• A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2010 « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing
  For the third year running (he did this in 2008 and 2009) Jeremiah Owyang aggregates stats in the social networking space on a single blog post, and update it through the year. Data fiends should bookmark this post for future reference.
  (tags: socialmedia statistics stats research social 2010 marketing owyang)

• Australians are #1 globally in usage of social media: Why? – Trends in the Living Networks
  "Some very interesting data just out from Nielsen on social media usage. The headline is that people in developed countries are spending 82% more time on social media than they were one year ago. However the data point that struck my interest most is that… Australia is #1 globally in usage of social media"
  (tags: socialmedia australia research trends media social stats data)
• Sex Explained By Pens: Pics, Videos, Links, News
  Absolutely brilliant and very funny!
  (tags: sex funny humor image humour cool fun article pens pen)
• socialized blog » Debunking Five Social Media Myths
  "Running a business is a complex affair requiring complex communications. Some companies use Sharepoint and other technologies to manage documents, but many still use e-mail to circulate Powerpoint, Excel, Word and other docs. Could you imagine negotiating a contract 140 characters at a time?"
  (tags: blogging marketing socialmedia)
• 20 Color Combination Tools for Designers | Spyre Studios
  "Being able to select the right colors is key in designing an effective and intriguing design, whether for the web or for print. If you’re able to achieve a good balance within your design, then it’ll communicate a stronger message much more easily to the users or readers because certain colors “activate” certain types of emotions"
  (tags: color webdesign design tools resources css tips colour)
• The Anatomy Of An Infographic: 5 Steps To Create A Powerful Visual | Spyre Studios
  Sneh is a designer from Sydney, Australia. She runs the Little Box Of Ideas Blog. She has great visual ideas – here's how she created a visual for one idea
  (tags: design visualization inspiration graphics tips howto tutorial tutorials visualisation infographic infographics)
• Grant v. Torstar and the defence of responsible communication: implications for bloggers and users of other online media : Law is Cool
  "These new disseminators of news and information should, absent good reasons for exclusion, be subject to the same laws as established media outlets."

  Two landmark cases from Canada with implications for bloggers, podcasters and their kind

  (tags: socialmedia socialnetworking journalism blogging podcasting vidcasting vodcasting law legal media)
• 5 Things Every Business Leader Should Know About Social Media | TerryStarbucker.com
  "It’s the new elephant in the room. Boardrooms and conference rooms, that is."
  (tags: socialmedia marketing blogging business presentations ceo cfo board)
• Trafcom News Podcast: Trafcom News Podcast 93: An intranet that works: An interview with William Amurgis at American Electric Power
  "The AEP Now intranet won an international honour called the Intranet Innovation Award for its Ideas Now effort, which resulted in a cost savings of $8 million over two months, thanks to employee suggestions"
  (tags: intranet donnapapacosta donnapepsicola trafcom podcast interview)
• Tools for Monitor Social Media – Blog – Socialite Marketing
  "We now have the ability to monitor everything as it happens, so are you using those tools? What are your customers saying about you and/or your products? This blog post will cover some FREE tools businesses can use to help monitor what people are talking about through social media!"
  (tags: socialmedia tools monitoring monitor iphone)

I’ve been using Corel ProStudio X2 for a while now as a step-up from the basic and free editing features of Windows Live Movie Maker.

I started creating my BCR videos with Windows Movie Maker, but forked out $99 for next-level Corel because it allowed me to have window-in-window effects. Thus I could be talking about, say, the World Correspondent’s Vest and be showing a picture of it at the same time, all the while still keeping me in shot, not something that Windows Movie Maker could do. If you wanted to show an image in MM you had to split the video clip in two, and pop the image in the middle of the cut. There’s no keeping the soundtrack going and overlaying the image on top of my beaming, handsome visage.

