No Need To Travel To Equine Events, With Online Simulcasts

Later this afternoon, the grand opening ceremony of the new Al-Marah Arabian Galleries at the Kentucky Horse Park will be broadcast live, during the 2010 Egyptian Event. Amazing that no matter where you are in the world, you’ll be able to view it via the Internet. In the future, will there be any need to even travel to equine events?

The answer is, yes, of course there will be. Horse people love to be around horses, and no matter how great the video and audio on a simulcast, nor how big your computer monitor, the Web will never replace being in the presence of horses.

That said, this is a cool use of technology. I wouldn’t drive the 8 or so hours from Chicago to attend the opening in Kentucky, but I’ll probably tune in later today, especially to see what my former employer is up to. Yup, I did marketing and PR at Al-Marah Arabians, back in 2004. Of course, back then we didn’t have such handy-dandy technology; when someone was interested in a horse we had for sale, I had to get out the camcorder, take the footage, transfer it to a VIDEOTAPE, and mail the video. Oh, back then it was a veritable Stone Age compared to now!

_______________________

What marketing and PR opportunities

might YOU create for your equine business, using video simulcast?

_______________________

I’m not sure if there will be an archived version of the video; I hope there will be. These galleries are part of the efforts of the Purebred Arabian Trust, and the opening ceremony would be an important historical document, albeit in video form.

It does bring up questions for equine businesses about video use. Can you expand your potential market through video simulcasts? Would it allow you to expand into other regions, countries, or even continents? Might you create public relations and promotion opportunities through the use of simulcast events? Ah, the opportunities!

Monday Morning Quickie – Check Out The Competition, With Compete.com

There are a number of helpful tools for analyzing online traffic. I think Compete.com is intriguing since you can compare multiple sites against each other. This means you can also look at your own site to see how it stacks up against the competition.

First of all, many thanks to Angelea Walkup, founder and ‘chief equine officer’ of HorseGirlTV, for sharing this resource with me.

While Compete.com has a paid, ‘Pro’ version, they also have a free version you can try out, and even the freebie has some interesting features.

I’m still exploring the site and its capabilities and applications, but by entering a Web site URL, you can view any site’s unique visitors (a better judge of traffic than ‘hits’), and see how that traffic has either increased or decreased over the past month and the past year. Compete.com also gives you the top five search terms (what people enter into a search engine such as Google or Bing in order to find you), and what ‘referring’ sites they find you from, such as Facebook or Twitter.

Here’s a graph for one of my clients, The Equine Chronicle, showing the increase in their Web site traffic over the past year:

Compete.com graph for The Equine Chronicle on June 7, 2010

How might you use Compete.com for your horse business? With the free version, you can identify your own improvement in terms of traffic, identify the most-used search terms and incorporate those into your online content, or even analyze media outlets to find out what might be the best fit for your advertising dollars.

If you’re interested in checking out Compete Pro, here’s a very thorough review of the Compete Pro version by Melanie Nathan at Sugarrae.com.

Have comments, thoughts, or questions about Compete? Please Leave a Comment below – thanks!

More Work-Arounds for Poor Flip Audio Quality

A question from one of my readers, writer and horsewoman RhondaL, sent me off on the research path for new and improved audio for videos made with the Flip cameras. While I found some great resources for recording and adding voiceover narration, I also came across some other work-around tips to compensate for the Flip’s poor audio quality. Enjoy!

• Here are some basic, common-sense tips from Greyson Ferguson at eHow.com; to get the best sound possible in your original recording, it’s a good idea to keep these tips in mind, such as minimize jostling, don’t touch the mic while recording, and limit outdoor recording (with the resulting wind-noise), but most horse people WILL be recording outdoors, so that particular option doesn’t work for us.

Thankfully, there’s more….

• A company called Quick Video Marketing has some videos and checklists about boosting your audio quality using mostly free software. They have options for both Mac and PC; the only paid software is QuickTime Pro, which the narrator (Jeff ‘Herschy’ Schwerdt) says is about $30. The audio on his videos is clear and strong, so while I haven’t yet used this process, I think it might be promising.

• But, THIS tip is the one I’m most excited about trying out for interview-type videos, since it gives you an option for syncing your Flip video with audio from another source (like my Olympus digital recorder!). It’s from a guy named Darrell Icenogle at EzineArticles.com – please read Darrell’s well-written explanation – it’s genius!

I look forward to checking out Darrell’s other audio/video & tech tips, too. He suggests another resource for learning how to maximize your Flip videos, FlipInFocus.com, which looks promising. Thanks, Darrell!

If you’ve missed my other posts on my Flip UltraHD camera, you can search for ‘Flip’ in the Search box to the right. If you have tips that have worked for you, please post them to Comments – I’d love to read about them!

Monday Morning Quickie – Creative ‘Work-Around’ For Flip Camera Audio Limits

Sorry it’s been an entire week since you’ve heard from me! I’ve been ‘under the weather’ but am now getting back into the swing of things….

I’ve recently written about my Flip Ultra HD video camera and the audio limitations of same, so I thought I’d point out a creative ‘work-around’ that was shared with me by one of my Twitter buddies, Liam Killen over at Abbeyview Equine. A UK-based company, they do Web sites for equestrians, and recently won a BETA 2009 Innovation Award for their PagePlay concept – congrats!

Image courtesy Abbeyview Equine

The video clip is at the Abbeyview Equine YouTube channel, and was filmed at the 2010 Badminton Horse Trials using Liam’s own Flip video camera. Liam has dubbed in music over the long-distance footage or clips that might otherwise be subject to wind noise, and while there is a bit of ambient sound in the background on interview clips, it’s definitely within manageable limits.

If you come across other creative uses of Flip equestrian footage, please send ‘em my way! And if you’d like to follow Liam on Twitter, it’s @AbbeyviewEquine.

Monday Morning Quickie – Haven’t Yet Found The Downside On This One

Recently I wrote about my new Flip Ultra HD video camera, and that while I love many things about it, the lack of an external mic jack and the zoom features were issues for me. Another bit of technology I recently bought is the Olympus DM-420 digital voice recorder, and I have to say I have yet to find something I don’t like about it!

In my work as an equine industry writer, I need to capture quotes and information accurately. While I do a good job at typing notes, sometimes I’m not at my laptop, and sometimes interview sources talkreallyreallyfast. In those situations, it’s especially handy to have a recording option. I’ve used mini-cassette recorders, but all those tapes take up space and frankly, who wants to keep track of them anyway? Not to mention the quality was often fuzzy.

My new Olympus recorder is about the size of a candy bar (see pic), works on two rechargeable AA batteries with over 50 hours of battery life, and has 2 GB of memory on a removable microSD media card, capable of 533 hours of recording. Sweet! It’s pretty easy to figure out functions, even if you don’t look through the owner’s manual. The sound quality is clear – I’ve recorded interviews over my mobile phone’s speaker, and the clarity is great.

That is a normal sized clothespin - yes, the recorder is THAT small.

My favorite feature? The British lady’s voice that indicates the battery strength level every time I turn the recorder on – always good to know how much juice you have! ‘Battery level, high.’ OK, it’s a bit geeky, but I’m always amused, and reassured, by it. I got mine at a local Best Buy, but you can find them for about $50 cheaper on amazon.com. In either case, the price is right – $100-$150, depending on where you get yours.

Bottom line – if you need a recording option, I think this one is a winner. Tune in again, I’ll put together some ideas for ways that equine businesses can use this handy-dandy little item. If you have some suggestions, please post them here in the Comments.