Asmus Farm Supply Video Shoot Wrap Up
May 21, 2010 by Doug Mitchell · 1 Comment
We had a great day up in Rake, Iowa (you can hit MN with a rock from here it’s so far North) shooting video and putting the pieces together for a 60-120 second “Who we are, what we do, and what makes us special” video that will soon grace the home page at Asmus Farm Supply’s Website. I shot a little blog post on our way out that reminds us all to not waste any opportunity to capture content especially when we’ve driven far and brought lots of great equipment. We have enough video archived now to provide Asmus with content for months. We can’t wait to show off the amazing staff, the unbelievably clean and massive facility, and the new offices and conference center that are being built.
Living in the city, you and I probably don’t appreciate how important solid agronomics and proper application of nutrients and other chemicals are to producing the food that feeds the world. I appreciate it 10x more after spending the day with our friends at Asmus Farm Supply, Inc.
Doug Mitchell talks content creation at Asmus Farm Supply from Doug Mitchell on Vimeo.
Building a Better PowerPoint
April 22, 2010 by Doug Mitchell · Leave a Comment
Are you ready to build a better PointPoint and absolutely make your audience gasp at your awesomeness? Well I’m not the guy to ask about the first part. I do pretty well with PowerPoint and Keynote in that I don’t use a lot of words. I have a formula for delivering more compelling presentations that breed engagement and interaction vs. note taking and word reading. If you want to know how to make unbelievable presentations regardless of context read the Rapid E Learning blog. But to get the audience thinking your’re awesome…here’s my formula.
- Script your entire presentation. (GASP!) “But what about spontaneity?” Don’t worry, you won’t read it verbatim when you give it…but I’ve found scripting as though I’m writing a book opens my mind and forces me to refine my message.
- Now, build imagery for your presentation around the refined and scripted document. You may riff for a paragraph on “The top 3 things to remember when using Twitter for Business”, but you don’t need to bullet point them and use lots of words, use a picture and a couple words to represent what you’re saying. This is fun and makes you think about how your viewers/participants/watchers will engage. This takes their mind off of writing and makes them more active listeners.
- Now the awesomeness – Record audio of the presentation using your script. Give the presentation behind the mic like you would in person! Inflect! It takes 5X the emotion behind the mic to equal you and body language so don’t slack.
- Use Apple iMovie or the PC equivalent of your choice to place your slides (exported as images) into the timeline along with your imported audio using clean and simple transitions. Export the entire presentation as a movie.
- Or, skip step 3 and use the narration function in your presentation software where you can talk and advance slides while it records the entire deal.
- Now, if this presentation is specific to an audience and you’ve done this specifically for them…in their context, upload this new movie to a hosting service like Viddler and make the video private and give out the TOP secret URL to the attendees only.
- Or, if you have a WordPress based site, you could protect the page and give out a password to the attendees (native functionality in WordPress).
- If you go a step further, you could use your membership based Interactive Learning Environment to capture emails to obtain the private video. This all depends on what you and the audience and your hosts are trying to accomplish. If it’s a public or more generic piece…then use your usual suspects for video/slide hosting.
Now you’ve provided the audience with a magical multimedia experience to go back to without worrying about note taking. This model works very well and people are typically impressed and blown away that you’d put such effort into making their lives easier. Let me know how it works for you.
ADDED EXTRA BONUS – If the information/content in your presentation is private post the doc on your scribd page, and put the audio up as a podcast, put the slide images in Flickr, perhaps video your actually presentation and upload it socially, embed your video/recorded presentation in a blog post…which feeds Facebook, Twitter…etc. Now you’ve hit at least 6-10 content outposts in additional to your personal speaking gig. Every chance to speak publicly is a chance to generate massive online organic findability. Don’t waste your chance!
Eckhart Tolle TV – Subscription Site Marketing Done Right
April 15, 2010 by Doug Mitchell · Leave a Comment
If you examine the business practices of superstar book writer Eckhart Tolle, you’ll find keen Internet Marketing acumen under the surface. You see Tolle offers a website of his teachings, lectures, and live streams, i.e. “content” called EckhartTolleTV.com. Most people will probably gloss over this quote about Tolle’s membership website from USA Today…but as a smart Internet Marketer, you would light up inside at its brilliance: (emphasis mine)
Subscriptions to Tolle TV, at $14.95 to $19.95 a month, cost less than a movie and popcorn, and a growing amount of the content — his lectures, teachings and meditations — is free.
