The Internet has come a long way since the days of chirping modems and painfully slow download speeds. The modern web is a multimedia marvel filled with audio, video, and interactive content. One of the most exciting trends is the explosive growth of online video. Billions of videos are watched everyday, and the technology to make high quality video content is accessible to anyone.

Since not everyone has the talent of Spielberg, or the budget of Pixar, here are some tips I’ve picked up while doing video projects for ArcStone:

1) Keep It Short & Sweet

Even if your video is well made and compelling viewers can only handle so much at a time. The sweet spot seams to be two minutes or less. Audience attention starts to wain after one minute, and sharply decrease after two. Keep the pacing quick and your script concise to help viewers make it to the end, and have enough attention left to visit your other videos or website.

YouTube has some great tools for measuring your videos effectiveness and audience attention.

2) Make It Your Own

Adding your company’s unique style and branding to your videos will help viewers make a connection between your video content and overall web presence. Also, take advantage of the customizing options many video sharing sites have. YouTube, for instance, offers a custom channel page that can help you brand and promote your videos.

With some tweaking you can make your YouTube page look much like your website.

3) Say Hello & Goodbye

Including intro and exit screens help frame up the video, and will benefit your marketing efforts if you include your logo, website address, phone numbers and other information. Having consistent intro screens will also create continuity between your videos.

4) Capture Every Detail

Now that HD (high definition) video technology has come down in price it’s worth filming, editing, and saving all your content in HD format. Many of the most popular video sharing sites are also making HD their preferred format. HD or not, upload the highest quality version of your video to sites like YouTube, as they will handle scaling down the quality for users with slower connections.

If you can produce videos in HD, viewers will enjoy more lifelike images and crisp, easily readable text.

5) Do Your Homework & Planning

Before embarking on your first video production check and see what else is out there. It should be easy to find a wealth of videos pertaining to your industry. Notice what you like and dislike about them, which ones keep your attention, and how well the audience has responded.

Usually the most costly aspect of producing video content is the actual shooting itself. You can minimize this cost, and end up with a better product, if you do the proper planning. Make sure the talent is well prepared, the location ready, and the shoot well thought out.

6) Have Some Fun

Online video is a great way to show your company’s personality, culture, and unique way of doing business. The most successful videos not only communicate key marketing messages, they also have a little fun doing it.

If you would like more information about how ArcStone can help you produce high quality web video check out our video production services page. To see some of our work visit ArcStone’s YouTube Channel.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

These words, penned over 200 years ago in the Declaration of Independence are just as true now as they were then. As sales professionals we sometimes tend to trample on these unalienable rights of our prospects and customers without even knowing.

Ari Galper, a highly acclaimed International Sales Trainer and Coach, and an expert in human communication has discovered that sales professionals need a bold shift in their mindset from traditional sales thinking that creates undue pressure and discomfort for our prospects and clients. This led to the creation of Unlock the Game, a highly successful sales training program.  This new mindset also led Ari to create his own Declaration of Sales Independence.

I would encourage every sales professional out there to place a printed copy of this Declaration in their cubicle, desk area or office. Let’s make a personal promise to the world as sales professionals and demonstrate that Selling is indeed a noble profession.

Although everyone is on the green bandwagon now, ArcStone is no Johnny-come-lately. We have been striving to lessen our environmental footprint for years, and encouraging customers to do the same.

With Wonderfile we help clients convert paper processes to electronic ones. Clients benefit from increased productivity, safer backups, effortless file sharing, and when a virtual document gets deleted it doesn’t end up in a landfill.

E-Brochure lets customers dump paper mailings for a superior electronic equivalent. Not only does electronic mail save paper (and trees), it does things paper can’t, like tell you how many people actually read your message and followed up on it.

We work with a lot of professional associations, many of which used to offer printed member directories. With AMO members can search the directory on-line and on demand. No more waiting for next years updated version, printing thousands of copies, and shipping them across the country.

