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.
If you’d like to see the slideshow of Tony Hsieh’s recent presentation to a group of Internet Marketers, you can view it below. To reiterate, Tony is the brilliant CEO of the billion dollar company Zappos.com.
Last weekend I was at a conference and one of the speakers was Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com. I expected to hear a presentation on Internet marketing. It was after all an Internet marketing conference. But what we all heard from Tony was how Zappos.com lives and dies on customer service and firm culture. One of the really cool things he mentioned is that every year his company creates a “culture book.” And, he told us how we could get a copy of it. Requesting the copy was one of the first things I did when I returned to the office and today the book arrived. It’s brilliant! It is full of answers given by employees when asked about the firm culture and what it means to them.
If you’d like to get a closer look at the book, you can watch the video below. I grabbed a little camcorder to provide some visuals.
I believe it was June 26, 2008 that our group of 20 attorneys from 13 states and 11 law firms decided to undertake the writing of a collaborative book on personal injury law. Today is Feb 5, 2009 – just slightly over 7 months later and we have our first physical proof. When it arrived today I grabbed a little video camcorder and shot some footage.
I happen to be from Philadelphia so there is a rather special fondness in my heart for the Wharton School of Business, which is located in our great city! They recently posted an article and a 12 min audio discussion on the topic “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Don’t Skimp On Their Ad Budget.” You can read and listen to it here:
Here’s a great interview of Guy Kawasaki by Robert Scoble. It caught my attention because another of my favorite guru’s Kevin O’Keefe highly recommended it. Guy talks about his new book, Reality Check. In the course of the interview he says something really astounding – “I am just so sold on Twitter…I think that Twitter is arguably the most powerful branding mechanism since television.”
