Three Generations and Confusion

I was part of a three-generation discussion the other day.

It was about music. It gave me insight but no answers.

I was out on our office porch (PR has its own house) with my two work study students. Christie is a 40-year-old former DJ with a wide knowledge of music. She’s worked at both country and rock stations. Matt is 20 years old and loves music and photography.

Christie, making conversation and trying to get to know Matt a little better asked: “So, what kind of music do you like?”

“All types,” he said.

“But your favorite type.”

He shrugged. “I like everything, really.”

She tried again. “Okay, what CD is in your car right now?”

“None. I don’t listen to CD’s.”

At this point, Christie lit a cigarette and formulated a new question. “Okay, what station do you have on in your car.”

Matt shook his head. “Whatever the dial number is that lets me play my iPod. I plug it in and hit shuffle.”

There you have it. Three generations. I grew up with vinyl records, back in the day when album artwork and liner notes meant something. (Andrew Careaga knows whereof I speak).

I’ve embraced every new step in technology since.

Christie was a child of the ‘70s, right there to experience the tail end of vinyl and watch the advent of cassettes and CDs. I’m sure she, like I, had our one or two favorite FM stations that we were loyal to above any others. This loyalty allowed advertisers to know knew exactly who their audience was.

And here’s Matt, downloading his songs and circumventing everything commercial –cds, radio — not because he’s rebelling. It’s just the way things are done.

Like any piece of anecdotal evidence, it was interesting to experience it first hand in a front porch conversation.

I still advertise on radio, but everything I’m reading, everything I’m hearing, tells me it isn’t as powerful as it used to be and like the battered Darth in the final Star Wars installment, the intimidating mask is off, revealing a small, mutilated man with a weak voice, wondering what the Force was and how it slipped away.

And here I am, still wondering how to effectively reach high school students.

Alumni Weekend: Full Charge to YouTube

I did a post June 8 about using animoto to create videos of commencement, using dozens of photos and for the first time recognizing hundreds of graduates on the most important day of their college career.

I also sent out a news release on the fact that we were posting videos of commencement saying “We’ve found a way to share the day with millions of people,” or something to that effect. The media picked up on it. Our local NBC affiliate gave us a fair amount of time and played part of a YouTube clip.

(As of this writing they’ve been posted less than two weeks and have attracted more than 800 hits. Not bad for a really small niche video collection).

Okay. Win-win situation. We get publicity, the overworked media folks get news handed to them. In the case of TV, the news folks simply read the release and played a clip of one of our videos.

I hope the grads, now alumni, see the videos as a gift from a university that cares about them. I hope their parents share it with aunts, uncles, grandparents, and we have a whole specialized audience of people who feel good about Mansfield University.

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It was a no-brainer to build upon this. For alumni weekend I told my staff and student photogs to cover every event. Cover registration, the golf tournament, presentations, banquet, dinners. Get the drinks, the food, the hugs.

I stationed my work study student in the studio. A month ago Christie knew nothing about video editing. The photographers came in after nearly every event and downloaded the photos. Christie edited them, found music, created a video and posted it. Within a few hours after each event, a video was up on YouTube.

My news director sent out releases about the weekend and included the link to the posts.

The alumni who were even vaguely familiar with YouTube were excited. The alumni staff of course was happy.

My staff was excited. Each person had a clear assignment and purpose, and they were seeing immediate results. No waiting around three months for the alumni quarterly to come out with maybe 20 photos at the most being printed.

The trick, I think, is keeping them short. I scanned a lot of commencement videos and they’re 8-12 minutes, too long for today’s audiences.

In the case of still shots, it’s just as easy to produce and post eight short videos as it is to post one nine minute one.

The videos are simple – photos, cg intros and outros and a music bed. They move quickly and most importantly, they’re produced quickly.

Oh, and they’re free.

Sunday Afternoon Thoughts–No PR

Today was sunny, warm without humidity, a perfect day. And it happened to be Father’s Day. It’s commercial, for sure, and far less deserved than Mother’s Day, also born from commercial ideas.

But what the hell, commercial or not, I take advantage of it.

I played with the dogs (three dogs, three balls, get a rhythm going and we all get exercise).

My son came up and we played frisbee, talking pop culture, politics, videos, my office activities and his musical endeavors.

