StateLawTV.com is up and running and we would like you to give you a sneak peek of our new show – Kate’s Kourt!

StateLawTV launched today and we are thrilled with all of the press and well-wishes! StateLawTV is an Internet TV channel that will also be available offline later this fall.

The New York Times Hires Their First Ever Social Media Editor. Below is the actual email sent from the head of the newsroom to his staff at the Times regarding the new position. I loved what he said at the very end… “because of course we all need to figure this out together.”

There is no blueprint for the ever changing and evolving new media landscape and world of social media and user generated content. We are all figuring it out as we go. I happen to love that kind of an environment. Whether or not you love it as well, I think it’s pretty clear to all of us that the landscape is changing rapidly and those who fear and resist change will struggle to compete.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: [...]
Date: Tue, May 26, 2009 at 9:00 AM
Subject: [NYT Newsroom] From Jon Landman: Jennifer Preston to be Social Media Editor
To: [...]

To the Newsroom:

One of the bracing things about this topsy-turvy media landscape is that you can wake up one morning and find yourself actually doing something you never thought you’d even think about. Take Jennifer Preston. In 25 years in the news biz, she’s been plenty of things: Reporter (cop shop, City Hall, Albany, etc.), editor (political editor, section editor, administrative editor, etc.) and even circulation marketing manager (at New York Newsday). But still, did she ever think she’d wake up one morning as “social media editor”?

No, she didn’t but yes, she did. That morning was this one.

Jennifer is our first social media editor. What’s that? It’s someone who concentrates full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers.

Think of Twitter. Did you know that The New York Times is No. 2 on the Twitterholic.com Top 100 Twitterholics based on Followers? (Behind Ashton Kutcher but ahead of Ellen DeGeneres.) Don’t care? OK, but the point is that an awful lot of people are finding our work not by coming to our homepage or looking at our newspaper but through alerts and recommendations from their friends and colleagues. So we ought to learn how to reach those people effectively and serve them well. At the same time, more of us are using social networks to find sources, contacts and information. Like this guy.

Jennifer will work closely with editors, reporters, bloggers and others to use social tools to find sources, track trends, and break news as well as to gather it. She will help us get comfortable with the techniques, share best practices and guide us on how to more effectively engage a larger share of the audience on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Digg, and beyond.

A big part of her job will be keeping everyone up to date with the rapid developments taking place on the social media front. She will work closely with social media whizzes in the newsroom and other departments, including Soraya Darabi in marketing, Jake Harris in software and Heather Moore in comment moderation, on how news feeds work and how best to be part of the online conversation. She will also work closely with Dawn Williamson, Derek Gottfrid and others involved in building our own social network, Times People, as we continue to use crowd-sourcing techniques to increase the reach and quality of our work. She will work with Craig Whitney and others to ask and answer the many tricky questions that arise in this context: What is the proper balance between personal and professional? What best practices should we adopt or adapt? How can we do the new stuff in a way that honors the old stuff? Etc.

In a significant way Jennifer will apply the collaborative techniques of social-networking to her own job, because of course we all need to figure this out together.

Jon

No, I’m not suggesting we go from Twitter to Flutter. As a matter of fact – Flutter was conjured up as a joke. What you will see below in 3:44 is a very clever and entertaining mockumentary about “a company that wants to take microblogging to the next level.” The video went up on April 3, 2009. It is now April 7th and it has had 289,540 views. Pretty impressive. And a great example of a viral video. Speaker Media will be testing viral videos for the legal industry in the near future. Check back and we’ll let you know how it goes.

I attended a conference about a month ago and heard marketing guru Paul Colligan talk about new media content creation. Tonight I received an email from Paul with a link to the presentation on his YouTube channel. If you have 8 minutes and an interest in better online visibility – this is an excellent presentation. As they say “content is king.” You have to have lots and lots of content flowing in order to continually improve your visibility and positioning. Paul talks about creating the content once and then repurposing it multiple ways to get greater advantage from it.

Recently I’ve had some questions about my post last week where I introduced a service called Animoto. Animoto does in about 20 minutes and for a few hundred dollars what would have taken about 8 hours and $5000 worth of video equipment to do just a few years ago. It allows members to upload digital pictures and music, press a button that says “create video” and wait for 20 minutes or so for the program to analyze the images and music and build a montage with the kind of style and impact usually only evidenced by highly skilled directors and editors.

I see multiple potential uses of this program for law firms. However, I do not mean to imply that it is a one stop video solution. It’s not. I simply mean to imply that I think it would be a great supplement to your online video program. For instance, most firms are involved in various types of community events, sponsorships, high school programs, etc. One suggestion would be to have a member of your staff attend and take lots of pictures. After the event, choose the best 40 images, sign up for an account with Animoto and build your first montage.

Here is an example that may help you brainstorm possibilities. Last week, some of my family went on vacation to Florida. We arrived home Friday evening. On Saturday, I went through my pictures, uploaded about 40 into Animoto, uploaded music and hit “create video.” Here is the result:

If you share my belief that online video is an absolute must for law firm marketing programs, then you’ll want to check this out. I had an email yesterday from a video trade group that I belong to. They were recommending a new tool for montage production using still photographs. The company is called Animoto. I flagged the email to come back to because I have such regard for this trade group that anything they recommend has immediate credibility to me.

Today, I opened an account in Animoto. The fact is I do a lot of montages using photograph’s and I have wanted to find an easy to use software to give motion to my still images. I saw an example from Animoto and decided to open an account and try it out. There are various levels of accounts. I chose the business account for $249/yr. I added an all access pass for $25 that will allow me to actually download the videos if I like.

Here’s how it works. You upload your images into the application. You can then drag and arrange them in sequence. Next step is to choose music and then click on create video. Pretty easy. I wanted to show you an example so I just took some of my stock image photo’s and uploaded them into the program. About 5 minutes later I received and email with a link. Here is the video that the system spit out. Oh, by the way, this platform was developed by a group of veterans of the entertainment industry.