturing home to the US. Fill that new office space or the old one with the most innovative iPlant the world has seen. Supremely efficient, incredibly safe, amazingly advanced and… there’s one more thing: the largest american-employing manufacturing plant to be created since the early 70s.

Bringing the manufacture of Apple’s products to Cupertino will do more than allow the iPhone 5 I’m destined to stand in line for to have a single line of white text (rather than 2): Designed and Made by Apple in California:

Ultimate control over the entire life of Apple products. This has been a goal since the earliest days of the company (http://bit.ly/1b76kn). Apple has already seen companies like Foxconn pushing knockoffs of the iPhone and iPad. The more hands you have on your CAD drawings, the more likely you’ll find one looking to make a side profit.

New areas of innovation. Imagine what Apple will invent or reinvent to build a Apple-quality manufacturing plant. Imagine being able to sell this technology to other US and global manufacturers, the US government, etc.

An excuse to really leverage alternate energy. Currently Apple’s new office will be powered by internal natural gas generators. Imagine the power requirements of a factory. Solar, wind, thermal, etc. will all need to come into play.

New customer base. The new type of manufacturing plant will no doubt pique the interest of other companies who had been outsourcing. In order to compete more patriotically, but still keep costs efficient, they’ll need new ways to manufacture locally. Much like LucasArts took on other film effects jobs between Star Wars movies, Apple could begin manufacturing for Ford, GE, Boeing, IBM.

Giving back. Apple wouldn’t be giving the country a fish, it would be teaching it to fish all over again. This move could kickstart a rebirth in US manufacturing, reinvigorating the US economy, bringing blue-collar jobs back to the middle class. More people with more money means they could buy more Apple products right?

Good will. America needs a hero. Jobs are outsourced, social services are being slashed, salaries are shrinking while workloads increase, there are 5 applicants for every 2 jobs. Politicians have been selling out the American dream since the mid-70s. We need someone who will give us back our pride in American ingenuity and the opportunity to earn a fair wage for a fare days work.

Halo industries would blossom. Their is already an enormous ecosystem of manufacturers, wholesalers, technologists, etc. around Apple products. Now imagine the impact an Apple manufacturing plant would have on machine parts manufacturers, robot designers, and the myriad of businesses that support factories. Now imagine that the only companies chosen to support Apple’s US manufacturing initiative were US companies.

Steve Jobs, if you really want to Think Different an establish a legacy that will be taught on iPad Xs in grade schools across the country, it’s time to start getting the iAssemblyLine rolling once again: http://bit.ly/nWiFSb.

Image courtesy joshcUK.

Google+ for iPhone Launches

 

 

Google+ was released for iPhone today. Scrolling through G+ you’ll see many posts like “finally, Google Plus for iPhone”. We’ve become such an MTV-generation on crack that having to wait 3 weeks for a smartphone app for a brand new social network (?) platform is excruciating!

If you are ready to download G+ for iPhone, click here. Word to the wise: you CANNOT currently find Google+ by searching the App Store. You must open this link on your iPhone.

Anyway, here are some screenshots:

The sign-in screen, clicking here requires your Google login and password credentials.

From here you can launch your circles, stream, upload photos or edit your profile.

 

Much like the mobile browser version, you can swipe through the streams from your various circles. A little tough for those of us with more than a few circles (disclaimer, I have 39 and counting).

 

From this screen you can see photos from your circles, view or edit your albums, see all the photos on your iPhone and choose which to upload, and see pictures of you others have posted.

 

You can view your Google+ Circles (I’m calling them Gircles dammit) here, add more, edit them. You can even see here how many people haven’t uploaded a damn avatar. My family is obviously not tech savvy!

 

You can view your contacts by name and add to Circles here. You even get the ubiquitous Suggested People feature, if you’re feeling lonely and adventurous.

 

I’m still trying to figure out what a Huddle is. There’s no explanation so I’m going with thinking of it as group chat. Unfortunately NOT a Hangout. I wouldn’t hold my breath for Hangout on iPhone or iPad, since it will conflict with Apple’s Facetime. I’m looking forward to using Google+ Huddle for the next Boston Social Media Club meeting.

