The answer is stabilization.

I would much rather watch a video shot using a 1995 Sony Handycam and all the stabilization and motion toys than the same video shot with a top-of-the-line DSLR attempting the same motion with only a palm and five shaky fingers.

Note that the “handheld effect” can contribute positively to the mood or feel of a scene. It gives a documentary look, and makes the shot seem unrehearsed. But unless you’re really going for that effect, I would try to minimize instability with some sort of stabilization mechanism. And let’s be honest, no one went back for a second chili-dog during Cloverfield.

So with that said, I’m going to tell you the three things I ‘couldn’t shoot without:’

• Manfrotto 547B Professional Video Tripod (Black) (I use Manfrotto 546B sticks)
• Manfrotto 501HDV Video Head – Replaces 501

These two combined make the most professional fluid shots for the price, in my opinion. The head doesn’t actually use fluid cartridges. Instead it uses Teflon-coated disks, which provide extremely smooth pans and tilts. For a fraction of the cost, you get 98% of the quality. Then there’s my slider. I did a lot of research on sliders, and after using several that just didn’t cut it for me, I landed with the Cinevate Atlas 10 Cinevate CILTAT1003 Atlas 10 FLT – 26-Inch LTS with Regular Ball Feet, (Black)

It provides extremely smooth motion, and it doesn’t require much skill to do basic moves on it. You can see that I’ve used it in almost all my videos. Sliders make the difference between a good shot and a great shot. Slight, smooth camera motion really grabs the attention of the viewer, and it looks beautiful if done right. The Atlas 10 will really help you get those incredible sliding shots you’ve been looking for,

The last piece I couldn’t shoot without is the one I’ve had the most fun with. From running across fields at full speed, to getting a perfectly smooth shot of a friend longboarding, my Glidecam HD-2000 never lets me down.

This thing is a work of art, and even after using it for 6 months, I still find myself jaw-dropped at the fluidity of the shots it produces. If you want to add some serious motion to your shots, this is the way to go. Personally, I think it’s the best camera related purchase I’ve ever made. You can check out some of my shots using the Glidecam HD-2000 in Joseph Chang’s Global Journey video. (Also notice how I used my slider in most of his interview shots.)

If you have any questions about any of these, or any other stabilization gadgets, feel free to comment below!

3 things to know about Social Media Marketing:

1. Make your social media efforts genuine by engaging visitors, not by advertising to them.

Customers want to interact with a company that asks thoughtful questions, expresses genuine interest in the visitors, desires to build relationships, and wishes to help fulfill the needs of the customer. By actively participating in relevant conversations on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, companies can engage customers in stimulating ways.

Do not strictly advertise to visitors on social media sites. It will most likely feel overwhelming to them. Social media is not a place to throw advertisements at people. It is a means of communication and community engagement. If your company shows a true passion for serving customers, visitors of your social media pages will notice.

People do business with those they like.
They will promote you, purchase from you, and recommend you to others.
You might be asking, “This is common knowledge, so what?”
Well, by successfully reaching out to customers and potential customers on social media platforms, you can grow your business’ image, brand and sales.

Imagine yourself as a potential customer who is visiting a company’s Facebook page. The company is posting boring content that does not appeal to you at all. They don’t seem like customer input is very important to them. Is this content inspiring you to research their products, perhaps even buy them? Does their social media presence make you feel like a desired customer? Do you feel like they are sufficiently reaching out to you?

If you answer no to these questions, then this company is not leveraging the power of social media.

I recently read a quote about SMM which is incredibly applicable. “Social media is about attracting actions and conversations, not shouting at people.” Do not make this mistake!

2. Create content that is exciting and inspires interaction from visitors.

Let me start off with a real-life scenario. I am sure you have seen or at least heard about Old Spice’s marketing campaign revolving around the “man your man could smell like” concept. Old Spice posted the original video to YouTube over two years ago and has now garnered over 41 million hits. The success of this video spawned countless other videos and commercials, effectively going viral on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Old Spice boasts over 2 million Facebook likes as well.

How did this do so well?

The video was well-made, funny, engaging and enjoyable to watch. It informed the viewers of the details of the body wash, gave men a very strong call to action and reinforced the manliness of the Old Spice brand all without strictly advertising the product.

How can this be applied to your business?