Most of the proceeds of his books and teaching tours are plowed back into Tolle TV’s elaborate professional productions, or the overhead for lecture halls. This enables him to reach an ever-widening audience without forcing solitude-loving Tolle to travel constantly, says Anthony McLaughlin, CEO of Eckhart Teachings and co-founder of Tolle TV.
BINGO! Absorb the bold text. YOU can travel less and do MORE by leveraging the power of your online brand and deliver what MORE people want…yes MORE people want you so give to them…and you can do it with less travel, less pain, less hassle, and for higher profit margins. Tollle is famous now and Oprah rocketed him to stardom when, “she invited him to co-host a 10-week set of Internet seminars on how to simply be.” (By the way, 25 million people watched those webinars.) However, you can follow Tolle’s model to the T. Ready…
- Passionately produce compelling content (books, blogs, essays) and publish to a WordPress based optimized website. (Join LunchtimeMastermind.com if you don’t know what this means)
- Build and support a community around that content. (forums, groups, blog comments, Facebook, Twitter)
- Capture names, email addresses, and as much information you can on your audience by offering them massive value.
- Speak publicly as much as possible. (Early on don’t be picky. SPEAK and you will refine your message and your work through live QA/feedback)
- (Maybe you have an Oprah moment maybe you don’t but keep going here)
- Capture as much of the live content (seminars, webcasts, webinars, QA sessions, appearances) as possible. Worry less about elaborate editing and production than simple basics like lighting and audio quality.
- Now, when you’ve got a huge library of material and large audience, it’s time to turn your WordPress site into a membership site. (again, LunchtimeMastermind.com)
- Once you’ve powered up the membership engine, keep producing content, keep giving it away, but now segment the content to deliver additional value (insider information, more depth, more access, more exclusivity, etc.) to the paying membership for $xx.xx per month.
It’s unacceptable and incorrect to say, “But I’m too busy being a good writer, speaker, and consultant to produce all this content you talk about Doug”…because you’re doing it already…you just don’t know it.
Get your foundation under you with a WordPress based optimized site and then capture, capture, capture. If that’s all you do for a couple years you’re in the top 5% and you can learn the rest.
New Virtual Coaching Option for Businesses
December 7, 2009 by Doug Mitchell · Leave a Comment
We’re making a big push to serve businesses (especially the smaller ones who are getting squeezed) with usable knowledge and strategies to become more findable and engaging on the web. To that end, we’re beginning a ongoing web based coaching system that provides 10 minutes of structured content then 50 minutes open QA with 6 clients at a time.. TWO times per month.
This way we’ll all get our fair share of talk..and QA. We will use a video-audio conference solution like Skype or Oovoo and we might even try to utilize TalkShoe. We’ll cover topics like audio, video, blogging, content creation, and all of the findability and organic SEO mojo you’re looking for.
Our goal is to put like minds in a virtual room during a one hour time block twice per month. That’s 2 hours of discussion, QA, feedback, interaction, and learning for the sweet little price of $47/month. We’ll set you up on a recurring monthly charge and you can quit, bail, jump, drop, leap, hop out anytime you choose with one simple email or call.
If you’re interested in this, you can email me directly doug@createWOWmedia.com and we’ll get you signed up. We anticipate the first session to be in early January. Once we have a group of 6, we’ll form another one and progress until we are full. We’ll probably start with an end of business day time…and a lunch and learn mid-day time to start with to accommodate your schedules.
As always, one-on-one consulting is available from our team but we know how tight resources are these days. We’re trying to strike the right balance for you and bring you value. If you’re ready, hop on board.
Investment: $47/month recurring on your credit card.
Times/days:
- Wednesday’s beginning at
- 12PM-1PM
- 2PM-3PM
- 4PM-5pm
- 6PM-7PM
Business Quality Video on a Budget
May 12, 2009 by Doug Mitchell · Leave a Comment
The guys at ReelSEO have done it again. This is one of the most salient posts I’ve read on the current state of business video and how companies can do it for themselves on a budget if they’re committed to becoming what Grant Crowell calls a “Videorati”. It’s called “How to Produce “Business Quality Online Video on a Small Business Budget“.
Here’s his definition of a “Videorati”:
- A hybrid-professional – can do more than one skillset, be it in planning, production, talent, publishing, marketing (including search marketing and SEO), and performance testing (including usability and analytics) of online video.
