Marketing, Communications and Technology

I have been away form the blog for a while and away from marketing as well.  I have been charged with the task of organizing a search committee and a plan for our new central web team.

My assistant found this great site and I wanted to share it.  If you need to write a job description for a field that you are not completely familiar with, this is great place to start.  Of course it’s also a nice job search engine for job seekers as well.

Essentially, it searches live job posts and profiles the information much like google, including salary averages per city.  Although the information is only as good as the posts, you can always click right through the results and read the actual description that was posted.  Its great resource that I will definitely go back to.

If you are like me, you found it much easier to grow a facebook group than a facebook page since you cannot send out “join” requests for a page and until recently we were not able to even see a page without logging on.  Groups however were easier to grow and a bit more viral in the features available. (Credit to my assistant, Karina, who discovered this recently for me.)

A request to Facebook and 24 hours is all that is needed to turn your group fans into page fans and maybe grow your page from:

this

to this

in 24 hours!!!

Here is all that is required:

1. Visit the Facebook Help Form Page.
2. Subject line should read: Convert Group to Page
3. Make sure you include the url for both the group and the page in the body of the request.
4. Watch your page fans grow!!

We doubled are fans with this new feature.

Come July 11th I think I will be taking the iphone plunge. I have turned into quite the mac addict recently. I guess I was just waiting for the price to be right. $199 for 8gb and $299 for a 16gb. Delicious.

• 3g speed
• Microsoft Exchange - important for me, it means I can use work email on it
• GPS - no need to by a Garmin now
• 24 hours of audio playback - do i need my regular ipod anymore?

Official Apple Store Marketing

Beware: 3G sucks battery life, they claim 5 hours of talk time/browsing but the silver lining it you could just turn it off when you don’t need it.

OK , where do I preorder!!!

Apple store down. Will we be able to buy a new iphone today?

Tick, Tock, Tick Tock.

Many times I am asked for recommended video and photo gear. There is a plethora of options out there but you would be hard pressed to find an easier solution for recording HD video than the Sanyo Xacti HD 1000. First of all, lets get something straight, if you want the best quality you should be looking at Canon’s line, they make incredible camcorders.

However, if you want ease of use, nearly pocket size, full hd recording, at a bargain price, look no further. Sanyo, yes Sanyo has done a great job with its xacti line by filling a niche of folks looking for portable digital recording (saving to a memory card) at an affordable price.

I hate tapes. I hate long editing jobs. I have grown to love taking short clips with my digital cameras and putting them together with simple editing tools like movie maker or imovie. This is why the next logical step up for me is a more capable memory card based camcorder.

Here are a few clips (which we took just to test it out). We have since purchased the wide angle adapter and are going to get some better campus shots filled with students for b-roll on our video projects and to feed our virtual tour pages.

In order to see it in HD you will need to visit vimeo’s site. Vimeo is a great video sharing site for hosting quality video. It does have high traffic (compared to youtube) but its embedded videos look fantastic. Actually, the one seen here is not even as nice as they can appear on your site, since wordpress is restricting the size of the video window on this site.

Pros

• nice quality HD video
• pocket size - take anywhere
• easy - flip open = turn on mechanism
• fast edit potential - easy upload
• external mic plug
• wide angle adapter available

Cons

• photo quality - sub standard
• low light performance - slow focus - focus hunting

But what about post production?

All these HD camcorders had many problems with editing when they first came out, mostly software related. Many are fixed now, including the HD1000. You can edit clip files with IMovie and Windows Movie Maker (for movie maker you only need to open in quicktime and save as “mov”, this alows movie maker to read the files). Its also important to note you can actually edit right in the camera’s built-in menu and you will be able to upload the “mp4″ file right to any video host.

The caveat: you need to record in the 720p mode. I use the 720p 60 frames per second mode. I have tried the higher resolution (1920 x 1080) and I just cannot find a program that will edit it. I am sure that video production folks have the skill to make it happen but for the amateur or enthusiast like myself, it was not working. It’s a software thing and eventually the consumer software will catch up but for now 1280 x 720 is a nice jump from standard videos and looks great online (for those with broadband and a good computer who can view it).

But even if the end product will be used in standard definition, you will get a very crisp looking picture that will rival and in some cases beat professional standard video equipment (assuming you have good lighting of course).

Lets recap, the name of my game is fast quality, portable, HD.

For this task I feel the HD1000 is a great choice. It been out for 8 months now and Canon has released memory card camcorders that I am sure are better choices for image quality but at $200-300 premium and a different, less portable form factor. As with all technology, I am sure in a few months I will have a different “weapon of choice” for quick HD video recording but for now you cannot go wrong if you want quality fast HD in your pocket.

Here are some more samples of what others have created with this little hd wonder.