• Create quality content.
• Keep customers entertained.
• Associate your products with excitement.

Customers love watching fun videos as illustrated earlier. Later on in Old Spice’s marketing campaign, Old Spice let customers ask the company questions on Twitter. The “man your man could smell like” would then answer these questions in videos posted on Old Spice’s YouTube account. Old Spice took the effort to interact with customers personally which reinforces the company’s brand. Old Spice even modified a new video by taking a suggestion from a follower on Twitter.

Make your customers feel welcomed and involved. Make them feel like what they say matters. Get them involved in contests, interactions, original content, things that will positively reinforce their perception of your brand. If you stimulate your customers in this way, nothing but good things will follow.

3. Approach social media with a marketing strategy.

Your company’s efforts on social media platforms should be seen through the lens of a marketing strategy. Social media marketing needs a strategic purpose. Without a clear strategy, your marketing may become a mess and may lose its direction and focus.

Before committing to social media marketing, ask yourselves questions such as:

Are we paying attention to our customers’ needs?

How are we brainstorming ways of improving the customer experience?

If social media usage fits into ways of attending to the customers, then keep these questions in mind:

• Does my audience engage in social media? If so, which platforms?
• What is my goal by utilizing social media? Can it be measured?
• What is the next step if our social media efforts fail?
• What do we do if they succeed?

Answering these questions before implementing any social media efforts will keep the campaign more controlled and will provide better marketing results.

Also take into consideration:

• Create content that is easy to digest. Audience members have a short attention span.
• Do not underestimate consumer preferences. Consumers’ goals tend not to align with marketers’ objectives. Many consumers have a strong tendency to follow/”like” companies to receive discounts & special offers.
• Do not post too frequently; do not post repetitive content. Studies have shown that consumers “unlike” and stop following brands on Facebook and Twitter for these reasons. Check out the results of a study on social media done by ExactTarget. Article link. Facebook is on page 13. Twitter is on page 16.
• Send clear messages. Unclear messages may cause brands to be seen as careless or untrustworthy.

Remember: Your social media marketing needs to have a distinct purpose. Your efforts on social media need to engage and inspire customers, excite them, and improve their experience with your company. Successful engagement on social media can positively influence your brand’s perception.

Three things to know about SEO

 1. Create content for the users, while keeping search engines in mind.

This one can be tricky because you will need to find a good balance in your content creation. You will want to utilize your SEO efforts and keywords to boost your SEO quality, but you do not want to provide users with keyword-stuffed filler. SEO is not about improving page rank. It is about better serving the customer.

This includes strategically weaving your keywords into your website’s content. Do not simply copy-paste keywords into the text. This may seem like an appropriate thing to do to increasing page rank, but it will hurt the visitors’ experiences when they read lackluster information. Instead, map out where you can place keywords that will add value to the content. It will be more beneficial this way.

Emphasize quality content on your website. Good content is content that speaks to the target audience by solving their problems, answering their questions and providing valuable information. Provide a space on the web that leaves visitors with more knowledge and direction on what they are pursuing. Provide value to visitors is absolutely paramount for websites.

 2. Lay out your website for optimum navigation for the visitors.

A visitor’s first glance of the website should tell them they are in the right place. The home page should say who you are, what you do, and how you will serve the customer’s needs. Assume visitors know nothing about you or your company.

Site architecture is a key element to website quality. It is all about improving how users and search engines navigate around a website. Websites must focus on getting the best and most relevant content to users in the fastest and easiest manner. The site layout needs to make sense.

Do not make a huge mistake by making your site’s navigation cluttered and difficult to navigate. Make sure each page on the website is meaningful and valuable for the visitor. Your website’s most important pages need to be one click away from the homepage. Any page should be within three clicks from the homepage.

If you have your website linked with Google Analytics, you can check to see which pages get the most hits and which get a low amount of visits. If you have a number of pages that get minimal or no hits, evaluate those pages to see if they are even necessary. If they contain valuable information, then take steps to increase the likelihood of visitors finding the pages.

3. Pursue link building opportunities.

Link building is basically gathering quality websites to link to your own website. Google rewards websites that have a good amount of quality link building. This means websites connecting to other relevant websites.

Why does link building matter?

