Reflection on Best Global Brands 2008

January 12, 2009 at 12:05 am · Filed under assignment, marketing

“Customers who choose to engage with their brands become loyal brand ambassadors, and the work they create is far more credible than anything we could say about ourselves.” – “The six laws of collaborative branding” by Jason Baer (page 7).

By allowing customers to interact with the brand, they have more of an interest in the brand and they will be more likely to recommend or mention the brand to an acquaintance. I think “ambassador” is a good word here. The customer does not define the brand – we still need the company to do that. But customers can be ambassadors for the brand and extend the reach of the brand beyond what it might other have.

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Examples of marketing

January 11, 2009 at 11:53 pm · Filed under assignment, marketing

Examples of marketing that made you say “Wow” or “Huh?”. Look at different marketing blogs, choose one or more and sign up to follow them through this quarter.

1. Allowing readers of the Bellingham Herald to see a list of advertisements that ran in the paper and choose if they want to see them. People miss seeing ads in the paper when they only look online and some of them probably want to check out local ads. This gives them a way to do it and expands the ads that would normally run only in print.

2. Sarah McLachlan commercial to support Society for Prevention of Animal Cruelty. Plays “Angel” while showing video of abused or abandoned animals. Reaches out to get an emotional reaction.

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Brands and a dinner party

January 11, 2009 at 11:50 pm · Filed under assignment, marketing ·Tagged ,

What brand(s) you would like to sit next to you at a dinner party and which brand(s) you would avoid!

Want to sit by:

1. Coca-Cola: Fun to be around, well-traveled, high social status, attractive

2. Amazon: Up-to-date on the latest trends, melding old and new technologies, social, DRM free

3.Google: Fun! Social,

4. GE: Sustainability focus, creative

5. Samsung: Latest technology, dependable

6. IKEA: Stylish, best Swedish meatballs

I would avoid:

1. Apple: snobbish, elitists, introverts, insulated

2. Ford: unsustainable business practices

3. Exxon: Unsustainable business practices, dishonest, not transparent


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Importing wmv files with Audacity

October 29, 2008 at 1:38 pm · Filed under technology ·Tagged ,

Audacity’s latest beta (Audacity 1.3.6) will let you import Windows Media Audio (wma) files. You will first need to download the FFmpeg support much like you must download the lame encoder to export in mp3 format. This is great news for those of us in education who have been using the inexpensive digital audio recorders that record in wma format. Now I won’t have to explain to students how to convert their files from a wma to a wav or aif file (zamzar.com) before they can import them into Audacity for editing.

The latest release also includes other features such as sound-activated recording.

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Seattle newspaper real-estate site leaves much to be desired

August 26, 2008 at 2:16 pm · Filed under usability ·Tagged , , ,

Newspapers have got to get their act together. NWHomes, operated by the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has got to be the worst real estate site I’ve looked at. Brandon and I are going through our first house-hunting experience and we have been enjoying going through the real-estate sites taking virtual tours, mapping properties, filtering according to square-footage, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, cost, etc. I created a favorites list on Windermere’s site, and I can easily get in contact with one of their agents or the agent selling the house. To put it simply, Windermere offered an enjoyable experience.

Back to NWHomes: You can only select one area to search from the drop-down menu (I can select different cities to search on Windermere’s site). I clicked on open houses and didn’t actually get a list of open houses. What is perhaps the most frustrating is that the listings don’t even tell me what city the house is in. I have to map each property just to find out if it’s anywhere near where I want to live. Is it Seattle, is it Marysville, who knows? Here’s the kicker: When I got frustrated with the NWHomes site I decided to search the John L. Scott site via a banner ad at the top of the page. The link didn’t work!

Newspapers are struggling with declining ad revenue, both from commercial advertisers and from classified advertising. Having a site that doesn’t take into account the needs of the user is not a good way to boost advertising revenue. Newspapers have got to realize that classifieds online are different than classifieds in the paper. You can’t just group them into one category. Users have to be able to filter for a variety of preferences. How ’bout a little bit of usability testing?

