Trying out Adobe’s Media Encoder CS5.5
I often find myself transcoding video into all sorts of different formats, and today I found myself needing to get a video into FLV format for streaming.
While I usually just upload my H.264 MP4′s into a place like YouTube, occasionally I need a different format. I’ve tried all sorts of tools, including FFMPEGX and several online tools such as encoding.com, but I was never completely thrilled with the results. They always take a lot of fine-tuning and Ffmpegx, for example, always seemed to make my videos darker, which wasn’t good.
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Trying out a Social Media Contest
This week, I’m stepping from out behind the curtain to try being a contestant in a local social media contest.
A local Saab dealership is holding a contest where 100 people each week receive a Saab to drive around. Our goal as drivers is to get people to be our “fan” on a contest page and to snap the 2 QR codes on the car, one on each of the back windows and one on the interior (which is worth more points.) Contestants also receive points if someone scans a QR code on the car and then visits one of the contest sponsors where there’s another code that earns the customer a discount or benefit. The people I’ve shown the car to so far have been most excited by the fact they get a free coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts if they scan the car. Finally, I’ll receive points for each time I post a photo of the car. I’ve put up a few so far, and the process has been smooth and easy.
After a semi-final round, finalists will select 1 of 5 boxes, each containing a key. If the key opens the Saab, you win the car. Personally, I don’t really need a new car, but I could use the money to re-do our basement, trashed this year in floods.
Anyways, to play the part of good contestant, I need to ask for your help and tap into my social capital. Here’s how you can help. It’s okay if you’re not in the northeast Ohio area or even in the USA, you can “like” me from anywhere, as well as scan the QR code. You might not get a free coffee, but you’ll be helping me out.
First, visit my contest page. Scroll down to the lower right, where you’ll see this area:
Click on that “become a fan” link, where you’ll be prompted for an email address. I’ve been promised the emails won’t be spammed by the dealership, but to be safe, use that second or third Gmail account you have for stuff like this.
Second, scan this QR code on your phone:
If you don’t want to go through all the trouble, just visit this link, which the QR code takes you to. You’ll be asked for your location, so it can find the closest sponsor location to you.
So, that’s how you can help. Now, let me put on my marketing hat for a bit.
So far, the contest has been managed and handled very well, which is key. They held an orientation session last week for participants where the rules were explained, forms completed and there was food. There have been constant email communications from the dealer to participants with updates and schedules, which has been helpful.
On Sunday, when I picked up my car, there was a good check-in system, where the last of the paperwork was completed and any questions I had were answered. From there, I was off the pick-up area, where my car was brought up from the lot. I was walked through the vehicle and off I went. All in all, a good system was in place and there were plenty of people staffing the various areas so there was no wait. I’ll return the car on Saturday and expect the same setup upon check-in.
From a technology standpoint, the contest site is set up well, works well in mobile browsers and image uploads by contestants are stored and served from Amazon S3. I don’t know if this is being run by a national company that sells this product to local dealerships, but it’s put together very well and the design is nice.
So, I’m two days in so far. The car’s fun to drive (and fast, thank you, Turbo.) I wish it had a hookup for my iPhone, like my Hyundai does, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Thanks for your help. I’ll update later in the week on my progress.
So We Have Google+ Pages, Now What?
I’m going to be honest here. I haven’t been swept up in the Google+ hype of the last few months. I just haven’t, I don’t know, gotten it. To me, thus far, I haven’t seen the killer app or need that Google+ fills that Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn doesn’t. So, I haven’t spent a lot of time there, and have seen lots of duplicate content across my various networks.
This week, Google allowed brands/companies/schools to start having their own Facebook-Fan-Page-ish Pages inside Google+. I, like many other web and marketing folks, created a page for my University. The setup process was fairly simple, and I had the profile setup in a few minutes.
Now what?
Do I re-post content we’re already posting to over 5,000 fans on Facebook, or should we be creating content just for Google+? These are the types of questions that I guess many teams are now wrestling with.
Having just spent a small amount of time, I have some questions about managing a Google+ page.
1. Am I the only person who can administrate this page? I see that one the circles/streams available on my Page is one called “Team Members,” but its not clear if I add people to that stream/circle if they are given the right to post on the page.
2. My page displays the 2 people I’ve put in the Team Members circle on our home page, and shows that we have 11 followers, which isn’t bad for two hours. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing a way to see who the followers are.
I can now see who is following me, and choose to add them to one of my circles. This is a marked difference from Facebook’s model, which is more one way the two services are different. If you’re a fan of JCU on Facebook, as an administrator I don’t have access to your page and personal info. Not sure what the right model will be here on Google+.
What circles should I put them, since I’m encouraged to do that in the Google+ model. Students? Alumni? Faculty? Friends? Parents? Sounds like a minefield and a timesink having to determine what bucket a person should go in.
3. Where are the analytics? Facebook’s insights are pretty decent, but so far, I’m not seeing anything in terms of analytics for my Google page. How many times are my posts being viewed? What are the demographics, broadly speaking, of my audience on this site? What are the trends. Google has a killer app in Analytics, it should be really tied in here. If there isn’t marketing stats available here, I don’t see us really spending a lot of time focusing on our Google+ page if we can’t determine the ROI or value of having it.
4. I can add video and photos, but wouldn’t it make sense if I could link my institutional YouTube account and have videos I share there automatically get pulled in here? I could manually share them, but that’s an extra step that seems unnecessary. I should be able to hook the two together.
Honestly, at this point, I’m rather unimpressed with Google+’s page offerings. I think Farhad Manjoo said it well in his post at Slate:
I know this sounds unfair: Facebook had years to add all the features it has now, so why should we demand that Google create a perfect substitute at launch time? But that’s just the thing—taking on a behemoth like Facebook is an unfair fight. Google seems to think about its social network in the same way it thinks of any other kind of software—as a “product” that it can design step-by-step, starting with a small number of innovative features and working up from there.
We as web and marketing folks have been spoiled by Facebook and their fan page offerings, so much so that we expect any competing, new product to have all the same, if not better, functionality.
I’ll be keeping an eye on our Google+ page and placing content there, but it won’t be the first place I think to post content, which Facebook is now for us.
