From The Commuters’ website:

Before forming the Commuters in 2010, Canadian-born, Philippines-raised frontman Zeeshan Zaidi (whose parents were born in Pakistan and India) spent many years in the music industry. His early accomplishments included producing and engineering Grammy-nominated artist Ryan Leslie’s first demo, and he subsequently worked in the marketing departments of major labels in New York helping to develop the careers of other versatile artists, including OutKast and Cee Lo Green. During this time, Zaidi was also honing his craft as a singer, songwriter and musician, performing around New York’s open mic circuit.

When the time arrived to put his own abilities as a performer front and center, he immediately shared a dozen demos of his songs with childhood friend, New York-based producer and soon-to-be Commuters guitarist Uri Djemal, who was also raised in the Philippines (by parents of Israeli and American descent). The two got to work co-producing Zaidi’s songs at Djemal’s Madpan Studios in Manhattan, where Djemal had produced many well-known artists in New York’s indie-rock scene. Says Zaidi: “Uri’s studio was a few blocks from my apartment and he was telling me for years to come work on my songs there. One day — when I knew it was time — I just walked over and we started.”

Soon, they were joined by Djemal’s previous collaborator, Ben Zwerin on bass and Paul Amorese behind the drums, solidifying the current lineup.

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Panelists posed after the program are (from left): Moderator Greg Weber of Garden State Press Clipping Service; Sally Pakutka, manager of news aggregation, Asbury Park Press; Gina Columbus, Asbury Park Press staff writer; Allison Gibson, assistant news director, News 12 New Jersey; Brian Thompson, New Jersey Correspondent for NBC4 New York, and Christopher Sheldon, Long Branch-Eatontown editor, Patch.com

The podcast was recorded at an April 17, 2013 meeting sponsored jointly by the Jersey Shore Public Relations and Advertising Association and the New Jersey Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America. A panel of journalists described how the rise of social media is changing the news gathering and reporting process. More than 75 communications and public relations professionals attended.

Panelists

GINA COLUMBUS serves as APP staff writer and joined Gannett’s Talent Development Program in 2012. Columbus serves as a metro reporter and writes lifestyles and features pieces, developed in the multiple media platforms.  Columbus launched her career as a Newsroom Intern. As Editor-in-Chief of The Outlook, Monmouth University’s student-run newspaper. Columbus has a B.A. in Communication from Monmouth University.

ALLISON GIBSON, Assistant News Director at News 12 New Jersey, has held this post for the past 17 years, working to launch the channel in March of 1996, and establishing it as New Jersey’s own television station and place to go to for local news.  Previously, she had worked as a producer, executive producer and assistant news director at the CBS affiliate in Roanoke, Virginia. Allison got her start working in Public Radio, and counts meeting boxer Muhammed Ali as one of her big career moments.

SALLY PAKUTKA is Manager of News Aggregation at the Asbury Park Press.  She began her career with the Press in 2001 as Editor of New Publications and was named Local News Editor in 2010. She started her current position in January.  Sally has been a newspaper journalist for nearly three decades. She previously worked at the Courier News in Bridgewater and the Herald News in Passaic.

CHRISTOPHER SHELDON serves as Long Branch-Eatontown Editor with Patch.com.  He has worked at two hyper local news publications before joining Patch, including the Westerly Sun in Rhode Island and the Ocean Star in Point Pleasant Beach.  A life time resident of West Long Branch, Sheldon earned a B.A. in journalism from the University of Rhode Island.

BRIAN THOMPSON, Reporter, NBC4 New York is an Emmy Award-winning reporter. Prior to joining WNBC, he worked for five years in Washington, D.C. He earned a New York Emmy-award for his work on a NBC New York’s political series.  He has been cited by the Associated Press for Best Coverage by a New Jersey-Based Correspondent. Thompson received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Florida.

You can see more photos from the event by clicking on the thumbnails below.

If you’d like to purchase any of these photos, please visit our online gallery.

If you want your business to show up online, forget about posting pictures of kittens on Facebook, or tweeting about what you had for lunch. We’ve outlined the Six Things You Need to Know about a content-driven online media strategy.

You can read them by clicking on the words “Creating Content Makes You More Visible” in the blue menu bar on the top of this page, or by clicking on the words in this post.

We can help you create a content-driven strategy for your company. Just ask us!

The Sony HVR-M10 can record and play HD video tapes.

High Definition Video Tape Conversion Capability

We’ve added the ability to convert high-definition videotapes (HDV) in the MiniDV format, with a Sony HVR-M10 professional tape deck. This deck enables us to transfer for digital editing high definition video — at up to 1080p resolution — from MiniDV tapes produced on prosumer and professional HD video cameras. Videographers can call on us to convert their HD MiniDV tapes into digital video files editable on nonlinear editing systems like Final Cut Pro or Sony Vegas.

The Rapco Press Box delivers broadcast quality audio to up to eight users at your seminar or press event.