To learn more about ArcStone’s role in the green revolution see our other green blog posts and visit ArcStone.com for more information.

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One of the things many of us like about ArcStone is the flexible work environment. Flexible means (at least to me) a recognition that to be most productive and effective you need to have a sensible work / life balance. Sometimes people will be more productive at night, want to work in the early morning, need to take a half-day with little warning, take a two-hour lunch to fit in a work out, etc.

This “flexibility” has been an ongoing experiment. Despite my best intentions and knowing that it benefits everyone from employee to customer – it still occasionally annoys me.

As a manager I frequently need to have short status / update conversations with my fellow ArcStonians. The flexible work schedule sometimes gets in my way and forces me/us to be slower to respond than I would like. I think this is a common feeling for those in management roles over here.

A couple of days ago my frustration level hit a peak and I sent a long, whiney email to the entire office, ranting about needing better communication and consistency so that we can work together more efficiently.

I asked for feedback and help from people and yea, verily yea, I got it.

Over the last few days I’ve been able to reflect, collect, and review the responses from my coworkers. I’ve compiled a partial list below and thought I’d share our efforts with the world. Hopefully they will be of use…

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I was catching up on one of my favorite bloggers, David Pogue of the New York Times. On his blog, Pogue’s Posts, you’ll see a lot of reviews of gadgets and commentary on tech news. Yesterday, for the first time ever, I watched a video he had up on the site that reviewed free cell phone voice-activated services. The video is funny and useful, and observing his geeky enthusiasm serves to remind you that he’s just a regular guy — like you or me.

It reminded me how often I am surprised to see the real live personality behind a blogger, a radio personality, or anything else where you usually don’t get to see the human on the other end. It’s usually a pleasant surprise.

Web media like blogs, and especially video, give us that human connection we all crave. I think this can be a place where a lot of websites fail miserably. In an attempt to appear professional and creditable, they take the human element out. But sites that do have that human element — say, a how-to video, or a blog with an active comment section — tend to make more of a real and lasting connection with users.

Is your site guilty of being sterile and cold? Here are some signs:

• You have no photos with people in them.
• Your site colors are all cool in tone.
• Your site is static with no interactivity.
• Your content focuses on your business and organization rather than your visitors’ wants and needs.
• You have no audio or video media.

If you suspect your site may be too cold, try any of the following:

• Add a video message, demo, or interview.
• Start weekly or monthly podcasts and make them easy to download from your homepage.
• Find professional and appropriate graphics that prominently feature people.
• Add an interactive element, such as user ratings or testimonials.
• Integrate a blog into part of your marketing strategy and keep the posts personable and down-to-earth.
• Incorporate some warmer colors into your site design.

Making your site “human” is easier than ever to do now. Have at it!

Video can’t do everything, but for specific things, it outshines any other medium on the web (text, pictures, audio, interactivity). Here are my top five:

1. Tutorials. There’s nothing better than an online how-to video. One of my favorite places to go for video tutorials is the DIY site Curbly.
2. Virtual Tours. We have a bunch of these over at Wonderfile that help a new user take a peek at what the product can do even before signing up. Within a minute, a visitor can usually tell how useful and easy to use a product is.
3. Interviews. Video the only way to capture the personalities of the interviewee and interviewer. Transcripts can’t capture pregnant silences or boisterous outbursts. Podcasts can’t capture gestures and facial expressions. Video wins for interviews, hands-down.
4. Product demonstrations. Think Guthy-Renker infomercials you see on early AM television. Apple does a great job of showing off products and what they can do in a short amount of time.
5. Viral Marketing. Nothing spreads faster than viral videos, particularly those that are funny. Check out the Will-It-Blend series and just try to NOT send it on to someone else.

By the turn of the twenty first century, it became essential that businesses have a website. Websites had faded from an optional marketing extra to an essential business tool, a company’s address in the virtual landscape.

Websites had faded from an optional marketing extra to an essential business tool

Now that websites are commonplace, a new, more specialized evolution of the website is becoming a business prerequisite: Blogs.