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So many formats, so little compatibility

August 13, 2008 at 10:41 pm · Filed under streaming media ·Tagged , , ,

I have an mp3 player that came with a converter to convert videos from wmv to smv for the device. The problem is, most of the videos I want to save are either Flash or mpeg-4. I’ve been very interested in the iTunesU store lately. It allows the University of Washington community to share audio and video content and viewers can download it for free. Some of the videos were fairly long, but I thought would be fun to watch on the bus. For example, the UW Chamber Dance has a video of their dancing, which I would like to watch. I suppose I could probably find somewhere to convert the file. But it seems like so much work to first convert it from mpeg-4 and then convert the wmv to smv.

This isn’t technically DRM. This is more of a standards issue. I usually listen to Internet radio so I don’t download music. While I might consider paying to download a video to watch on the bus, most of the rentals are so restrictive that I wouldn’t be able to finish it in time – assuming the DRM didn’t prevent me from putting the video on my device. So my main experience with DRM is avoiding it.

I understand that companies want to increase their market share and they see proprietary formats as a way to push out competitors. But it’s so frustrating trying to sort out all the different formats and find a way to make this work on this player and that on another player.

I am often faced with a similar situation when students are using the Communication labs and are learning to use Windows Movie Maker to edit video. WMM will import avi files or wmv files. So inevitably students will ask how to make files that will work with Movie Maker. There are a couple web conversion programs that work, but it’s hard to keep track of everything and no site really does everything so it feels like a constant battle to get content to work on the player you need it to work on. Things would be so much simpler with standards.

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That’s Cloud Computing with a capital C – if Dell gets its way

August 11, 2008 at 9:50 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , ,

I found this article interesting after Pete Grondal’s visit and his emphasis on cloud computing. Apparently the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had originally given Dell preliminary notice to trademark “Cloud Computing” after its Cloud Computing Solutions. But now it appears they’re going back on that. Dell would probably have difficulty defending the trademark even if it’s approved, since the term seems to be taking off in popularity.

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National Geographic video using Brightcove

August 6, 2008 at 9:47 pm · Filed under streaming media ·Tagged , ,

To get oriented with the Brightcove video player I watched the webinar that is advertised on the home page. I was impressed with the customization and ease of use of the Brightcove player. I was also impressed with the integration of video with other content such as advertisements and viral distribution. The demonstration of adding content was also impressive. It looks like an incredibly easy UI.

After getting a feel for how Brightcove works, I explored National Geographic Wild. I was surprised that the featured video, Journey Into Amazonia, was 55 minutes long (after the Waste Management ad played of course). It turns out that National Geographic features a full-length “Program of the Week.” The other videos are shorter. Anywhere in the range of a minute to 20 minutes.

I watched about 15 minutes of Amazonia. It would have been more, except the video would just stop about every 5 minutes and I would have to reload the video, watch another ad and then skip to the part where it had left off. The third time I did this, while watching piranhas in a feeding frenzy, I gave up on Amazonia. I’m sure my broadband connection was probably acting up again – but I wish that the video player had handled it better. It didn’t say buffering or anything, it just stopped.

I do wish National Geographic Wild would find a few other advertisers. I got rather tired of watching Waste Management ads. Surely they can find some more sponsors?

The search function also did not work. I tried typing in a few of the animals that I had already watched short pieces on (and whose names were in the titles of the movies) – bears, elephants, lions – none of them returned any hits.

It was easy to browse the videos, but it would probably be difficult to find anything specific. None of the tabs are very specific. I finally realized the “On Air” tab was to show previews of upcoming programs that will appear on National Geographic. It seems like National Geographic would want to promote these programs higher up in its list.