I’m sure stuff will be changing as the Google+ team keeps moving forward. They’ve been doing a great job in taking everyone’s feedback.

I’m looking forward to the iPad app and more updates in functionality.

 

Google+ing your Blog

So, you’ve heard of Google+ right?

• If yes please read on
• If no please click here

Now that we have that out of the way… You’ve FINALLY gotten your Google+ invitation, you’ve logged in, you’ve figured out how to use everything, what else do you do? It’s time to Google-ize your blog. Oh, don’t worry, it’s not that hard. The first thing you should do is add your Google+ link to you blog. After all, you want your readers to find you everywhere right? There are many ways to share your Google+ URL depending on how your blog is set up. It could be a contact page or, as in the case of my blog, a set of icons:

I keep a relatively short list of my social networks in a widget on my blog. The first one, About.Me is nothing more than a personal landing page with most of the same links. However you share your social network profiles with your readers is fine, just make sure to add your Google+ URL.

About that Google+ URL: most of us using the service agree that it’s ridiculous:

the number, in this case, 116375847890292587823, is your actual Google+ ID. Most of us our hoping that unique nicknames will be added soon, remember, G+ is in beta. Google is moving very quickly with this new service so I don’t think we’ll need to wait as long as we did for personalized URLs for LinkedIn! If you don’t want to wait, you can try a free service a bunch of clever guys thought up called Gplus.to. Just copy your G+ ID number, pick a nickname and you’re all set:

You’ve already got a Facebook Like button, a Tweet button on every blog post right? Now it’s time to add a +1 button. It works kind of like a Like button, nothing more. I’ve looked around to find a WordPress plugin that combines the Like, Tweet and +1 button to no avail. For now we’ll have to deal with:

If anyone comes across an elegant plugin that combines all 3, let me know!

Your blog should be all done! Currently there is no way to have a blog stream your G+ posts, you can see mine streams my Twitter stream, but I expect it fairly soon. At the moment you can’t share G+ posts with Facebook or Twitter either.

Make sure that when you publish a new blog post you share the link on Google+ the same way you share it on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter:

Is “Too Big To Fail” Just Too Big?

Thursday April 21st was well past April Fools Day and no one was laughing when they tried to checkin on Foursquare, catch up on Reddit, or collect on SCVNGR.

All three of these popular sites/services and a handful of others, including Twitter dashboard darlings Hootsuite, hosting provider Heruko, and Wildfire among others, were all down. How could this happen? They all host their products through Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing system. Early in the morning a failure that shouldn’t have brought down the system did. There has been plenty written about the iceberg that sunk Amazon’s elastic database already and plenty more written about what should have happened. My opinion: Amazon has gotten too damned big. Now, I’m all for capitalism, profit, growth and I have nothing against Amazon’s growth in the retail ecommerce space. My issues resolve around it’s hosting service. They offer a fantastic end-to-end service that many fledgling social media and tech startups rely on for hosting. Too many.

The issue lies with the fact that so many companies rely on just Amazon’s service that a failure at one company brought down a half dozen high traffic companies. It would seem to make sense to go with the guys that do such a great job for everyone else, but as yesterday proved, just because everyone else uses something doesn’t mean you should. The United States has seen many examples of companies that have gotten so big that their failure can bring down entire business sectors, put people out of jobs, devalue national currency. Is it time for us to use some common sense and hedge our bets rather than put our eggs in the same basket as everyone else? Should we fight against companies that only offer services that lock you into their ideal partnership?

