Date: Thursday, March 31, 2011 Time: 4:30-6:30 p.m. Event Description: Effective internet marketing, along with the effective use of video, are often challenging topics for legal marketers.  Please join us on March 31 at BlueRock Studio to explore these daunting yet exciting (and some would say critical) topics as they relate our interests as legal marketers.  Hosting our discussion will be Marci De Vries with MDV Interactive and Gregg Landry of … Read More

via amabaltimore.org

The viral videos launched last week for my software client were just picked up by the Baltimore Sun’s Tech Blog

See the post here:
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/technology/2011/03/watch_the_royal_wedding_at_wor.html

Views are edging at 250 views in less than a week. This is such a fun project.

The video project that I’ve been hinting around about for a few weeks now went live this morning. We are all very excited to see how a new approach to video promotion helps move the needle for this software company. The software is called Private Eye, and it hides content on users’ screens to prevent snooping and insider information leaks.

Our strategy was to “show” how the software works in real life contexts so users can identify “getting caught” with their screens showing to the wrong people. We felt that a lighthearted approach would help build community and generate positive emotion toward the software.

Without further ado, here are the videos:

March Madness:

Coffee Shop Information Leakage:

Royal Wedding:

Snooping at Work:

For a frame of reference, this is a sample of the videos that the company had been publishing about the software:

So the time has come when the perfect storm of client need, video providers, and a clever idea converged into a video shoot on Friday. I’m not going to tell you much about the shoot, because the truth of its effectiveness will come out in the final video product, which I will post here once it’s ready.

But as a teaser, here are photos from the event. All parties are very excited about the way the videos will bring their product to life on the Web.

 

 

This afternoon the some of the Baltimore Chapter of the American Marketing Association members and friends shot some testimonial videos for the Chapter Web site at our favorite studio, BlueRock Productions.

Video on the Web is the next great chapter for marketers. I’m pulling my vendor list together as we speak. I’m so excited that we get to talk about something other than Social Media for a while.

Video Shoot for the AMA Baltimore

As a special surprise for the New Year, I learned that one of my e-mail accounts had an issue that kept me from seeing 5,582 new messages over the course of the past year. I told my husband about it, and he was amazed that I didn’t spend the next day poring through the e-mails to see if I had missed anything important.

I was, too.

Then I realized it: E-mail isn’t that important anymore.

Then I wondered what the killer communication app is right now. And, after much consideration, I have to say that there isn’t one anymore. Why? Because everyone who needs to contact you has so many options for contacting you that they will find you whether or not you read your e-mail or text message, or listen to the voicemail on your mobile phone, or read their post on your Facebook/LinkedIn wall, or  their direct message to you on Twitter. They can “poke” one of your colleagues at work to deliver a message to you in person, or find your address on their GPS and come to your house if they really need you.

We’re behaving badly.

Read the Rest at the Maryland Daily Record

Happy New Year everyone,

I want to post a quick heads-up here for Gmail users. In the last two months, Google has started transitioning all of my Gmail addresses to IMAP from POP. What this means for you is this: You’ll be emailing along just fine, and then you’ll have a few quiet days. Then you’ll start getting really concerned about your mail, but there are no error messages to let you know what’s happening.

If you log into Gmail at this point and look in “settings=>POP/IMAP settings” you’ll see that Google has simply checked a different box. Instead of the POP mailbox being checked, you’ll all of a sudden see IMAP checked instead.

It’s easy enough to get your Outlook email to read the IMAP settings instead of POP, just follow their instructions link under the IMAP buttons.

But can I say for the record that I think this is mean spirited and a little aggressive on Google’s part? I can understand that they want us all to transition to IMAP but can’t you send me a text message or an email about this? It’s obnoxious to break my email altogether to get me to change these settings.

Anyway, there’s the heads up. Looks like I snuck a rant in there too.

Ah well. Here’s to 2011!

I’m posting a link here where you can find all of the columns I’ve written for the Daily Record– it’s a search page, but all of the Tech Talk articles are at the bottom in the results.

So far this whole “Columning” exercise has been really interesting. I’ve had new subscribers to this blog (hence the new effort at keeping it up to date) and my following on Twitter has increased substantially. Surprisingly so.

Check it out, let me know if you have any topic ideas, and we’ll all stay tuned…

This week I am enjoying the launch of my new syndicated column via the Maryland Daily Record. It’s called “Tech Talk” and I’m pretty jazzed about the potential impact of being published in a traditional-going-digital media publication. I’m also curious to experience the difference in viral spread between “legit publication” and the blogging/Twitter/Facebook viral spread that I’ve working in for so long. I suspect that “legit” goes faster, but maybe that’s my optimism talking.

Stay tuned…

Last night I taught my friend’s marketing class at the Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business. I do it every year at the Carey School and a few other universities in Baltimore. I used to do it with a little bit of theater … my act was that I was really too busy for this, but as a favor I’d take it on.

This time I dropped the act. I took my time and had a real conversation with the students, and we learned from each other back and forth instead of me just lecturing to them. It was a blast! I wish now that I had stepped back and relaxed all those other times before.

The biggest take-away for me was that I am not (actually) too old to consult about social media, which is something I’ve been wondering about lately.

Many of the students were about to start their careers or have been in the work force for a couple of years. Some of them didn’t participate at all in Facebook, Twitter OR Linked In. Those who were engaged with social media were as unsure how to drive business from it as many of us older marketers.

Looks like we’re all still figuring it out. Maybe it will always feel this way. At any rate, it was refreshing and I think we all got some really great ideas out of it. Thanks guys…