Incidentally, Windows Movie Maker is no longer bundled with Windows – there was no ‘Movie Maker’ in my menu system when I installed Windows 7. You have to download it from Microsoft’s cloud instead. Anyway, back to the story…

I installed the review copy of Adobe Premiere Elements 8 that the very nice folk at Adobe sent me and noticed something straight away: the second dvd with ‘content’ on it installed the extra goodies I know not where. You know how installer software always picks a default place and gives you the opportunity to change that place if you want? Well, whilst you *can* pick the landing spot for the main program, you have no choice over the extra gubbins that turns this program into something worth considering. Why is this relevant? Stay tuned…

I figured that I’d take the video I had shot that ended up as BCR 057 and use it as a testbed for Premiere Elements (hereafter ‘PE’). So I fired up the software and this is what I got once I had ‘imported’ my original video file.

You will note the lack of any ‘additional’ content – you know, sound files to add ‘ambience’, video files to use as titles, titles to use as credits and intros, and so on. No amount of looking helped me find them.

“Ah-HA!” I said to myself. “Just look in the ‘Reviewers Guide’ that the nice folks at Adobe gave me on a usb stick accompanying the software.

I scoured the Guide… nope, no helpful suggestions in there as to how to find and add the appropriate ambience-creating content.

I searched my hard drive. THIS is where knowing where the extra content was located would have been handy! Then, I figured, I could just ‘import’ it as I had my video file and then play around with it.

At this point I cursed the software, as Corel makes it very easy to find the additional content – it’s all there as soon as you crank the program up. With PE, I figured, I had to go ‘find and catch’.

The Premiere Elements user manual to the rescue?

Alas not. At least not at first. I had to carefully wade (definitely NOT skim read) through eight closely-typeset pages to get to the section, ‘WORKING IN ELEMENTS ORGANIZER AND ADOBE PREMIERE ELEMENTS EDITOR’.

It was there, snuggled warmly in amongst other text, was the phrase, “…you can work with video files in the Adobe Premiere Elements Editor.”

That sound you can hear faintly in the distance is the sound of a penny dropping in what some laughingly call my brain.

Back to PE, click on the monkey-shit-brown ‘EDIT’ tab and VOILÀ !

[click on the image to enlarge it]

All of the additional gubbins there and ready for the use thereof! MARVELLOUS!

Lots of jiggery-pokering later and I had figured out how to ‘InstantMovie’ my base video file, choosing the ‘Spy’ theme, since I am an international man of mystery.

‘Danger’ is my middle name.

But it was at this stage that things started to come unstuck. Try as I might I could NOT get the newly created themed movie to play in the built-in preview window. I even output the movie as a flash file, ready for YouTube, and STILL it wouldn’t play.

Using Adobe’s Media Player, I could ‘scrub’ along the playline and see that the movie had rendered correctly, but no way could I get it to play via the ‘play’ button. Grrrr…

I remembered seeing something about how to deal with playback problems in the Reviewer’s Guide; switching off the GPU acceleration would fix things, apparently. Not knowing wtf a ‘GPU acceleration’ was, I switched it off anyway, saved the file, closed down PE, restarted it and tried again.

Nope.

So I re-output the movie as a flash file and tried playing it in the Adobe media player.

Nope.

"“Grrr… by Grrr…” as my carpenter friend says.

On top of that, add in the frustration that hitting the ‘X’ button in the top right corner of PE does NOT shut it down – a quick look in Windows Task Manager showed it still very much alive and chewing resources. So if I wanted to shut it down completely and restart it I had to ‘X’ and then finish the shutting down via Task Manager. Not impressed.

The annoying thing was the movie, when scrubbed along the playline, looked really cool and definitely something I wanted the world to see.

Eighteen hours later…

Errr, that’s eighteen ‘production’ hours later, not a mere 18 hours of which half is spent sleeping…

I STILL cannot get the damn software to stop crashing. Despite having recently upgraded my laptop to 4gb of ram, it runs at a snail’s pace when rendering.

My ‘core’ video file, because the soundtrack to it is very quiet, isn’t recognised by PE when it comes to mixing in the rip-snorta spy-genre music and sound effects. So I either get one or the other – either no music so I can hear what I said in the video, or else exciting music but visuals of me mouthing something unintelligible (I pity any poor person trying to lip read me).

After 18 hours of work on what, prima facie, would appear to be something quite simple, I gave up. After all, I’m not a professional reviewer paid by a publisher to rate products all day; I’m a working consultant who, if he isn’t working on a client project, is not making any money.