Once only pursued by prolific writers and angst-ridden teenagers, blogs have become a valuable marketing device, making them many companies front line weapon in the battle for customers.

Keep reading for my guide on how to turn your companies collective knowledge into a blog, and a blog into profits.

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In the past, it was pretty clear who you went to for developing and implementing a cross-media marketing campaign — the ad agency. You went to an interactive firm when you only needed web work, or you had to integrate complex web applications that traditional agencies could not effectively manage.

Today, the web-based projects are a critical component for major marketing initiatives. The lines between ad agency, interactive agency, and web development firms overlap. So when it comes to online marketing efforts, who do you go to? Do you go directly to the ad agency? Or do you find a company specializes in custom web development, design, and consulting? Do you separate out the web portion of your project and hand-pick a specialized web company? Or do you let your agency find their own vendor?

Good questions. Here’s a few indicators you may want to consider working directly with a company that specializes in web development:

1. You need more than a public marketing site. If your project involves anything more than a public-facing website, there’s a good chance the traditional agency is going to be lost.
2. You want to streamline your business processes through web applications. Ad agencies won’t help you build web-based software to manage your members, for example. ArcStone, on the other hand, can build you a member management system with online dues payment, member communications, and more, all integrated into a public facing website. (That’s just one example – the possibilities are pretty much endless.)
3. You want to implement search engine marketing. Agencies don’t typically build SEO into their campaigns. SEO campaigns are their own special beast — they can be very time-consuming, the rules are constantly changing, and they require specialized skills that ad agencies typically don’t cover.
4. You need a full-service solution. Using five different agencies for your design, programming, SEO, email, and hosting can be a logistical nightmare. If you find an agency that accomplish all of your online objectives, you’re going to save yourself a heck of a lot of time, money, and headaches.
5. You need heavy interactivity and broad support. Agencies are great at designing the generalities of the user experience but struggle with the details. A development company is going to follow interface best practices and bring years of experience to the table. A typical web development shop has done hundreds of different user interfaces and has a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. Another example of a sticky interface issue is multi-browser compatibility. The intricacies of modern browsers makes it very difficult to make a consistent user experience across all the major browsers. Web developers have special expertise in scripting and style sheet languages that agencies don’t.

ArcStone is a great fit for clients who need custom web solutions or a full-service technology solution provider. We do web consulting, development, design, hosting, email, search engine marketing, file management, email marketing, and more. We’re interactive, we’re programming-heavy, and we excel at building custom web solutions to help streamline business processes.

Ad agencies recognize that most mid-sized to large organizations have some form of online most often need to sub-contract out web development work. It’s a good system, as long as the web portions of the project are pure marketing. Introduce anything else and the traditional agency is out of its element.

The web is a complicated enough beast these days; don’t trust your marketing guru with your web technology. It behooves businesses and organizations to recognize the strengths and weaknesses in both types of firms.

With gas prices soaring and no end in sight, many drivers are adopting new habits to help ease the pain. Lifehacker, The Consumerist and many other sites offer great millage stretching tips, but some of my favorites are not usually mentioned.

#1 – Order At The Counter
If you frequent fast-food joints, or anything with a drive through window, don’t idle in a long line of cars. Instead, park and order inside. It will probably take about the same amount of time, and you won’t be sitting in your car getting 0 MPG.

Keep reading for the rest of my tips.

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If you’re anything like me your daily digestion of web content can’t be contained in one browser tab. Between RSS feeds, work Intranets, gMail and other web applications, several tabs are needed, and flipping between them constantly becomes a carpal tunnel inducing nightmare.

The solution many choose is to setup a start page. Start pages are one page sites that aggregate data from many other web pages into a dashboard style display.

Google’s iGoogle is the most popular start page system, but I have started using a little known competitor that puts iGoogle to shame; Netvibes.

Keep reading for tips on setting up the ultimate start page and the secret to unlocking the start page’s hidden power.

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