Harry Potter on a new muggle device

When I first got my Kindle Fire the first books I tried to buy were the Harry Potter series. Before facebook, twitter, and youtube - Harry Potter dominated my life. However they were never released on Kindle.

But now they are.

J.K. Rowling is doing it a little differently though. Instead of buying them off of the amazon website you have to buy the books off of her new site, Pottermore.

This is good news for consumers though. If I were to buy it off of Amazon and then get a different device than the Kindle I would have to re buy the book. On the Pottermore website when you buy the Harry Potter series you get access to it for any device you have.

Amazon must be pretty upset about this but consumers seem to be pretty happy.

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Sony's new FS700

It seems just a while ago the new Sony FS-100 was being announced. This was a great new camera for DSLR shooters because it had the benefits of shooting on a DSLR without the problems they have. Now Sony is announcing the Sony NEX-FS700.

What makes me so excited is that it is going to be able to shoot 4K in the future, shoots ultra slow motion (120 and 240 fps) at 1080p and even more intense slow motion (480 and 960 fps) at a lower resoultion.

Oh - and it only costs $8,000. Compared to the $15,000 Canon C300 - it seems like the FS700 will be better in almost every aspect. The one thing that I would want to know before buying it would be the low light capabilities. I shoot a lot of concerts and weddings (which their receptions are notorious for bad lighting). The C300 has already proven to be an amazing low light camera - being able to film at ISO 12,000 and still be presentable. I think if the Sony FS700 has low light capabilities just as good they will have effectively killed any chance the C300 had as being a popular camera.

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Wedding Videos

Jeremy and Kaite Webb - Same Day Edit from Egbert Media on Vimeo.

Well this past week has been busy. It involved me flying to L.A. and filming my friends wedding. I started at 7 am and didn't finish until 1:00 am that next morning. Overall it was really really fun and I am so happy for them.

I learned something very interesting about everything though. This video I shot and edited in the same day so that it was playing at their reception by 6:30 PM. It was a hard task and with L.A. traffic I didn't have a lot of time to do it. I think I spent about an hour and a half editing the video - but because I have training in quick deadline news stories I was able to make it look the best I could with the time I had.

However when I did show it people were utterly amazed at the end product. They were just amazed at how I was able to get it done and showing at the reception.

It made me realize that future media professionals don't just have to be able to produce good content, they have to be able to produce it faster than everybody else at a high quality. I was able to do that by writing down what shots I wanted to use for the beginning middle and end. However those who can't do this will probably be out preformed by those who can. 

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Niche TV

This last weekend I flew to Los Angeles to film my friend's wedding video. I got to the airport pretty early so I waited in the terminal for my plane to arrive. While waiting I started to watch CNN on one of the many TVs in the area.

After a few news stories an advertisement for CNN came up promoting what I thought was a new station. It turned out it was the one I was currently watching.

CNN has created a news channel specifically for airports. This channel plays in big airports and has news that would be important to travelers. This would be weather, flight delays, and an equal balance between hard and soft news.

I also noticed that the ads playing between news segments were different than normal ones. They advertised airline companies and higher end products. I think that the reason why they played a lot of commercials about higher end products is that the majority of people who fly are business men and people who can afford to fly which means they have higher income and would be able to afford these higher end products.

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Pintrest Irregularities

So I have a pretty cool sister-in-law who has this pretty cool (that is if you are a crafty mother) blog called Freshly Completed. She has been blogging pretty avidly since last August and has created a decent following since then just on her blog. In recent months she has branched out to a facebook page and using pintrest.

She started using pintrest because she noticed how many people started pinning her blog posts and then others repinning them. So she signed up and she even got her husband (my older brother) to sign up. They started pinning her blog posts (as did I - even though it took the manliness of my pintrest down a notch or two).