Link building brings people to your site from other sites who have endorsed your website. This can provide positive traffic streams both ways, depending on the level of relevancy of the two websites. Link building is an easy and inexpensive way to develop visibility of a website in search engines’ organic search results.

Do not mistake this point for the idea of buying links from other websites. This action may seem appropriate but search engines will penalize websites that engage in buying links. Search engines know which sites sell off their link space. Since the website relevance will most likely be low, the quality score of your website’s SEO efforts will score low as well.

It is a better practice to avoid paying for links and to engage with related companies’ websites for link building.

Remember: do not get tied up with focusing strictly on SEO. SEO definitely helps connect your website with search engines and visitors, but it is not the end goal. No matter what SEO tactics you put into play, always provide quality content.

Google’s new algorithm update specifically targets overdoing SEO and will penalize sites that engage in this practice. By leaning more towards quality content rather than aggressive SEO tactics, your website will be better off by scoring higher on search engine rankings such as on Google search results.

My name is Will Todd and I am excited to be a summer intern for Creative New World!

Hold your applause, please.

I was raised in Beaumont, TX in a family of five. I really enjoy photography, music, soccecr, ultimate Frisbee, computer gaming, and making people laugh.

I began my collegiate career by attending Texas A&M University in the fall of 2007 with a business degree in Management of Information Systems. This degree gave me insight on the info system background that makes businesses run in this modern technology-demanding world that we live in. The degree also gave me the realization that I did not want to directly pursue this field as a career. Thus, I sought for more business knowledge.

I ended up applying for a Marketing graduate program at Texas A&M University. Thankfully, I was accepted into the program and began the graduate degree in August 2011. Apparently, I can never leave my Aggie roots. Do not hold it against me!

Currently, I am living in Austin for the summer. I moved here in mid-May and feel slightly overwhelmed by the size of this place. It will take some getting used to! I won’t call myself an Austinite yet, but only time will tell! What is interesting is that I am working satellite, conversing with my team leaders and co-workers via telephone and, of course, telepathy.

I will be working with the company in its marketing capacities. My efforts will be geared towards online marketing for Creative New World and outreach to the online communities. I will be furthering my knowledge of online marketing techniques such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), link building, SMM (Social Media Marketing) by partnering with some of Creative New World’s marketing masterminds.

Hopefully my work during this summer will prove to be valuable to the company. Making an impact is my top priority, as well as becoming more educated in the marketing realm. Although Creative New World is only months old, I can tell these guys are passionate about what they do. The company exists to find ways of enhancing others’ business efforts and to be an outlet for creativity and passion.

So why am I writing a blog for Creative New World?

Well, this blog will contain my learnings and increased insight from my summer marketing internship with the company. I will be passing on information that I deem to be valuable in hopes that it will be beneficial to any visitors of this website! I hope that whoever is reading this blog will walk away with some good information that can be applied wherever it can.

I happen to be a huge Ron Paul fan. I was born in raised in Lake Jackson, Texas, where he currently resides. And speaking of being born, Dr. Paul happened to be the OBGYN that brought me in to this world. I remember him riding his bike by my house several times a week, and my brothers and I would pause our war games to wave.

In what seems like a few days later, 3,500+ fans took my place in waving and shouting, while I manned my camera and filmed them. It was a weird feeling to have to keep the Glidecam still while everyone else in the room was going berserk over something by which I myself am excited.

I learned a lot about improvisation on this shoot. First, we didn’t have press passes, so we had to do some sneaking around. We were told that cameramen had to stay on the back two rows of the auditorium, and my wide angle lens wasn’t going to cut it from there. So while everyone was being seated, I told the event manager that I need to take “interview footage” of people up front. I made friends with the leader of Youth for Ron Paul, (youthforronpaul.tamu.edu) who got me a seat on the second row. And the interview footage ended up being great!

Afterwards, I wanted to say hello to Dr. Paul and get some up close footage of him. I missed the press time to do interviews with students, so I had to sneak backstage. Another member of Youth for Ron Paul thought I was their photographer, and asked me to take the group’s picture with Dr. Paul. Afterwards I got to talk to him and remind him that he knew me from back home. He seemed like he didn’t really remember me, so I approached our future first lady. She remembered my red hair and freckles, and called out,

“Ron, get over here! This is Taylor Stanley from First Baptist!”