My daughter from Alaska called and I talked with her while working compost into the garden and pulling weeds from the moss that grows between the stones in my flagstone patio.

My son and I fired up the grill and all of us at the house feasted on hot dogs, bean salad and a key lime pie my wife whipped up. We ate on the deck, soaking up the sun. After he left, it was dog time again, then some weed whacking to sweat out all the nitrates and preservatives ingested from the hot dogs.

I skimmed through The Rolling Stone Interviews that my son had given me because I have lived a lot of my life in and through music.

Dinner on the deck again. Afterward sitting back, smoking a pipe, sipping coffee and watching the living art of changing clouds, thinking Hemingway never had it this good.

I caved and did some freelance work, finished a blog for my next post here and reflected back on a lovely day.

I hope all of you with children were appreciated by them, and I’m sure you were. I hope those of you who are

blessed with fathers still alive let them know how special they are.

The day is commercial, but it does serve to focus us and appreciate things, moments and people that are important.

Local.com Legit. Still Not Interested.

You know, I thought a long time before posting the previous blog about www.local.com I’m not usually so direct or critical. I thought about it all day today as the hits kept coming.

Then at 2:30 p.m. today something happened that blew away my vacillation. My news director forwarded a call to me.

Before I proceed there’s one thing I left out of yesterday’s post. The two sales women I talked with had heavy Latino accents. I left it out because I didn’t think it was relevant.

When I answered the forwarded call, a male said, “Hello. My name is Brad Miller.” He had a thick mid-Eastern accent. Brad Miller? I don’t think so.

He went on. “I represent local.com and I just want to verify your street address for your listing.” He proceeded to read off a different street number than the woman yesterday. I politely interrupted.

“I talked with someone from your company yesterday,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“I talked with a local.com representative yesterday.”

There was a hesitation. “Oh, and what was the result?”

“I’m not interested.”

“Oh. Well, thank you very much.”

Same pitch, different accents.

I came away with some new thoughts. First, these hired guns must be given information, all of it faulty in my case. They figure they’ll be forwarded eventually to the right office. I wish I had played the game longer to talk with the supervisor and see if he or she had the same accent. That would tell me that they’re calling from different countries, which is not unusual. A couple years ago when I was having problems with my Dell laptop, I talked with two reps in India and one in the Philippines. I know because I asked them.

I went back to local.com twice. You get, as I said before, your business listing, phone number and street address. To the right is a map with a road and a pin in it. You can hit a link for a more detailed view.

Some more searching for information and reviews showed me that local.com is large and legit. I just don’t like their sales tactics and the fact that I would have to call them to unsubscribe after the first free month.

In fact, on their site they urge you to get your business listed with them, saying, “It’s fast, FREE and easy.” It’s not a lie. It’s just misleading as hell.

I did get something out, though. I did a search for motels in New York City just to see local.com’s reach.

I clicked the Affinia Dumont Hotel link and found an “insider tip” that it has rooms with removable walls so “couples can enjoy massages, facials or other treatments together.”

Legit? Scam? Beware.

Note: I’ve edited this and corrected the url. Apologies to mylocal.com which is still undergoing site changes.

This posting is for PR folks and others responsible for advertising.

I got a call yesterday from a sales rep selling listings on www.local.com. The woman, who had a heavy accent, read from a script and couldn’t veer from it, which always makes me suspicious. I asked for the site address, which she gave me. I visited it while I answered more questions.

The first red flag popped up when she said I needed to give her the last four digits of my social security number or my birth date. This was for my personal security code to get on the page, or whatever. . . .

“You need this for what?”

She read the script again. I played along and gave her my birth date, day and month.

When she finished she said she had to put her supervisor on.

The big red flag rose. It’s happened to me before.

The first time was a few decades ago when I was out of work and my wife was pregnant. I answered an ad, found myself in a seedy motel conference room with an equally seedy guy telling all of us down-and-out suckers how we could make a million dollars selling fire alarms. All we had to do was get into a family’s home and show a video of a fire that killed the family’s children.

Then Diamond Jim walked out wearing a thousand dollar suit, rings polished to glint in the overhead lights and movie star white teeth. He told us that he had a yacht, a sports car and took vacations around the world and we could too. All we had to do was sell fire alarms (playing to the most elemental fear of all parents) and move up in the organization.

Capitalism at its most brutish.

