When I was a youngster, people who drove particularly slowly were disparagingly called “Sunday Drivers.” The idea was that they must only drive once a week on the way to church.
The good thing about Sunday Drivers is they rarely got in accidents, and if they did they wouldn’t do much damage at such low velocities.
My wife, Lisa, ran across this video yesterday that shows some motorists who would be well advised to limit their driving to once a week…or less. It’s not really related to SMUG coursework, but I’m sharing it just for fun, and hoping your Sunday driving experience today is better than these:
YouTube is by far the most popular video sharing site in the known universe. That doesn’t mean it’s the best one, but only that it’s one you can’t afford to ignore if you want your video to have the best chance of being seen.
Until SMUG moved to its self-hosted home, our video player options were limited, because wordpress.com essentially allows YouTube and not much else. You can’t embed a flash widget, which is what most video players are.
Now we have choices, and one I started exploring last night was Vimeo.
The ad 34 seconds long, instead of the customary 30;
I was about $2.6 million short of the cash required to pay for the airtime; and
I created it during the Super Bowl today.
One of the ironies of social media is that everyone asks about the ROI, or return on investment. It’s an understandable question, but one of the points I make in presentations is that as I (investment) approaches zero, ROI approaches infinity, because it is calculated as follows:
ROI = benefits/costs
My cost of producing this stellar Super Bowl ad wasn’t exactly zero, but it was zero out-of-pocket. I already had invested $150 in the Flip video camera used to record it, and the production took a bit of my time and attention as I enjoyed the game .
I expect the benefits to be non-monetary as well, measured mainly in the satisfaction of getting more people involved in exploring social media. I hope you will use the ShareThis tool below to pass this post (with its embedded ad) along to your friends and co-workers who might benefit from becoming a SMUGgle, and invite them to enroll. I think it captures the essence of SMUG in a brief video snippet (but how did I manage to leave Blogging out?!)
Then we’ll see what happens to the SMUG enrollment, currently at 261 members of our Facebook group.
Updated: I originally had embedded the ad in the Facebook player, but I’m wondering whether that might be responsible for a SMUG slowdown, so I took that version down, at least for now. But you can see the higher-resolution Facebook version in the SMUG Facebook group.
Updated 2/3/09: Here’s the same video in a Blip.TV player. Another post coming on the topic of video players soon:
…do you really think as a PR professional that you will be immune from the need to retool and innovate?
See what the Chicago Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal reports today about restructuring at WMAQ-TV, Chicago’s NBC affiliate.
News producers, writers and editors at NBC-owned WMAQ-Ch. 5 were told Wednesday they must reapply for new multi-faceted positions, the demands of which reflect the station’s efforts to provide content not just for TV but the Internet, mobile devices and other emerging platforms.
The new jobs – with titles such as platform manager and content producer – are to be posted beginning Thursday, not just for internal candidates but outsiders as well.
In response to concerns about whether existing staff will be able to adapt, station manager Frank Whittaker says WMAQ plans to make training available.
Here’s another advantage of self-hosted WordPress over WordPress.com, particularly as Facebook has extended the functionality of its video player.
For each video you have uploaded to Facebook, you have an option to embed it in your blog.
When you click Embed this Video, you see a window pop up like this:
And then, when you’ve copied the code, you can just paste it into your WordPress blog post in the HTML editor,
so it looks like this:
Which is what I did below, and you see the results. I had not indicated any privacy protections on this video, so you should be able to see it. Please let me know if you can’t.
This is an Aase family classic, in which I discuss the ins and outs of our birdhouse project with my firstborn son. Jake demonstrates exceptional bravery in completing the conversation even after receiving a grave injury.