She turned back to me, “He used to point to you and your brothers every Sunday and say ‘I delivered all three of those red heads.’”

After a few more pictures and handshakes, the candidate was urged out a back door nearby where I stood. He stopped to pat me on the back of the arm, “It was nice to see you again, Taylor!”

There seems to be a little bit of something in all of us that desires to be known by someone greater than ourselves. And there’s something in me that desires to capture things that are bigger than myself. Both of those urges were quenched that night, but they already seem to be creeping back in, only a week later.  Perhaps there’s something more than big events and celebrity encounters…

I like to break up my most boring, monotonous activities across multiple days, although I’m one of those people who likes to get unpleasant tasks out of the way as quickly as possible.

If I feel I really need to be productive on a specific task I try to set aside at least two hours where I’m unlikely to receive last-minute meeting notices.

When I need to develop strategies I let the people involved in the project decide for me how I’ll do that. If I’m working with people who want or need to have a say in the strategy I sort of wing it and just wait for the meeting where the strategy must be decided. This way I don’t come in with a plan that no one had any input in. On a very small number of rare occasions I have asked people in advance to submit ideas; but in my experience it’s better to let the group strategy come together in a group meeting.

If I’m being asked to just hand someone a strategy I’ll try to set aside time to write up some ideas. However I don’t always have that luxury. So what I like to do is jot down little notes from time to time that I can go back and mine later for ideas. That way when I’m asked to produce a lot of ideas I have at least been able to skim through my notes and select ideas that seem most appropriate.

Sometimes I set aside time for a Website review. Not a thorough review but just quickly scanning a few pages, maybe a few dozen pages. I look for things that are easy to fix that SHOULD be fixed. If I’m the guy who has to fix the code I might dig deeper and look for a systemic problem. If I’ve been asked to help identify the cause of a serious issue I might change my schedule to give myself enough time to dig deep into the code.

The basic, fundamental process is pretty simple: Produce content that is useful, helpful, meaningful, entertaining, or somehow creates value. If you’re not responsible for the content then compile ideas to help your team create better content or otherwise improve their practices.

Content-based SEO is richer and more powerful than link-based SEO. It’s also less boring since you don’t have to worry about asking people to link to really awful content. In a content-based SEO campaign you can replace awful content or at least move on.

These are just a few ways I spend time doing my own in-house SEO work.

With that said, there are some basic components of every SEO campaign that form the foundation of a successful campaign. Anyone who’s been around SEO for any length of time already knows these “basics,” but they bear repeating for anyone who is unfamiliar as to where to begin with their SEO effort:

SEO & Keyword Research

Every SEO campaign starts with keyword research. It’s critical to uncover and organize your core terms or phrases in order to create a road map moving forward.

SEO uses keyword information to create customized titles, descriptions and page heading recommendations, along with editing the content of your pages to make them more keyword friendly. The SEO can use your existing content and rewrite it specifically to integrate the keywords selected, as well as improve the sales conversion funnel. Text edits should includes internal linking to other important pages as well as adding strategic calls to action if necessary.

As keyword performance is measured, additional recommendations should be provided, tweaking the pages to improve rankings and conversions.

Information Architecture & Usability

Your team or company should regularly be reviewing site analytics information in order to seek out and uncover site architectural issues that hinder your performance in the search engines. Using this information, they can provide specific recommendations and solutions that will build better site architecture, remove duplicate content, fix problematic HTML and a whole lot more.

The mission here is to make your site search and searcher friendly on all levels.

Content Review

A site-wide content review provides strategic recommendations designed to help you produce content that better relates to your audience, effectively uses frequently searched keywords and improves the overall sales message being delivered. The goal is to create engaging content that informs, educates and sells your products or services while also attracting visitors through the search engines.

Content development doesn’t assist SEO alone, but also improves your sales process and your link and social media efforts. Without great content, your site really doesn’t deserve great results in Google, Bing, and the like.

Link Building

Your should research you and your competitor’s link landscape and come up with a variety of linking opportunities to pursue. These opportunities include lists of sites, directories, blogs, and other strategic sites and the best approach for establishing a linking relationship that compliments your optimization efforts.

Your team should work to establish contact with these link opportunity sites and lay the groundwork for a (linking) relationship, submit linking requests and negotiate link placement, among other things.