- Is community-minded, and a leader this is important for video publishers, since they require a large audience to build advertising and subscriptions around must be public with sharing their expertise and opinions, and be able to reach those people through search engines, video sharing sites, and social networking sites related to their industry or skillset. (This is where Video SEO comes in very handy, plus the gift of gab.)
Exactly! This perfectly describes where we try and coach clients to end up in their own video work. If they don’t want to become a full blown business videorati…they can at least use someone for the more tricky elements while they produce the red meat.
Excellent post to start my day with.
Ask the Google Video
April 23, 2009 by Doug Mitchell · 1 Comment
Ok, so I think our recent 8 week stretch of creating and launching and being totally immersed, I think we were craving a bit of fun times. So we put our skills to work and created the most comprehensive video to date showing how to use “The Google” to execute searches. Enjoy and share please.
We’ve Figured Out Some Gaps In Our Customer Experience…and We’re Changing
April 7, 2009 by Doug Mitchell · Leave a Comment
It’s not about NOT making mistakes right? It’s about fixing what caused them in the first place and not repeating. Well, our team has figured out a few areas in which we’re not as good as we thought we were.
- Project Management. We have made the assumption incorrectly that our clients automatically know “how things go when rolling out a web site, etc.”
- Video. We have made the assumption that everyone knows the process of creating a brand presence with video and haven’t done more granular expectation setting/review.
We’re learning every day and have done a deeper debrief and dissection of our efforts and are taking steps to tighten them up to create even more of that WOW experience for clients. We can’t get everything right…but we’re striving to create unique and memorable brand experiences for you.
Promo Video for Entrefest
April 1, 2009 by Doug Mitchell · Leave a Comment
We put together a little video to promote Entrefest. Hopefully Entrefest 2010 will benefit from this piece where we tried to capture the collaborative, informative, and upbeat environment that surrounds the conference. The create WOW media team is proud to have been a part of the show!
Client launch: Fredsolomon.net
January 17, 2009 by Doug Mitchell · 3 Comments
The create WOW team is proud to release www.fredsolomon.net. This site is a wonderful example of what you can do with a membership site. We’ve leveraged video heavily in this Interactive Learning Environment. Fred had a wonderful 3 hour workshop that he puts on video taped for us.
The next step was to release the video editing wizard Paul Gratton on the project to chop up that 3 hour seminar into 30 manageable chunks for use online. We’ve also taken some recorded audio calls done in our podcast recording studio and created some training calls for Fred’s online subscribers.
Additionally, we’ve integrated video chat into the site in protected page so Fred can connect daily with his clients and partners around the USA.
You’ll probably also notice the “walk on” video that we’ve done here. Walk on videos pack quite a punch. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty intrigued when I see an owner walk onto a screen and deliver a great marketing message to me. We’re very pleased with the results on this video. Fred flew into Des Moines for a day (quite a change from Newport Beach, CA huh?) to shoot this piece. If you live in Des Moines of course…no flight necessary.
Fred Solomon is taking his incredible message, products, and talents online by leveraging the create WOW media membership software platform. Our platform is getting more refined every day and our deployment times are coming way down too.
Please take a look at www.FredSolomon.net and let us know what you think. You may also want to sign up for Fred’s Free 15 day trial as well. Now the blogging and marketing of the site will really pick up speed. I can’t wait to share the results with you down the road.
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Podcast with Daniel Shipton of Impromptu Studio
January 14, 2009 by Doug Mitchell · 1 Comment
Here at create WOW media, we’re proud to have just moved into the shiny new studio at Impromptu Studio on SW 5th St. in Des Moines. The studio is taking shape and we now are fully operational in the audio booth with capacity for up to 5 simultaneous people. That means YOU can conduct your own company podcasts, you can interview clients for audio testimonials, or conduct multi-voice voice overs for presentations, etc. Additionally, we’ve perfected the art of recording calls via skype. You don’t need to know about the technology. Just think about having a client call a phone number, and you end up with a studio quality conversation produced into a high powered testimonial for your products/services. Photos and live streaming coming very shortly!
We invite you to email us or call us and come by for a quick tour. We appreciate your continued support and would like to again thank Daniel Shipton @ImpromptuStudio for his support and assistance.
Take a listen to a quick chat we had this morning about the studio and what it means to the Des Moines business community and beyond.
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Interview with Daniel Shipton of Impromptu Studio [9:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (203)
