Social Media Advisors – Page 37 – We are Social Media Advisors, a Social Media Speaker, & Custom WordPress Site design.

HD Video Options- What’s The Best Bang for Buck?

I just finished reading a post by Judi Barrett asking what people thought about the Best HD video gear. Well, I left a comment there explaining my choices, but I thought I’d share with everyone else in a little more details my thoughts and likes for video gear. I think there are 2 categories on this that we need to discuss.

Good Quality with Great Price Tag

The first category is equipment that is going to deliver you some really good quality video without super high prices. This is the equipment that you can get for well under $250. In the past I have used my flip video camera which delivered decent quality, but not always the best. My big complaint was always that the audio would not be the greatest because of no way of connecting an external mic to it. Then, I have also used my digital camera before which takes amazing pictures and HD video. The audio quality also seemed to be pretty darn good. But, my issue here was that the file sizes were HUGE and couldn’t be transferred quick and easy.

So, I did some research the past few weeks and think I have found the newest winner. I just purchased this past week a Kodak Playtouch. This little guy will shoot 1080p HD video and has a 4x zoom. It’s lightweight, has the ability to connect to a tripod too. But, the thing I really like about this camera is that it can have an external microphone hooked to it. So, I picked up one of those for $25. The tests I saw made this a no brainer for improving the audio quality majorly.

Now, after reading many reviews and seeing the down sides to the Kodak Playtouch being the not perfect video quality in low light situations, I decided to buy a small bracket & 36 LED light attachment. I should never have any issues now with the light being too low. The other thing I purchased was to make sure I could get wide angles. It was a Kodak Wide angle lens for under $20. Both of these accessories were purchased for under $40. The last accessory I got was an extra battery. Because I bought all the stuff from Amazon, I was able to get some really good proces and purchased the camera & all the accessories for under $300! Personally I think this is pretty good deal for all the equipment I ended up with.

Pro Grade with Pro Price

I know for some of you, you want to take it to the next level in your video and have the funds available to go buy pro quality stuff. For this category I found something that really impressed me. A few months back I was in Orlando for an event and got to use a friends Canon T2i DSLR camera. WOW was i impressed with it! It shot some amazing video and had the ability to add all the types of accessories I talked about above. These little beauties are going to run you probably double the price of the Kodak setup above. Plus, you will need to then pick up a few lenses for it. But, like I mentioned, for the person who wants pro grade video, you will get it for sure with this product.

To give you an idea, here’s a video that was shot by Mike on his Canon:

Also, to make it easier for everyone, instead of you needing to click on all the links above to see the different things I am referring to, I put them all together into one page inside Amazon that you can view here. So, what items are you using for video that I might have missed?

**links in this post are connected to an Amazon affiliate account. Owner of this post may be compensated from any purchases made from links above.

Building Your Relationships To Build Your Business

Custom WordPress Sites, Online Consulting, Social Media Advisors

Today like most days has been quite busy with email inquiries, prospective phone calls and a touch of social media madness. To be honest, the past few weeks at 210 have been quite busy as I have been deep in the canyons of WordPress working on Custom sites for many customers. But, as my clients know, I am pretty meticulous at returning all phone and email contacts within 24 hours of receiving them. While this is a blessing to my clients to always receive such prompt attention it is also a detriment to my health at times as I will sometimes stay up till three in the morning replying to email.

Today as I was returning emails & calls I received from the morning and one of the calls that came in seemed like a great potential new client. The message said:

My name is Richard ——- in Denver. It’s Thursday morning about 10:15 and I’d like to talk to you about your services when you get a chance. My number is ***-***-**** . Thanks very much.

So I gave Richard a call back expecting it to be someone needing services. The conversation began with some small chat about where he’s from and where I live and the weather and then we got into business. He asked first if our business was being social media advisors for clients. I said yes, we do advise businesses on how to use social media properly in addition to building sites, working on SEO for current sites, etc. At this point the conversation starting going way downhill.

The conversation suddenly switched from me helping his business with their social media needs to his business trying to pitch me their product to sell to my client database. The product itself was pretty much junk. It was some Yelp review scraper that would email you daily if any new reviews were written about your business. I asked “Couldn’t this be done with a Google Alert?” He responded that yes, it could be, but that it wouldn’t include a nice graph in the email like his does. I then asked, “doesn’t Yelp already have the same graph of information? To which he replied that it did.