Back to www.local.com The second woman, the supervisor, asked me more questions and mentioned in passing that we would get a free 30 day listing in a prominent spot on the page. If we didn’t contact them within the 30-day grace period we’d be added to their site for $49.95 a month.

I stopped her there and said I wasn’t trying anything that automatically subscribes me if I don’t contact them. I also told her I thought the site was shallow and of not much use.

And I hung up.

I sent a warning message to our town chamber members to give them a heads up.

www.local.com models itself after Yellowbook. I suppose it’s legit but it’s of little use to local or regional advertisers unless I’m missing something in the bigger picture. You get your phone number and address listed for $50 a month on a site that offers nothing else but the weather. That’s it.

I’m wary of this one. If you’re not responsible for advertising, pass this on to the folks who are.

Sunday Afternoon Thoughts with Animoto

I’m sure many of you have discovered Animoto, an amazing software program that synchs music with your photos. It was released in February by a group of techies and tv/film producers.

It works like this: Choose a batch of your slides and music (yours or theirs), upload them and the result is a video that “is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced on a widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.” (From the Animoto home page).

It’s based on Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that thinks like an actual director and editor, according to the home page info.

I liked the demo and set my students, Matt and Christie, on it. Play with it. Push it to its limits, I told them. They quickly ran through the limited use for the free version so I bought the $30 a year unlimited use version.

With some events like commencement, alumni weekend, homecoming and our Fabulous 1890s Weekend, we take hundreds of photos. Through traditional media, and even our web site, we use a handful. With Animoto, we’re able to use dozens, as you can see in this video.

In the case of most of these events, the use of slides, special effects and music is often more effective than video. It moves faster with more information per second.

The synching of the photos with the music is pretty amazing.

But there are holes. After posting a commencement video, Christie came in and said it looked crappy. I looked at it. “Bad compression. Contact them and ask.”

She did. The guys were quick to respond that yes there were some things that needed improving and they were working on offering high def video but it would be with a small upcharge.

Well, I do want the improvement but I’d rather pay a slightly higher annual fee than get ‘upcharged’ for each posting.

Matt produced a four- minute show of a Mexico experience he participated in. The rendering time was two hours.

Okay, a few bugs but a wonderful program. The ease of use, the intuitive nature of the program, far outweigh the glitches which I know the programmers will fix. I also have the feeling there will be regular improvements. Check it out. Animoto is fast, easy and right in synch with the times.

If anyone else has used animoto, share your thoughts and experience.

Sunday Afternoon Thoughts 21

It finally feels like summer. The lawn is mowed and trimmed, the tomatoes are planted and the blisters are turning into calluses.

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Excellent article on how H&R Block successfully marketed their brand on social sites, YouTube and Twitter. Some good lessons here.

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Marketing guru Steve Rubel makes a prediction about social sites that’s a little unsettling for us in marketing and advertising.

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Some thoughtful speculation about TV advertising “While Many Have Rung Its Death Knell, the Pendulum Is Swinging Back to TV.” No wonder I’m in a continual state of confusion.

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In a recent post , “Imagined Identity: Envisioning the Future of Social Networks,”

Fred Stutzman sees three themes emerging: Closeness, Curation and Imagined Identity. Fred’s blog is Unit Structures.

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According to Social Media Trader, If People Love You They’ll Pay To Promote You. Can this be migrated  to higher education?

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I mentioned in Sunday Afternoon Thoughts 19 that my multi-media experiment at commencement was partially successful. What I didn’t mention was that I recorded the commencement speaker with the Flip. I was too far away and it was boring. So my student took the audio, and the several hundred still shots taken between my photographer, news director and myself, and assembled a slide show with his address as the audio. It’s too long for YouTube but we’re airing on the area cable TV station.

Fortunately the address is interesting and gives some context of the photos of excited graduates, our president hugging nearly everyone of them, proud, parents, siblings, the crowds in the bleachers and the stunning scenery.

I mention this because we wound up with two YouTube videos, a cable TV show, and it’s the first time we’ve used more than a handful of commencement photos.

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Martha Horton is a retired college PR director who’s been a friend for more than 30 years. She’s published her first novel, Faun, loosely based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun. The mystery, set in today’s Rome is well-paced, well-written and literate. Martha knows a lot about fine food, wine, music, literature and history and weaves it throughout this witty, suspenseful work. Check it out.