Reviewer’s Guide

I think that Adobe ought to consider including a re-badged version of the excellent Reviewer’s Guide in with the software. I know that for 99.9% of the population it would be an unused waste of bytes, but the Guide really was a fantastic learning tool. It’s a pity a few typos crept into it, and that the first half of it was taken up with ‘housekeeping’ rather than ‘how to get the most out of this software’ type content.

In the Guide Adobe says there’s stacks of new and improved features, and that PE 8 supports Windows 7. Given my ‘challenges’ with crashes, inability to do simple things like preview a file (yes, even after rendering to create a preview, the ‘play’ button didn’t) I can only assume my three-year old laptop isn’t up to it, despite having cold-installed Windows 7 and upgraded the ram to 4gb and having a graphics card with stand-alone ram.

Being shown that your three-year old laptop is already ‘way over the hill’ is a chilling experience – another capital expense looms large in front of me. Yet frustration *also* looms large; Adobe’s ‘System Requirements’ on the side of the box say it should run:

• 2Ghz or faster processor (I have Intel Core Duo @ 2Ghz);
• Microsoft Windows XP with SP2 or 3, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 (I run Win7 Professional);
• 1 GB of RAM (I have 4 GB);
• 4.5GB of available hard drive space (I have 20.5GB free).

Conclusion

There is no doubt this software is powerful. I really liked how it almost transformed a dull video of me into something far more exciting and energetic (it’s hard to believe you can have *anything* more energetic than me, but there you are – you can!).

Were I living in Sydney I would have dropped into the boys and girls at Adobe and asked them to help identify where my technical problems lie.

But I don’t live in Sydney, which is a major blessing – because not only do I not have to deal with Sydney’s laughable political system, its appalling public transport infrastructure and its interminable traffic congestion, but more importantly by not living in Sydney I can give you feedback based on what a REAL punter, living in the outback township of Oonawoopwoop is potentially going to face when he stumps up the $$ to buy this kit.

If Joe or Joanna Humperdinck has any computer LESS than the very latest, if they have a graphics card LESS than a state-of-the-art expensive one, if they have a total ram of anything LESS than 8gb, they are going to earn themselves some brownie points if they don’t throw the computer or the software through the window, or under the ute.

I truly would have LOVED for this software to work for me. With all of its bells and whistles I could see it making my little videos even more fun to produce. I WANTED it to give me a reason to move from my beloved ACDSee image cataloguing software to Adobe’s integrated Media Management Hub called ‘Elements Organizer’ (which also sneakily hung around in the background – chewing resources – when you had no idea it was even running). I love Adobe’s high-end products  like Fireworks (I only use Photoshop when I am working on one client’s material, principally because it ‘stroke’s easily; everything else is done in Fireworks! Hint, Adobe: add a quick ‘stroke’ feature to Fireworks), Dreamweaver (“nothing compares to you”) and Soundbooth.

But because I don’t run a Cray supercomputer, or something that the boys and girls at Pixar use, PE 8 failed me because it kept crashing and taking forever to do the little it actually was able to do.

So for now I will continue to use Corel’s otherwise-excellent ProStudio X2, or Windows Movie Maker for really fast-and-furious output. There’s even the basic editing tools inherent in my Flip mino if time is really tight.

End of Year Report: Student (aka ‘PE 8’) has great ideas, but must try harder to answer the question set in the exam paper. Is not able to deliver a concise answer within the time allotted.

Score: 5 out of 10.

May God be patient and help those friends of mine with teenage families who’s idea of when to upgrade their computer is when the mahogany varnish wears thin. They and their offspring are going to spit chips when trying to get this software to work.

But if Adobe want to furnish me with a brand new state of the art laptop, I’m very happy to try again. Seriously; it would make for a good test and case study of why computers should be upgraded every three years.

Professional Proposal Kits – Accurately quote your projects, multiply your profitability, brand yourself as a top professional and close the sale. Proposal Kit helps you demonstrate that you are the right professional for your customers. It’s mission-critical, easy, customizable, accurate and immediately downloadable.

One of my favourite business tools, Proposal Kit, has recently had a swag of upgrades.

The 2010 Proposal Kit upgrades have been one of their largest ever updates. Based on feedback throughout the year they have covered just about every common request.

