Interactive Video How-To and Examples

I talked awhile back about personalized video and how it could be (is) the next big marketing medium. The benefits of personalized video are obvious, you'll get better quality personal information and it is very viral.

The key here is personalization and interactivity. The internet took a turn a few years back with the rise of social and interactive networks. From that point on, the user was given control, and thats the way it going to be from now on. I showed in my previous post how successful personalized video is and now, I want to show you how easy it is to pull off.

Here are two videos i made when first experimenting with how flash could be used to manipulate video:

The best part is that i made each of those videos in under 15 minutes.


All you need to do it upload your video in flash:

1) File -> Import -> Import Video




(Note: I had to rerecord my video as a wmv because i could not get avi to work properly)


2) Then choose:





"Embed video in SWF and play in timeline" is what allows you to manipulate movieclips on top of your video. Now what you could do with this is map certain items to sync with the video and possibly even change those items at run time. You could insert personalized images, text, etc.

Affiliate Marketing is Tarnishing Our Social Media

As more and more people look for the "easy solution to making money", they find themselves exploiting affiliate links on their favorite social networking sites. Unfortunately these social networking sites are also yours and my favorite social networking sites. It's sad to see the fruit of the web rotting in front of my eyes and, unfortunately, there is little I can do about it. CAN-SPAMM laws only protect us from e-mail spam (or try to), but will there be a move to protect your favorite social media site? One can only hope. If the educational fiber of sites like Plaxo, Facebook, etc gets permanently tarnished to the point where you can't weed out the legitimate from illegitimate posts, then i might have to resort back to books :0 (god forbid).

What kills me is that affiliate marketers that exploit social networks don't believe they are spammers. Well, I would let that slide if I wasn't getting links shoved in my face for "Air Conditioners" inside a "Help Zimbabwe" group. Others try and say that the community "will benefit from these products". Well, honestly, I think the marketer is the only one that benefits from these products and I guarantee you I could find a cheaper, better quality product than whatever your getting paid to promote.

So please keep your spam *cough* I mean affiliate links on your own websites and out of my networks. And, to all of the innocent, none the wiser, social media participants who DO want to purify they're network groups, don't be afraid to speak up.

*Note: For all the Plaxo members who have fallen victim to these links all you need to do is click the 'hide' button under the users link which you believe to be spam. Hopefully over time the spam will go down and we can clean up our community.

Favorite Social Media Sites

Below is a list of all the social networks I use and what I think about them. At the end I will list my personal favorites and i invite you all to publish links to your own profiles below.

Ziki.com - I like this because it gives me free personal advertising. I think they spend like 10 bucks a month per person. Free being my favorite part

Twitter - This one is cool because by following certain people i keep up to date on trends in the marketplace

BlogCatalog - I use for getting people to both my blog and my company's blog. Its also a cool place to meet other bloggers,

Digg - I use as my general news service and i follow 1 friend at the moment, hopefully more will develop

LinkedIn - A great professional network. Bad thing about it is there are not alot of communication opportunities between networkers besides a Q&A section

YouTube - Video Uploading site. Could be great for viral marketing but theres so much competition out there its hard

Jyte - Fun community full of free thinking OpenID enabled humans where you make claims about things. Not so good for advertising i guess but i think its addicting

gooruze.com - This site is good for Internet Marketers looking to give back to the community and actually learn. The site is spam free and I would appreciate it if it stayed that way :)

Wink - this is an interesting site in that it collects all of your social networking profiles into one page and users can search a master database to find all of your pages.

ning - here you can create your own social networks. this could be great for establishing your brand or company is leaders within your industry if you can develop a large enough following.

Facebook - one of the first biggens. It started off for colleges and now can be used by anyone.

Myspace - other than friendster this was probably the first biggen. In my opinion it is too loaded with spam.

MyBlogLog - youll see the widget for this site on a lot of blogs. This site is very similar to BlogCatalog however i don't think it has as much activity

Orkut - Google's version of a social network

FriendFeed - this site brings all of your feeds across multiple networks together.

Plaxo - This is an excellent resource to network and share. The site allows you to share links, messages, pics and more. It also displays all of your feeds as a "pulse".

* My favorites are currently gooruze.com, plaxo, and twitter.

Please comment and add your own favorite networks and/or your profile links

Gooruze.com

So this site looks interesting. Its a niche specific social networking site where people can ask questions and provide answers to other users posts. If all works accordingly this could be a very resourceful community. If anyone else is one here please check me out at jonbish.gooruze.com.

Personalized Landing Pages 2.0

So its no news that a personalized landing page as a response portal to any kind of direct marketing campaign can increase response rates dramatically, but where's the next step up?

Well it seems as if there are multiple cross-media technologies emerging from the web to help engage, interact and even entertain the user, therefor increasing conversions. People have seen XMPie and other related products do cool things with people's names and putting them in the picture. But what if the user could change their name at runtime. Furthermore what if the users name wasn't in a picture, but in a short movie. This is the future of PURLs as a response portal and will be a hit in the social media world. Already I was pointed to a website for a TV Show on FX and I was amazed at what they had done. Here is a PURL someone made for me. I like everything about it, from the page looking like a blog to my name being inserted into the movie.

Now here's something my own company put together. Basically I wanted the user to be able to interact with the flash movie in real time from outside of the movie itself via the web-form. Using javascript, I was able to insert the users name into the newspaper at runtime and its had an amazing response. People need a break from their every day activities and these fun side trackers give them this opportunity, so both the user and the company win.

So I'll say it now and say it loud. Get Interactive, Engage your Audience and become successful.