I like that National Geographic has customized its player, though I do think they need to make some changes in how their video content is organized. I enjoyed watching the videos, however, and watched several. The video looks good in full screen too, with just the basic controls for the player. The embedded player on the web page includes the “share” information button.

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Finding and watching embedded QuickTime

July 29, 2008 at 11:34 pm · Filed under streaming media ·Tagged , , ,

In order to search for QuickTime movies I first had to switch from Firefox to Internet Explorer. For some reason I can’t get Firefox to recognize that I have QuickTime installed and it asks to me install it every time I try to play something that uses QuickTime. I’ve tried reinstalling it a couple times and still no luck. So now whenever I want to watch a QuickTime movie I open IE. Which was why I found it humorous that while exploring the QuickTime site it said QuickTime has trouble sometimes playing on IE and recommended using a different browser.

While the QuickTime site has an extensive selection of samples of HD video, when I went to the sites for some of the video (such as BBC) it looked like it was Flash. To make things more confusing I found some vague information that sounded like Flash will stream QuickTime format – so does that mean that even though it’s in a Flash player I’m actually watching QuickTime video?

After watching a few HD video clips it was difficult to go back to the regular clips (even though my computer couldn’t really handle the HD clips and kept pausing to buffer). I finally did find a neat blog post on how to embed QuickTime files with a WordPress plug-in. The video that was shown on the blog as a sample looked really clean and played right away. It was also nice to have the clip right on the screen. If I was watching something that was really long I would want it to play in a player, but with something so short it’s much more convenient for the file to be embedded.

Granted, it was a short clip, but it seems like QuickTime is a good platform for video on the web. But it seems so complicated to embed QuickTime on web pages. The file is also larger than most of the files I’ve downloaded at 2 MB so it seems like with longer videos that would slow the time it took for the video to load. I’ve also noticed that QuickTime buttons sometimes don’t work so well on my computer. For example, the volume button on the embedded blog video was a click and drag rather than a click, release, move the button. Also when I was playing some of the HD video the pause button would stop working occasionally. And when I paused and navigated away from the page and came back, the video would start playing again automatically.

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New York Times video

July 24, 2008 at 12:11 am · Filed under streaming media

The New York Times has several points of entry for its videos. Scrolling down a bit on the home page will take the reader to an embedded Flash player that has a default video selected and ready to play. The video loads quickly after playing a 15-second ad and includes a few seconds of branding that show the company’s logo and a short jingle.

The video is also found embedded within the article itself. Readers usually have to scroll down a bit in the story to see the video so they are unlikely to see it if they don’t find the story interesting enough to scroll down. This is probably fine since most people who would be interested in watching the video would read at least enough to find it down the page.

What I like about the placement of the video within the article is that it is obviously content and not an ad. It is in the left column with the text – not in the right column with the ads. It loads quickly and includes an option for changing the quality – something the embedded video on the home page does not include. What I didn’t like was when I changed the quality I had to start the video over. It would be nice if the video could shift seamlessly to a lower or higher quality like video sites such as Hulu do.

The video did not play perfectly – there was some buffering here and there – but overall it was a good user experience. The screen is small but adequate for the content. There is also a box under the player with a title and short description of the video. The title screen of the video also gives a description and the name of the reporter. These additions to the video help to add context for the reader. It also helps that the video is within the written article.

I’m not sure if the site uses any DRM besides streaming, but this seems to be enough to prevent the average person from downloading it – at least I wasn’t able to download it using the RealPlayer Download feature. The videos also include a watermark (the Times T) so that if someone does capture the content they will able to identify it.

The third place to find the video is on the New York Times video page, which plays the videos in a slightly larger player. The quality also seems to be higher. I wonder how many times the content must be compressed in order to have the different versions for each player.

New York Times is respected for their commitment to embracing new ways to tell stories through video and other multimedia and digital technologies. Digital media can add a layer to a story that is not possible with words alone and I think New York Times does a good job figuring out what stories will benefit from the extra work of creating, editing and compressing video.

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