1. More content has been added (over 300 pages of new samples, proposal templates and contracts)
2. Training videos for how to use the products have been updated
3. More Wizard additions to manage the volume of content

Major additions to existing products:

• Proposal Kit Pro V14 has added 900 pages of new content
• Proposal Packs V11 have added over 300 new pages
• 15 new sample proposals have been added
• 26 financial calculators have been added

Nineteen new contract documents have been added including:

• Engagement letters
• Title 18 Section 2257 policies and agreements
• Web and software specialty contracts
• More Human Resources contracts

…and much more.

Proposal Pack Wizard has also been upgraded to version 5.0 to work with the new proposal and contract templates and products.

Use Proposal Packs to write a wide variety of proposals:

• General business proposals
• Federal government grants
• County/State/Local government grants
• Technical and non-technical proposals
• Product and service sales proposals
• Short form letter proposals and quotes
• Book publishing proposals
• Organizational grant funding proposals
• Business plan funding proposals
• Government contracts
• Sales letters
• Resumes
• Business documents
• Reports

Proposal Kit started in 1999 with a small collection of proposal and contract templates (under 50 pages of material – ahhh, those were the days, I remember them well!). With the Proposal Kit Professional V14 release for 2010 there’s now in excess of 3,600 pages of content. The proposal and contract products range in price from $10 to $197 and are used by tens of thousands of businesses in over 100 countries – including me!

Proposal Kit products are ideal for freelancers, small to medium size businesses or teams within larger organizations. I cannot recommend them highly enough!

“I read your materials and immediately set 7 appointments. Of those appointments I closed 4 deals. Nobody asked for references and they all "thanked" me for taking a burden off their shoulders. I highly recommend your product.”
Christopher Chase, My Marketing Coach

• Why is Lack of Control Suddenly a Big Deal? – The PR Warrior
  "Then, if the crap does hit the fan, maybe – just maybe – they'll like you enough not to tweet about your stupid CEO or your dumb-ass promotion or whatever. And hey, if they really love you, they might – just might – stick up for you. Now, that's a key measure of success in the online world (and offline too)!"

  Link courtesy of @susanlambe

  (tags: control pr trevoryoung socialmedia)
• Tragedy in Haiti proves value of social media – Nationmultimedia.com
  Twitter posts appeared within seconds of the quake, while photos emerged on Twitpic and Flickr almost instantaneously. Videos soon appeared on YouTube. Text message donations flooded charities in Canada. Messages of condolences were everywhere on the Internet. From concrete relief efforts to gestures of sympathy, the world is reacting through the new social means of global communications. This is despite the fact that only 10 per cent of Haiti's 9 million have access to the Internet.

  Port-au-Prince Salvation Army director Bob Poff has been using Facebook and Skype to communicate with teams on the ground, and back in the US. While some may have had their religious faith shaken by the quake, Poff wrote: "Thank God for Facebook."

  (tags: twitter twitpic socialmedia charity youtube flickr roi value haiti)

• AdHack Blog – Pepsi Backs Crowdsourcing and Social Media. No Super Bowl Commercial This Year
  Why Pepsi isn't advertising in the SuperBowl this year, but instead spending the money in social media initiatives. A powerful read and something to shove under the noses of sniffy Marketing Directors and CFOs.

  # Total Production Cost at Market Value: $40,000
  # Total Placement Cost: $0.00. The ads were uploaded free of charge on YouTube.com.
  # Total Marketing & Promotions Budget: $700 for 2 electronic press releases.
  # Active Campaign Promotion: 1 month.
  # Campaign Lifetime: Continues to date.
  # Total Campaign Views to Date: 63,637 views
  # Show Us Your Balls (Part 1): 37,141 views
  # Show Us Your Balls (AdHack ending): 18,289 views
  # What didn’t happen (Crowdsourced ending): 8,207 views

  (tags: adhack crowdsource socialmedia superbowl pepsi advertising traditional metrics)

Windows Secrets is a paid newsletter I’ve been subscribing to for a little while.

Cut from the same cloth as my long cherished Woody’s Office Watch (I was a very early adopter of Woody’s seminal and superb newsletter and books), Windows Secrets offers two ‘flavours’: free and paid.

