Film, edit & upload a video in less than 4 hours

Image by art.implausible via Flickr
Simon and I of the social media team here at Leapfrogg set ourselves a challenge, "to film, edit & upload a video in less than 4 hours".

Our main reason for doing this was to demonstrate that video content:

1) isn't difficult to produce
2) need not cost the earth
3) doesn't need to take weeks to organise & complete.

What we used to create the video:

• A Laptop with basic editing software like imovie or movie maker
• A digital camera
• A kitchen
• 2 actors (simon and claire are available for weddings, blessings and bar mitzvahs)

A break down of our video production time is:

• Planning - 60 mins
• Filming - 40mins
• Sourcing music - 2 mins
• Editing - 80 mins

Total: 182 minutes - around 3 hours from start to finish.

and here it is, hope you like it and please get those digital cameras out and start filming NOW!



Video content is vital to a website, especially with video creeping into the search listings, it is a useful way to differentiate your business & your website from the rest.

Video is fantastic for product reviews - interacting with customers - building communities - reaching the mass market, humanising corporate entities & getting links to your site!

The fact of the matter is, if you aren't making a video now... you can bet your competitors are!

Related articles

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• IAB Completes Industry Guidelines For Video Ads [via Zemanta]

PS: If you have made or want to join in the 4 hour challange let us know about it so we can all be happy video friends together email us at: socialmedia@leapfrogg.co.uk

Leapfrogg in Sunday Times!!

We were delighted to be featured in an article in the Sunday Times business section this weekend. Titled Searching to get to the top of Google the article highlights that more and more firms are investing in natural SEO to get themselves noticed on the Internet.

Have a read, there are some interesting thoughts and views.

The 'Leapfroggers' move into their new home!

A few weeks ago we received the keys to our new office. Back then it didn't look much - dated, bland and slightly scruffy around the edges. As this is a massively exciting time for us (moving from serviced offices to our very own) we wanted to document the work involved and the finished space. And what better place to do so than the 'Froggblog!'

So, here we are in action putting the finishing touches to modernising the new space:



And the finished result:





A special thanks to our office manager, Jody, who has project managed the various contractors involved and ultimately ensured the smooth transition from our old home to the new one.

If you are in Brighton and fancy dropping by we would love to see you at the new home of the 'Froggers'.

Hilary Duff Topless Pic

That was the subject of an email I received over the weekend and what a disappointment it was not to be greeted with a picture of the Cheaper by the Dozen star upon opening it. But this is not to say I was scouting for such unsavoury material, on the contrary, I was going through my email account, deleting emails I no longer needed, re-sorting my folders and occasionally pausing to investigate interesting emails with catchy subject lines.

And whilst there was the obviously emails offering all sorts of remedies for particular “dysfunctions”, I had to praise how such scammers and spammers constructed these subject lines, and whether they tested their results.

On a daily basis I’m pitching to site owners, bloggers and journalists to take a few moments out of their day to speak to me, have a look at one of my client’s sites or better still, write about one of my clients and the email subject line is of fundamental importance. If you are simply including “Link request” in your email subject then chances are your email is going to be ignored, after all, it doesn’t really call people to action like the Hilary Duff subject now does it?

But what about including something personal? Something with their name or brand name in? or a subject which sums up what you want, without mentioning links?

Of course, how you ‘pitch’ your emails will depend upon the client you’re working on behalf of, but however and whatever you are doing, be sure to test, tweak, test some more and then tweak again and then continue to tweak based on the feedback and responses you are getting.

If your link request emails aren’t working, then change them. Try to add value to the subject line, to maximise readership and ensure they respond. No one likes to have their emails deleted, especially when you taken so much time to tailor an email specifically for them, so make sure it get through!

Have you had any funny or interesting email subject lines? Can you offer any more advice? or how about an insight into the type of subject lines which grab you?
Being sure to keep it clean of course…

Yahoo "Import" Feature Problems on Excel 07

As much as I have frustrations with Panama, the relatively new Search Marketing platform from Yahoo, I have found the "import" feature of great benefit. True, it did take a couple of days to get the hang of it, saving the file as Unicode Text with a .csv extension(?!?!) - but after that it was all plain sailing.

That was until I upgraded my computer to Office 2007! After that it all went blurry and fuzzy again, and nothing seemed to work. Even Yahoo's official instructions on how to use the import tool seem to contradict itself!

Try and try and try as I could to use the tool, it was just not happening. I did some searches and found a thread on SearchEngineWatch.com. Apparently what you need to do is:
1. Save the file as Unicode (.txt)
2. Close down your Excel spreadsheet
3. Go back to its saved location and rename it with the .csv extension
4. Upload the file using the Import function

HOWEVER...this still did not work for me?

I understand that Office 07 is a relatively new package, but it seems crazy that the import function is incompatible with it.

So, if anyone from Yahoo reads this, please, please, please make the import process easier and compatible with all versions of excel.

I would be interested whether this has worked for anyone else?

Yahoo's New Partners

We were running our standard end of month PPC reports today and came across something quite interesting for one client. On Yahoo! they experienced a huge increase in impressions, although we changed nothing major within the campaign. We have content network switched off and these results are very much out of the blue as you can see:

Feb	Impressions	Clicks
X Y	2618	20
X Y Z	1500	6

March	Impressions	Clicks
X Y	24,351	16
X Y Z	44,446	26

(X Y Z stand for different words, with X Y Z being an extension of X Y)

Having looked a little further into when these clicks occurred they always arrived in short bursts. The first came between Monday the 10^th of March and finished Friday the 14^th of March. The next burst came between Monday 24^th of March and lasted until Friday the 4^th of April. To me this looks like a testing period; from Monday to Friday and then a longer period of two weeks, including a weekend.

Having thought about this and considered going mad, we called Yahoo! After some denial on the second call they did mention that they might be “trialling new partners” but that they didn’t have any available information at the moment.

Looking to a number of our other clients who are also on Yahoo! we have notice similar trends over similar time periods, with nothing but tweaks made to the campaign.

Interesting, something is going on behind the scenes with Yahoo! the question is just what?

Search marketing report from 3i

One of our clients, 3i, has been busy researching and compiling an interesting search marketing report examining a number of key topics in the world of search, including the central position of Google, the role of the marketing agency and the rise of mobile and social search.

A number of leading business leaders have contributed to the report, including Sir Martin Sorrell and John Battelle plus leading figures from Google and Yahoo!

The report offers some interesting insights and commentary concerning the search landscape so if you have a spare moment it's well worth a look.

3i's media sector search marketing report