I’ve talked about variable video and personalized video a little in the past. Now let’s look at some more examples and break down some of their components.

Here are some examples:

• Inspiring Escapes
• Dexter
• Haunted house
• Walts wisdom
• Carmen has a crush on you
• News3Online

There are 4 main effects that can be achieved in a variable video:

• Variable text - example: holding up a card with the persons name
• Variable image - example: holding up a picture of the person
• Variable audio - example: saying the persons name with actors face covered
• Variable video scenes - example: saying the persons name without actors face covered

If you wanted to create a variable video campaign, there are multiple ways to go about it. All of the above effects can be recreated using Adobe Flash. If you only plan on doing variable text and/or imaging in the video you may not need 3rd party software. If you do wish to integrate your variable video campaign with other software, XMPie recently announced video integration capabilities with their system.

Another important aspect of variable video is the story. To properly recreate any of the videos shown in this post you would need actors, sets, equipment, scripts, etc. But, one great thing about variable video is it’s surprise factor. You could get away with crappy quality video as long as the personalization tied in seamlessly.

The most important part of any variable video campaign is it’s final conversion screen. This is where you encourage personalizing the video for someone else. Someone the user believes will find the video entertaining. People love seeing their name in lights and now everyone can be part of the internet video phenomenon.

Contact Magicomm to learn more about variable video.

Everything you need to know about Twitter in as short of a post as possible.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific or Facebook. - From Wikipedia

Commoncraft also has a pretty good explanation of what twitter is on youtube.

Here are some Twinterviews about what people love about twitter.

Who do I follow?

First thing you can do is invite all of your friends through Twitters Find & Follow page. Once that is done you can move on to websites like Who Should I Follow, Twittersearch and Twubble. (More Twitter Search Engines)

There are also lists you can scan through at TwitterPack and Twitterholic as well as some Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter.

It is probably a good idea to view a users Twitter page before you follow them to be sure they aren’t spam.

How do i update?

There are A LOT of ways to update your twitter status. The most obvious (and sometimes most reliable) is the Twitter site itself.

There is also an array of third-party apps to help feed your twitter hunger:

• TwitterFox
• Twhirl
• Twitterrific
• Snitter
• Twitkit

Or you can automate the process with TwitterFeed.

Where else can i put my twitter feed?

You can view your feed in any feed aggregator (Google Reader, FriendFeed, Outlook, etc). Your feed can be accessed at

• http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/username.rss - Your Feed
• http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/username.rss - Your Friends Feed

as well as by clicking the RSS button at the bottom of your Twitter page.

Another popular thing to do is add your Twitter feed to facebook. Twitter has its own Facebok App or you can just sync your facebook satus with Twitter. I personally chose to use FriendFeed because it was the least intrusive.

What are some cool apps I can use?

Check out the Twitter Fan Wiki Apps Page.

I hope someone found this informative. Please feel free to follow me: @spazcer

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.

There’s a small back story to this entry. Ive been working with an open source content management system for my company Magicomm and it eventually came time when we decided we were going to start our own blog. My goal was to use the preexisting framework of the CMS to smoothly integrate the blogging software into the back end of the system. It turns out this was the easy part….

So now the goal of this entry. When it came time to output the data into your common blog format I found that their were some small things that helped my blog get indexed by popular blog directories as well as other assorted social media aggregations.

So ultimately I’m assuming you understand the general format and benefits of a blog. You’ve got your title, author, timestamp, and a post of some sort. Other optional features include keywords, permalinks, comments, and an RSS feed.
Now I want to go into a little more detail about the code side of this and show you where some simple HTML syntax separates the blog from the..um… not-blog.

Rel-tag

First I’ll talk a little about my favorite blogging feature, the ‘rel-tag‘. Rel-tag is basically a keyword that physically sits on your screen as apposed to META keywords which hide in your page’s header. Now when you’re displaying ‘rel-tag’ that relate to a specific post you use the relationship attribute of the anchor tag to define the hypertext as a ‘tag’.

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<a href='http://www.magicomm.biz/tags/great+blog' rel='tag'>great blog</a>

As you can see it it pretty simple to establish a tag. Basically rel-tag is a MicroFormat and what you are doing is declaring that this link is an author-designated keyword for this post. Also note that in the URL of the link I’ve separated the two words with a + sign instead of a space (You could also use %20). You want to try and be sure that your tags relate and are appropriate for your post. Alot of social media aggregators use this information along with specific information in your RSS feed to categorize your post and you can often see your tags displayed on sites such as technorati.com and mybloglog.com.

Permalinks

The second thing I would like to talk about are permalinks which are also often called bookmarks. Permalinks are basically links back to a specific entry that will never change. This makes them ideal for bookmarking which is why it comes as no surprise that the following helps you establish a permalink/bookmark.

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<a href='http://www.magicomm.biz/blog/cross_media_is_now_our_life' rel='bookmark'>Cross Media is now our life!</a>

As you can see we once again use the relationship tag to define the Permalink. This is not always necessary however Ive found that certain social media sites use the bookmark relationship to determine if this link is a permalink or not.

RSS

Now last but not least there is the RSS feed. I could go on forever about the different formats and everything you can stuff into a solid feed, but i wont. The only thing i want to mention here is how to make your feed available to social media sites (seems to be the theme here). Basically what you do is use a combination of rel=”alternate” and type=”application/rss+xml” to define a META link to an RSS file.

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<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="MagiBlog - RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Magiblog" />

Thats pretty much it. I hope that between the 3 things I’ve showed you and some of the resources ive presented you should have a social media friendly blog thats ready for the masses.