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.

Happy New Year!  I don’t know about you but I am truly excited about 2009.    The New Year is a time that I generally focus on goals and priorities and that process tends to be invigorating.  One of the first new projects for our team in 2009 is the launch of Legal Marketing Cafe TV.  www.LegalMarketingCafe.com.  

As with most things we do at Speaker Media and Marketing, we anticipate that this project will evolve over a period of time.  Our philosophy is to kind of roll up our sleeves and test and measure as we go.  We’ll keep you posted on our progress!

I am writing this post from Coeur d’Alene in Idaho.  The M&L group has just finished the first day of their 3 day conference at this beautiful lakeside resort.  I haven’t been to M&L for a few years, and it has been so nice to see friends that I haven’t seen for quite some time.  Of course, Bill Berg is one of my favorites.  Bill is the one that first took a chance on me when I left my position with a Philadelphia law firm and ventured out as a consultant.  My friend and client Terry Bryant is here.  I always get such a kick out of Terry.  We share a thing about time.  I had to laugh yesterday when I was leaving the Spokane airport for the 40 minute trip to the resort.  Terry and a few other attorneys were waiting to get on a shuttle to make the trip.  As I walked by Terry heading towards my rental car he was looking at his watch saying that the shuttle was not meeting his time schedule.  So Terry and 4 others jumped in the rental car with me and we had a fun trip over.  I’ve been working with Rainwater, Holt & Sexton for quite awhile now but we had never actually met in person until yesterday.   Mike is holding down the fort back in Arkansas but both Stephen Holt and Bob Sexton are here. 

A couple of my Atlanta clients came in this afternoon – Tom Ashenden and Bruce Millar.  Greg Stokes, also from Atlanta will be here tomorrow.  Greg has a terrific marketing director, Melanie, and I was so glad to get to meet her this evening.  Melanie gets things done.  It’s great.  She is a mover shaker!

I could go on and on but the hour is late and I want to wrap this up.  I do want to mention one resource that I discussed during my talk today and that is www.ustream.tv.  I have a test site set up and it’s at this link:  www.ustream.tv/channel/legal-marketing-cafe.

Las Vegas attorney Richard Harris and I chatted at the cocktail party tonight and we set Richard up on UStream.TV.  If you want to take a look, here is a link to his show site:  http://www.ustream.tv/channel/las-vegas-personal-injury-lawyer.  Obviously he hasn’t done a broadcast yet but my guess is that he will before long!

 If you’d like to know more about UStream.TV, feel free to email me at cindy@cindyspeaker.com and I’ll help you get started!

There was an excellent article in Forbes magazine today about how Facebook and MySpace would like to help grow small businesses.

Ditch your Web site. Facebook and MySpace are eager to help small businesses find friends

I am a big fan of online video and just see that market exploding in 2008.  Well today I came across a great video about online video and thought I’d pass the link along.  I especially appreciated the statistics they bring to light.

http://www.accelacast.com/jlp/inP_iaf/1/80226632/

Clicking the URL above will take you to “Getting Results with Online Video”

So here is my first question… how might this work for my attorneys?  Let me tell you how it is supposed to work.  First of all, when Google bought YouTube they did not reveal any profit model that they might have had in mind, but it was obvious that that was part of the game plan. 

Well, today the New York Times reported that Google believes they have a formula that will work.  No, they will not put a ”preroll” on the video that requires the viewer to watch it prior to the video.  That just wouldn’t work for short form video and Google knows that or they would have tried it by now.  It is, however, used fairly effectively in long form video.

Instead the magic “formula” Google has in mind is to “introduce a new type of video ad,” which it said was unobtrusive and kept users in control of what they saw.  Google’s director for media platforms describes the interface as a “user controlled ad format that is engaging.”

Basically, the ads, which appear 15 seconds after a user begins watching a video clip, take the form of an overlay on the bottom fifth of the screen, not unlike the tickers that display headlines during television news programs.   The user can ignore the overlay, which will disappear after about 10 seconds, or close it.  But if the user clicks on it, the video they were watching will stop and a video ad will begin playing.  Once the ad is over, or if a user clicks on a box to close it, the original video will resume playing from the point where it was stopped.

In early tests, YouTube users clicked on overlays five to ten times more frequently than on banner ads.

 The video ad market is expected to double this year from last year to $775 million.  It has been projected to grow to $4.3 billion by 2011, according to eMarketer, a research firm.

It looks like video ads are here to stay so we, in the PI industry, need to pay attention to this so that we can investigate ways to potentially benefit from this emerging form of web advertising.

 For more information, you can contact Cindy Speaker at 610-692-3217.