The promise of the cloud seems pretty simple: spread your data to machines optimized to serve single functions to make it more efficient and cost effective, mirror your data across the network to avoid failure bottlenecks. But what happens when a system that shouldn’t fail does? By all accounts a failure in a single data center happened and built in redundancies failed. How could this happen when Amazon is a lead in cloud technology? Many years ago I worked for a small regional web hosting and access company called Shore.net. A year or so into my employment there we were acquired by a telecommunications giant called Primus Telecommunications. For all the negatives of Primus (just ask if you’d like to hear some of my horror stories, needless to say I’m not a Paul Singh fan), we did a version of cloud computing well. We had data centers in Boston, Virginia, London, and, If I remember correctly, India, Australia, and South America. We pushed every hosting client toward our collocation service. You could drop a bomb on Boston and your site would stay up. London could sink and your site would stay up. Our Australian staff could spill Fosters all ogre the servers and your site would stay up. There would have to be a global catastrophe to take your website down. This was 1999. WTF Amazon?

Search Versus Social Media Results

Few companies are willing to post numbers or results from their search engine and social media engagements. This leaves a ton of forums full of people asking what works, what doesn’t, what kind of results they can expect, etc. and no one is sharing answers. Some numbers can’t be shared for competitive reasons: how much you spent on a campaign, your exact numbers, elements of your strategy, etc., but some can. In the charts below the actual volumes have been removed but there is still some very strong data that I’d like to share with you that will hopefully help inform brand and agency strategists.

Data

This data is very specific to my current employer, a financial software company, and some very specific tactics that have been undertaken. The company has a Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn presence. While we Tweet, Facebook, and Linked at least once a day, based on some of the earlier number we received we decided to run ads on LinkedIn. Leveraging these channels as well as spending a good amount of time creating content and optimizing our website for search engines has led to the following findings:

Our Unique Visits from LinkedIn far outweigh traffic from other referring sites. To be clear, these results are outside of direct visits or referring sites like outside blogs, portals, even traffic from our own newsletter. They are merely focused on the traffic from Google, Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Very often people swill stop investigating here. Focusing on the site sending them the most traffic. But, that traffic isn’t always qualified traffic. In the chart on the right, it’s clear that while our Page Views from LinkedIn users outweigh those from Facebook and Gmail, we get a much larger number of page views from Twitter and Google. To me, this means these sources contain visitors that are much more engaged, qualified and interested in our content.

As you can see above, LinkedIn represents our greatest percentage of new users. Gmail may sound a bit strange except that my company uses Gmail as our email tool so any clicked link in our email signatures or included in the body of an email  shows up as a visitor. This is very important since it remains one of our primary sources of communications and sales. Combined with data concerning Unique Visitors we can differentiate which sites give us more repeat traffic versus which sites give us more new traffic. An important distinction when deciding which marketing messages go to which sites. Bounce Rate isn’t a huge concern primarily because our site is information, not ecommerce. This means that our Call to Action (CTA) is for the user to call or email our business intelligence team rather than visit another page. However, when combined with Page Views and Time on Site, it is a good indicator of user interest or qualification.

Time on Site indicates how long a person spend on the site. It’s interesting to note how closely this mimics the number of page views. The first observation is pretty obvious since reading more pages would take more time, but then again, you could take more time reading a single page.

Findings

Initially Twitter looked like a bit of a loss for us. We got a minimal amount of traffic, and to be honest, our audience isn’t really that prolific on Twitter. However, if you look closely, even though visitors from Twitter were minimal, they had the largest amount of page views and a close second for number of pages visited. This means that we’ll continue to cultivate traffic through Twitter hoping for a growth in visits.

I mentioned that we ran a set of 3 ads on LinkedIn for the company. Despite the hype around Facebook ads, based on earlier numbers concerning bounce rate, time on site, pages visited, and contextuality we decided not to run ads on Facebook. LinkedIn ads allowed us to zero in on a highly defined group of users based on industry (we’re a very small niche of the financial industry), countries, states, even gender. LinkedIn best practices says “good ads have a CTR greater than 0.025%“. Our rates were .056%, .074%, and .087%. Our ads worked. We opted for a CPC (Cost Per Click) model rather than a CPM (Cost Per Impression). It’s a good thing, our impressions were 1300 times what our clicks were. Since clicks show interest, and impressions may not even be seen, this made sense to us. In addition our average click cost was actually half of what our click bid was!