Audio feed distribution for broadcast news media (“mult box”) rental

For our clients conducting seminars or other public events, in addition to offering a wide range of video and audio recording of the event, we can now provide support for your broadcast media guests through the availability of our new RapcoHorizon PB-8 Press Box, which allows us to deliver clean, high quality audio to as many as eight broadcast XLR output connectors.

Both of these new services are available to clients at an attractive cost. Please email or call our office to get more information.

It’s surprising that even in this technologically savvy age, we still encounter recently built meeting venues that were obviously designed without any input from people who produce video or audio recordings for a living. The future for most live events is through recording, podcasting, repurposes, and re-use of lectures, speeches, conferences, panels. And yet the designers of these rooms do almost everything possible to make such recordings impossible using the built-in audio and video systems in these rooms.

Most of these facilities seem to be designed more to protect the equipment from being stolen  than to offer an effective system for recording and preserving the events staged there.

Most of these rooms have expensive audio systems but absolutely no access to the system from inside the room. The audio control panels are often mounted in a rack that is locked inside a cage in a closet down the hall from the meeting room.

The actual audio components chosen do not have any input or output connectors on their front panels. All the connectors are on the rear of the device, which is bolted into a rack and completely inaccessible for either adding a microphone or taking an audio signal out to a recording device.

Similarly, room designers never take into account the modern seminar format common in most organizations, a panel of four or more speakers (we’ve seen up to seven on a panel) who each make opening remarks and then engage in a give-and-take dialogue with a moderator. Most of these rooms only have a single microphone jack built into the wall, so the only microphone you can enable is one on the lectern, where the moderator is standing. The owners of these modern conference rooms often don’t know how many microphones they have, how to configure them or what might be required for good sound for a panel of seven members.

Wireless Internet access is another afterthought. Most attendees at conferences and events expect wireless connectivity, but often this is not available, or it is password protected, or the conference venue thinks it will make extra revenue by charging attendees for using it.

It’s particularly surprising that some of these rich-media unfriendly venues are in academic institutions. Instead of thinking about the future of how educational materials will be delivered (online, podcasts, webinars, MOOCs, and so on) administrators are using unimaginative old-school approaches that assume the worst and do not plan for the best.

Here are my recommendations:

• An audio mixer with at least eight channels mounted in the room, accessible for adding inputs or taking an audio output signal for recordings.
• A digital audio recording device in the same rack mount as the audio mixer, one that uses SD cards or Compact Flash for recording.
• Recessed power outlets in the floor of the room, the kind that have a cover that makes them invisible unless they are opened to plug something in.
• Room darkening shades for any windows that might end up being the backdrop for the panel of speakers.

Next time you are designing a new conference facility, it wouldn’t hurt to check with some videographers and sound engineers before you lock all that equipment in a closet down the hall.

Stephen Baker, author, blogger, journalist

The New York Times took on the conventional wisdom about Facebook and other social networks being a goldmine for marketers because they enable pinpoint mapping of consumer behavior using “big data.”

I’ve been arguing for some time now that marketers are using social media wrong. It’s not a megaphone for you to shout your commercials at people engaged in social conversations, and yet that is how most marketers insist on using it.

Unless marketers start creating great audio, video, photo, and multimedia content that informs and entertains — not commercials — they are going to irritate, annoy, and chase people away from their brands.

Ask yourselves if you would like someone jumping in and out of a conversation at a cocktail party asking you if you’d like to buy their product. That’s about how it feels.

The premise of the piece, “Can Social Media Sell Soap?” by Stephen Baker, former BusinessWeek senior writer and author of Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything, about the IBM supercomputer playing against human champions on the popular TV quiz show, is that marketers see gold in the data they can extract from social media sites to target their marketing messages to consumers who are predisposed to them. He writes:

Growing legions of marketing consultants are pushing social media as the can’t-miss future. They argue that pitches are more likely to hit home if they come from friends on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or Google+. That’s the new word of mouth, long the gold standard in marketing. And the rivers of data that pour into these networks fuel the vision of precision targeting, in which ads are so timely and relevant that you welcome them. The hopes for such a revolution have fueled a market frenzy around social networks — and have also primed them for a fall.

My comments on the article were published on the comments tab, but I thought I’d bring the discussion here so that we can share some conversation about this topic.

I agree with Baker’s premise that these numbers-oriented marketers are headed for a wakeup call. Baker amplifies his Times article in a blog post on TheNumerati.net. He says:

The more data that arrives, tracing our movements and activities, the more analysis it generates and questions it raises. Arguments are inevitable. The losers will hunt down more data of their own launch their own studies, challenging the status quo. As a result, we’re be scrutinized in remorseless detail. The market would have it no other way. The process is barely begun. And no matter how much they know, advertisers, on Facebook and elsewhere, will always come up with reasons to dig deeper and a little more. In the process, they learn more about us–and perhaps that process, or insights derived from it, will lead them into entirely new businesses.