So, in the paid section you can find the answers to questions like:

"Could you please address the issue of which medium is best for long-term storage? CDs/DVDs have a five-year limit. USB sticks are costly per GB and delicate, etc."

whereas in the free flavour you don’t.

As another example, in the paid version you find out the answer to the question no doubt on the very tip of your tongue:

“Do I really need a quad-core processor?”

wherein you will be taken through a readable-by-a-human description of what a quad-core processor is, and whether or not you need one (it turns out I do, which all adds to the pressure on me to upgrade my technology soon).

Sure, you can Google that question and no doubt come up with a few answers (about 29 million of them at last count… ahem) but I know for me it’s a damn site easier to have the answer sitting in my inbox where I can search and find it, rather than search Google and wade through molasses to find something resembling it.

For a measly few dollars (you get to pick what YOU think is a fair price) you can find out the answer – plus answers to a whole heap of questions you can ask over at The Lounge, imho the best place to go for Microsoft and non-Microsoft questions of all shapes and sizes.

Each newsletter (no matter the flavour) comes flying into your inbox every seven days – you can’t ask fairer than that.

“Windows Secrets? Don’t run your pc without it” as 1970s American Express tv ads might have said.

There are a shed-load of new articles now online over at my Business Communication articles site. Included in the new batch are:

• Seven great articles from Philip Yaffe, including:
  • How crafty word order can instantly improve your writing and
  • The secrets of writing a truly useful executive summary;

A plea by Dr. Carol Kinsey Goman for the return of human touch, as exemplified by Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton in her articles

• The Obama-Clinton touch and
• the differences between men and women in workplace communication;

and joy-oh-joy, two new articles by a truly wonderful and gifted woman that it has been my pleasure and delight to have corresponded with for a few years, Emmy-award winning former WSJ journalist Kare Anderson:

• The priceless power of memorable naming and
• Synchronicity as a signal

Each and every one of these articles is a true gem and worthy of your attention.

Go get ’em!

I wanted to give you a sneak preview of some fascinating preliminary findings of Melcrum’s latest social media research and invite you, gentle and refined reader, to get involved and take the survey yourself.

The study will concentrate on the role communicators perform in getting the most from social media, how they monitor and measure results, how they make the business case for additional investment, how they protect their organizations against misuse by employees, and social media’s impact on other channels such as email.

Highlights so far from Melcrum’s initial research include:

• Responses from 2,212 senior communicators
• 40% of respondents said the business case for social media within internal communication was clear and that there is visible return on investment
• 53% said they were planning to increase investment in their organization’s intranet in 2010
• The business benefits of investment in social media highlighted included improved levels of employee engagement (21%), better communication with remote workers (16%), knowledge management and collaboration (25%), improving employee feedback (20%) and making business leaders more visible and accessible (14%). 

Highlights of the research study will be presented at Melcrum’s London conference on February 9-10th, 2010: “Social Media for Internal Communication”. The full findings will be made available to members of the Social Media Benchmarking Group and subsequently published as a major new research report in March 2010.

The link to the survey is here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=T48_2f_2fE8R1wAr56hH1hPX6aNTK9zxRR6LRyNDEX3_2f9_2fI_3d

Further reading: James’s blog post on social media adoption behind the firewall: http://www.melcrumblog.com/2010/01/research-reveals-widespread-adoption-of-social-media-inside-the-firewall.html

Come on, join in the survey – you know you want to!

Music Rescue is one of those applications that can save you from tears of frustration. It can also elicit tears of joy.

Recent shenanigans with my laptop meant that the only place my carefully built playlists could be found were on my iPhone and my iPod. I still had all of my music on one of my portable drives (I am slowly learning my painful lessons regarding backups) but of course as soon as I connected either the iPod or iPhone to the laptop iTunes would offer to sync, but one way only – that is, wipe out everything on my device and load it with material from the laptop, and in the process destroy my playlists, sending them to a virtual non-existence in the digital ether.

But good ol’ Music Rescue did, indeed, rescue me – again. I upgraded to the latest version for a pittance and it copied across my music and my playlists back to iTunes. Sure, I now have duplicates of the music, but that is easy enough to go through and delete – more importantly I have my carefully crafted playlists still intact.

Huzzah for Music Rescue!