The crazy thing was the respins she received from pinning. And it wasn't from her pinning - it was from her husband. It all started with this blog post about the Perfect Lemonade. She pinned it and got a few people to repin it. Then my brother (who only uses pintrest to pin his wife's blog posts) pinned it and it shot to 100 repins by the end of the night.

I was talking with them and for some reason my sister in law who uses pintrest for everything got only 10 pins. My brother who never uses it got over 90 - in one night. They asked me (as they do with most social media questions) why that was. In fact - I have no idea. I tried to formulate ideas why that would be.

Then to make things crazy my brother (who once again only pins his wife's blog posts) is gettingmore followers than her.

Social media is so cool, but sometimes I can't understand it. The only thing I can do is go with it and try my best to understand it.    

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Youtube and Google Adsense

For my youtube series Awkward Moments In Life I am fortunate enough to have google adsense enabled on my videos. What does that mean? It means that for the ads that appear on my youtube videos I am able to earn a portion of the money that these companies pay google to be on these videos.

A lot of times people ask me how I did it and how they are able to get signed up for google adsense for their youtube videos. Well here is what I did.

When I started making my videos I would put in their descriptions, "On this episode of Awkward Moments In Life we see..." I think that Google would see that and notice that this isn't just a funny video I posted once but something that I plan on making on a regular basis.

Next I would always post links to the facebook page and twitter account. Google would see this and see that I was dedicated to using a wide range of social media.

The final thing was that all of my videos started with a title slate that branded them as part of my series.

These were the things that I did in the beginning and a few were by accident. However if I was to start another youtube series I would still do all of these so that I could start getting my youtube videos monetized as fast as I can.

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Facebook/Twitter Competitions

This past month I was running contests on both my facebook and twitter accounts for my youtube series Awkward Moments In Life.

After researching how to properly do them I learned a lot about not only social media contests but social media.

Facebook Contest
The first thing I learned about facebook contests is that I couldn't just post on my wall "Share this link to my contest and you are entered in to win a $50 amazon gift card." All contests had to be separated from facebook. In order to do this I had to run an app on my facebook page. I decided to go with North Social because of the free 14 day trial plus the low cost to run it afterwards. Although I really liked their app I found that their services are more directed at companies that would have a fully integrated social media platform instead of me who just needs a contest.

Twitter Contest
The twitter rules were less strict. I just had to tweet something and ask people to retweet it. It was pretty simple but I only had 10 people enter - so it ended up not being that effective.

All in all my facebook likes went from aroun 50 to 230 at the end of the contest. I plan on running the facebook contest again in the future and here is what I plan on doing differently:

• Use a service that makes it so people share that they entered the contest on their facebook wall
• Create a facebook event with all of the information on the site
• Use different means of entering. Maybe an awkward photo contest or let people vote on who has the most awkward contest

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Seattle Part 7 - Banyan Branch

Out last visit of our second day was to Banyan Branch. Overall this was the coolest place that we visited.

Banyan Branch is an integrated Social Media Agency. They have been around for only a few years but have already established themselves as leaders in Social Media Marketing.

In the back of their offices they have a wall that holds about 20 large TV's that are displaying trends, topics, graphs, tweets - and it is all in real time. Not only that but their software tracks everything that is being said and how it relates to their clients. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if they found this blog post about them. If so and they are reading this I would like to say, "Thanks for the visit."

What I got out of visiting them is how they were able to make money off of social media and how they were able to help companies use it not so much as another way to make money but as a tool to interact with their customers.

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Seattle Part 6 - Weggner Edstrom

For the sixth part of our visit in Seattle we visited Weggner Edstrom - a PR firm in Bellevue who does a lot of the PR for Microsoft.

The most interesting thing about this company to me was their special task force they had to deal with online customer complaints. There was a division of people who tracked the internet and social media to find out what people where saying. When something did arise they would go out their to the blogs, facebook, twitter and other social media and start blogging, sharing and tweeting to resolve the problems that were presented.

It kind of sounded like guerrilla PR - and it sounded awesome.  

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