The relentless quest for more data to reduce marketing risk will continue. But it’s a flawed quest.

Here’s what I wrote:

Quantitative marketers are making the same mistake extrapolating behavior from data that arguably comprises the whole universe as they once made on stratified random samples where a 5% confidence interval was considered a good margin of error. Just because the data tells you something about the behavior at that point in time, it doesn’t tell you everything about those people.

Randomness in human behavior can’t be captured in numbers.

If you think Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and the other networks are megaphones to shout commercials at audiences you are using them wrong. People go to those sites for the human SOCIAL contact, not for words from the sponsor.

Marketers who get it do not use social media like digital billboards. They engage in human interaction with people who express interest in learning more about the product. They create branded content in the forms of useful print, video, photographic, and other multimedia that helps people have a positive experience with that product or service. They post that content on their own company websites where they can control it and update it, and not have Facebook mucking around with how it gets shared — and then they use social networks to engage interested people and invite them to visit where the “good stuff” is.

Companies should create media publishing and broadcasting sites that generate real content on a regular basis. Customers will trust that more than a pay-per-click ad on Facebook that no one ever clicks on.

What do you think? Are marketers and advertisers on the wrong track, or is it me?

See larger image Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything (Hardcover) By (author) Stephen Baker List Price: $24.00 USD New From: $2.78 In Stock Used from: $0.93 In Stock Release date February 17, 2011.

Norman and Eleanor Stofman with son Marc.

We’ve produced a number of tribute videos in the past few years for nonprofit organizations and religious institutions. You can see them here:

• Tribute video for Saltzman Foundation.
• Tribute video for Leon Levy retirement as Congregation President

In the course of producing these projects, we’ve recognized that there is a growing interest among families to preserve the memories of their older members so that future generations can benefit from their wisdom.

A conversation recorded on video, documentary style, with members of your family from multiple generations, interspersed with family photo album pictures, scrapbook mementos, and home movies can be a powerful way to add context and understanding to how your family’s traditions and stories came to unfold in the ways they do.

We produced a series of video slide shows recently as a tribute to late Cherry Hill resident Norman Stofman so that his grandchildren would have a lasting understanding of Norman’s life and the things that mattered to him. Eleanor Stofman, Norman’s wife, graciously allowed us to share some of these videos here as examples of how a family legacy video might look.

Norman Stofman Video Part 1 – Early Years

Click here to view the embedded video.

Norman Stofman Video Part 4 – Life Cycle Events

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’re enthusiastic about working with you to produce a family legacy video that will honor your family’s past by preserving it for the future.

Dad’s vibes

Back in the early 1970s, we had a music room in the basement. My dad played the vibes (see photo), mom played the Lowrey organ, and we hosted musical accompanists from among my dad’s students in the military at Ft. Monmouth. We made lots of recordings, most of them were songs owned by others, so we’re not posting them online. But my dad did write two songs. This is a recording of one of those compositions, “Hey Kid,” with my dad on vibes and a young bass player named Dave Wilson.

Technical information: The original recording was made on a Roberts 771X reel-to-reel deck with Shure microphones. The tape was Scotch 203 Dynarange.

Let me know what you think. I hope you enjoy hearing it!

Alexandra Inglis

Our guest in this edition of the Middle Chamber Books and Music Podcast is singer/songwriter Alexandra Inglis. Alex has been performing since she was eight, and she has already appeared at legendary Jersey Shore clubs such as the Stone Pony and the Wonder Bar.

She began writing and composing original songs when she was 12. “Thank You”, her debut CD is a ten song CD that showcases her wonderful songwriting capabilities as well as her magnificent voice.

Alex has also performed at The Bitter End, The Living Room and Pianos in New York City. She has been a guest on numerous radio stations and her songs are also being featured in regular rotation on many stations as well. She’s currently working on her second CD.

You can learn more about Alex and her music at her Reverbnation website.

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See larger image One Day (MP3 Music) New From: $0.99 In Stock Release date July 23, 2012.

The panel begins its discussion of Superstorm Sandy at the November 28, 2012 Social Media Club of Delaware meeting in Newark, DE.

In this edition of the “Lubetkin on Communications Podcast,” we present a panel discussion hosted November 28, 2012 by the Social Media Club of Delaware at the Marriott Courtyard Hotel, Newark, DE, on “Social Media & Disaster Communication: What We’ve Learned After Sandy.”

Panelists

- Holly Norton, Community Engagement Editor, The News Journal
- Kelly Bachman, Social Media Manager, The Office of Governor Jack Markell
- Tom Byrne, News Director, WDDE public radio
- Mike Williams , Chief, Administrative Policy & Communicaitons, DelDot/Division of Motor Vehicles/Office of Public Relations

Moderated by Matt Sullivan of Strongpoint Marketing.

See more photos from the program in our Zenfolio gallery.