Recommendations

Clearly this data is not going to define your strategy. It is unique to our company, not even our industry. I do hope that it will help inform you. You may decide we are nuts not to be advertising on Facebook, or convinced that we’re just not using Twitter effectively enough. All possible. Unfortunately digital strategy, for all of it’s data, still requires much experimentation. I encourage you to experiment, track your numbers (but don’t get wrapped up in daily results, look at trends), and define a respectable schedule to gather data over. Decisions shouldn’t be made over a few days’ worth of data, but over a few months, keeping in mind global events, holidays, etc.

Good luck.

Yes! I’m Selling This! Endorsement Transparancy.

I recently spoke at the Social Media Law conference in Boston. I was one of only 2 presenters that were not lawyers (or wore suits, or ties, or left our cars in paid parking, or had a beeper and a cell phone). Some great folks presented including the General Counsel for the Massachusetts Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation. Some fantastic topics were discussed around user privacy, data security, and transparency. One of the more interesting things that was discussed revolved around requiring users to Like your Facebook page in order to access special content or join a contest. This is as illegal as requiring me to buy M&Ms to enter in your M&M piggy bank giveaway. Remember: No Purchase Required.

While perusing Twitter this afternoon I saw an interesting Tweet from a celebrity. Let me be perfectly clear, despite my dislike of Dancing with the Stars, I’m a big Tom Bergeron fan and an even bigger Brooke Burke fan. I’ve been following her career since she was a drunken (OK, buzzed, but she did do alot of shots!) jet-setting travel TV host. But Brook’s tweet took me by surprise. Brooke is a model, TV show host, blogger, author of The Naked Mom, contributor to (or founder of?) ModernMom.com, and founder of BabooshBaby.com. She’s also an all around hot mom. What I didn’t know was that she also endorsed a drink called underWAY. I know about her other endeavors from reading her Twitter bio:

I didn’t know about Brook’e endorsement of underWay because it’s not in her Twitter bio. Why do I know about underWay at all? Because of this post:

The way this is positioned is as a helpful hint. Brooke eats less when she drinks underWAY. To be honest, I first thought she meant that she was drinking while moving, like water or juice. It was the way underWAY was written that attracted my attention. Now, I click on alot of Brooke’s links because, they are often pictures of her, and c’mon, who couldn’t use another picture of Brooke Burke to spice up their day. I clicked on this link for just that reason: oggling. Imagine my surprise when I opened a landing page for a health drink. I scrambled back to Twitter, scrolled down to find the Tweet again.

I wouldn’t think much of this because I see it all the time, especially from celebrities, even Twitterfamous celebs like Robert Scoble and Chris Brogan. I’m sure many celebs have very lucrative endorsements that are very savvy in leveraging the celebs social media presence to sell products. That’s not a problem. In fact I know that Chris Brogan is very careful to disclose links to books for which he is an affiliate, clients, and products that have been given to him to review.THis is an example of a non-celeb promoting a website. The difference is that she refers to the site as her site so we know it’s an endorsement:

Here is another that is blatently selling, but that is obvious from the tone:

But a quick trip to their Twitter bio shows that they’re selling cooking products:

Here is the problem with celebrity selling via their social networks; Very often these celebs are doing the Tweeting themselves. I applaud them for this, it’s very honest and has a great impact when it’s very personal. But celebs aren’t lawyers. They don’t understand the laws around endorsing products.They don’t understand that they need to disclose products they are endorsing.

Part of what I spoke about at the Social Media Law conference was the need for corporate social media policies, a basic what you can, cannot, and what we’d like you to do in social media. It’s obvious that celebrities need the same kind of social media policy. Knowing that this is happening, should Twitter allow for longer bios? Currently, and in true Twitter fashion, they allow 160 characters for a bio. Should celebs link to a landing page with a list of their endorsements?

So, I’m officially offering to fly to LA to give Brooke Burke a weekend-long social media bootcamp.

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