Analytics & Conversion Optimization

You need to regularly review you and your competitor’s Web data to understand search performance and user trends. This information should provide additional insight and strategy recommendations that assist on-page optimization, link building, social media and strong content development

Based on the analytic data and findings, your team can conduct a/b and multivariate testing designed to test various performance and conversion options. Selecting the best performing options provides the ammunition needed to continually improve your site conversion rates.

These are just the basic fundamentals of a solid web marketing campaign. Each area noted here can produce a plethora of actions, reactions and recommendations that are designed to continually propel you forward in the search results. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the tasks in each of these categories, but it can give you a good place to start.

SEO has changed, and there is no going back. Want to ensure your site doesn’t disappear from Google and that you’re “future proofed” for the next round of vicious Panda updates?

Recently, a major industry publication wrote,that Google is de-indexing link networks like it’s going out of style. That means that all the links they (the link networks) had in Google are now gone. In Google, they no longer exist.

This is just the latest round of updates Google has pushed out. And they’re just getting warmed up.

Matt Cutts – Google’s head of web spam  - recently gave a sneak preview into Google’s next update. Their target? Overly SEO’d websites. Here’s a tasty quote from the article:

We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter, make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.

- Matt Cutts

So what does that mean for your site? Well, it’s good news if you have been concentrating on new fresh content and attracting links the old fashioned way(virally and real user interest).

What Google is trying to do is re-focus sites on user experience and answering the user’s questions . Links are still going to be crucial, but, the number really is not as important as the quality. A good SEO will take this into account and help with the content and flow of your site, not just one way links. One of the benefits for the web site owner is that the look, feel, and user experience of your site will not take a back seat to back end work or other techniques you do not actually see on the page. SEO is, and has never been Magic, it is good content creating a good user experience that is easy to follow with other sites

Here is a great article by Patrick Altoft, Director of Search at Branded3.com on the new google link algorithm

Be an SEO ninja. No one is as good at as going invisible as ninjas are.

Our approach to SEO has always emphasized that it should be deliberately unnoticeable. What do I mean by that? Simple: SEO should be unseen, when it’s done well, and only noticeable to other SEOs. It should not be overt. It should not take precedence over more important aspects of a site, like the site’s brand message, its purpose, its user experience, and its value proposition. We can distill this to a simple concept:

1. First, make the best user experience possible. Make a great product. Have something truly valuable.
2. Next, maximize it for SEO.

SEO should be an invisible layer beneath a strong user experience, a beautiful site, and a clear, coherent message and purpose.

This makes the risk of falling to an over-optimization penalty simple to avoid. If a site has no real purpose, save leveraging weaknesses in search engine algorithms; if a site has no clear business model, other than finding inefficiencies in the market; if a site has no clear value, other than ranking highly for long-tail terms and passing traffic along while taking a few bucks; if any of these cases are present, the model is not sustainable.

SEO should never take prominence over more important aspects of a site, especially its business model. It’s in these situations that a site should be worried about its future.

‘Over-optimization’ May Not Be New

It’s likely Google has already looked at this area before, and is simply calling out publicly some of the things its been doing for several years (while naming it something new). We’ve recommended against what we call “SEO footers” (the long, below-the-fold-forever, exact anchor text matching nonsense) for several years. I believe strongly that links within these low-quality types of ‘shingle’ or ‘stub’ page elements get devalued, at best, and possibly even contribute to lower organic scoring for a website.

Keep It Simple. Keep It Smart.

Don’t re-invent the wheel. Create the best user experience possible with good content and an easy to follow platform and not only will the users come but the results will too.

Creative new World has five manifestations: Photography, Graphic Design, Cinematography, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Website Design & Development. One company. We have professionals that specialize in each discipline, who are passionate about their unique impact on the world through media and marketing. People who view every obstacle as a challenge to be faced. We are pioneering the new technologies that are being developed in every field in our industry and using them to make a better digital experience for your cause.

As a company Creative New World wants to develop unheard of relationships with customers, and inter-discipline collaboration (and lots of adventure and fun along the way). We will be raising the bar on every level. I am excited to see how you will be partnering up with us.

I love my job and working with people like the ones I have around me. And I can’t wait to see our future together as a growing team, and as a community, and how together we can shape the world to be a better place.

Christopher Villasana
Partner and Technopreneur of Creative New World