Your Website Vs. Social Media Presence


Social media platforms are great for building community and knowledge of your goods, services, brand...but you don't own or control the platform. We'r all aware of the ever-changing landscape of social media: look at how 'groups', 'pages', 'individual' Facebook account (sharing and privacy) rules have changed in the past few years. Users get very little input on how these evolve.

A website allows you to market yourself on your own terms. On your own site you get to:

• set rules and guidelines for how you share content
• have and build direct relationships with your audience
• organize your branding content how you want  it organized

Roberto Blake gives a lot of food for thought on the topic:

In the past half-year or so I’ve lamented the fact that I have little time to do in-depth video production. That drought is over.

With growth on the horizon for my department and an organizational push toward getting the most from the technology tools that we now employ, I’ve been called upon to interview some folks. I got the assignment and the deadline last week—these need to be done really soon. Luckily I grabbed my favorite campus personality about a year ago and recorded a 30-minute interview and B roll of him strolling across campus and teaching his online course.


This week is dedicated to editing down 2+ hours of interviews, and an hour of atmosphere/B-roll into three, under-five-minute snapshots of how our faculty use technology in the and out of the class. The upshot of this double-quick assignment is that I get to hear the individual stories of how these folk approach the tools. What I’ve learned—and this is important for us in IT departments to hear—is that they are open to using these tools and pushing the limits of the technology to best fit their needs. They’re experimental and they’re open.

My goal is to have my final cuts done by Friday.

Then sometime on Monday, next week, my committee reviews them for content and offers any edits or input. And I spend that afternoon editing--if necessary. Then the final cuts will be hosted on our website by next Tuesday…

*Whew*

A recent project I built a HTML5 video player. For these players to work across all the major browsers redundant video formats must be created. There are several free online services that will convert video formats to ogg theora, mp4, and webm for you. However, once you get to long/large video files, they act up (require payment, or freeze).

VLC media player is free and will convert your vids to the desired format, relatively quickly. One drawback is that you can't run more than one conversion instance at a time. If you need to convert, say 1000 videos, then you'd better get some help.  Here' the quick and dirty of using this player to make your job easier:

My friend Kate just posted this fantastic vid of a graphic designer, DangerDom, creating a poster in Adobe Illustrator. This time-lapse presentation shows the poster for ALT-J from sketch to finished product. Phenomenal!!



Alt-J Poster Process Video from -DangerDom- on Vimeo.