So when I asked what benefit this had to my clients he basically just went on trying to pitch the product which I kept shooting down. So, I finally thanked him for wasting 25 minutes of my time and that I needed to move on to my clients that actually wanted my services.

Classic Bait and Switch

We’ve all heard of classic bait and switch stories by used car salesmen, and other brands. In essence, this is what this gentleman was trying to do to me by asking for help knowing it would get me on the phone so he could then try to sell his product to me. But what was missing is that he had no connection to me and he did a really poor job trying to form that before pitching a product. What bothered me even more was that he acted like a person in need just to get me on the phone.

As Scott Stratten says, “someone who buys your product because you threaten to punch them doesn’t make you a good salesman. It just makes you a bully.” As my friend Liz Strauss would say, she “wants relationships not blog post offers.” The world of marketing is evolving. It’s no longer effective to try bait & switch methods, or squeeze pages that pop up 13 times begging you to not leave the page, or MLM schemes where I get 100 of my closest friends to join and we all make millions of dollars. True success in business comes from forming meaningful relationships with others.

In the future I hope that this guy learns that trying to sell his crappy social product in the manner he has been using is not effective. As Chris Brogan shared recently, business needs to be humanized. It’s time to stop treating consumers as robots that will just take what you put into them and to start treating them as actual people who need a valuable product that can see through the smoke and mirrors.

3 Steps To Success:

If your selling crap, stop trying to sell it and revise your product or service into something that offers true value. Stop pitching why they need this and instead make the product/service so awesome that everyone will want to purchase it because it actually helps better their lives.
Engage consumers and treat them as actual humans that you want to help with this product. People want to feel important and cared about. A business that does that will benefit greatly even if they don’t have the best service or product on the market. People will pick service over a slightly better product because they can connect to that company better.
Be upfront with your intentions. If you want to sell a product to a vendor, then say that when you engage them. Many like myself are very busy during the day. My time is the most expensive thing I have. It’s limited daily and I really do not like wasting it on things that I feel I’ve been duped into. If you want to sell me something, great! Make that point known in the beginning. If your product interests me, I will call back, but it won’t be in during prime hours. That is and always will be set aside for my clients. They are my family and I treat them with the best care possible. It’s what makes them write great recommendations for me.

In closing, be upfront, be honest and be real. Is that too much to ask?

“Guerrilla Social Media Marketing” by Shane Gibson & Jay Conrad Levinson

Social Media Training

As part of my 2011 effort to read at least one book per week on average, I finished another book yesterday, “Guerrilla Social Media Marketing” by Jay Conrad Levinson and Shane Gibson.

Shane Gibson has actually been a guest twice on Social Media Edge, our BlogTalkRadio show, and he is also the co-author of “Sociable”, which is another book I liked. Jay Conrad Levinson is the father of the guerrilla marketing movement, and his books have sold over 20 million copies worldwide.

I was excited that Shane sent me a free copy of the book, for two reasons:

I love marketing and books about marketing
I love free stuff

I found the book to be a relatively quick read, with an emphasis on specific social media tools/platforms, along with goal setting and planning. There are lots of worksheets and step-by-step plans that make it easy to develop a solid gameplan from the beginning.

I think this is a terrific book for beginners and intermediate users of new media. Chapter Four alone is worth the price of the book. Titled ‘The Guerrilla Social Media Arsenal’, it contains 126 different sites and tools for marketing online. Yes, you read that number correctly in the last sentence. Although I had heard of most of them (sometimes just in passing), I have to admit that I learned about a bunch of new and interesting instruments and ideas for gaining exposure.

Levinson and Gibson did a great job of making one critical point: It’s important to know whom you’re targeting with your efforts. I’ve seen agents in our local market who don’t seem to test their marketing efforts at all, or even give much thought to who is reading their ads or posts.

There are many ways to hone your online marketing focus, and they managed to cover most of them within the book. One thing that I and others have struggled with is how to make the most of time spent on blogging and social media sites. They provide some tips in this regard which I found helpful.

This book is well worth the read if you intend to make a concerted effort to leverage online tools for your own marketing plan. Also, Shane Gibson is a terrifically nice guy, and I’m sure he would be happy if you picked up a copy of your own. 🙂

You can find “Guerrilla Social Media Marketing” at your local bookstore, or at Amazon right here:

http://www.amazon.com/Guerrilla-Social-Media-Marketing-Influence/dp/1599183838/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1295721507&sr=8-1

Looks like it’s on sale for only $13.06 right now. Bonus!