100 Days – The Countdown to WEG2010

Lexington, Kentucky, is often referred to as the Horse Capital of the World. When I arrived here this week for the American Horse Publications conference, I was greeted by rolling green pastures filled with mares and foals, and as I pulled into downtown, I saw a ‘WEG countdown clock’ showing there were 100 days until the start of the Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games 2010 (WEG2010). If your schedule is flying by these days like mine is, that will be here in about two blinks of an eye.

I’m gathering lots of pretty amazing WEG2010 info and will share it here, so tune in over the next few weeks. For example:

• The expected worldwide viewership is expected to be FIVE TIMES that of the Super Bowl.
• Over 1,500 journalists and photographers will be attending the Games.
• WEG2010 has an official soft drink, pizza, beer, coffee, and I don’t know what else!

This is going to provide lots of great information and case studies on equine industry marketing, communication, and PR. If you don’t want to miss any of it, you can sign up for email alerts when I do a new post, or the RSS feed.

Also – if you have friends and colleagues who are also interested in equine industry marketing and media, or following WEG2010, please give them a heads up and a link to my blog. Thanks, I appreciate your help!

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!

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What marketing and PR opportunities

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

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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!

Monday Morning Quickie – Are You Quitting Facebook Today?

Facebook has been the ’800 pound social media gorilla in the room’ for a while now; however, they’re facing increasing criticism and unrest from users due to Facebook’s treatment of user data and their complex privacy opt-out settings. May 31, 2010, has been designated as Quit Facebook Day; is it a sign of things to come? Or will it be business-as-usual come tomorrow?

An excellent article by Ian Paul at PCWorld.com covers the issues on this topic; he reports that while only a small percentage of surveyed Facebook users intend to quit today, over 80% are now being more careful on the social networking site, with 76% sharing less personal information. Paul’s article also covers some of the recently simplified privacy changes, in case you’re interested.

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Facebook: Do you love it? Or hate it?

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On a related topic, Mashable.com has an alert about a Facebook ‘clickjacking’ worm that is spreading via ‘likes.’ If you use Facebook and regularly ‘like’ items, you might want to read the alert and use some caution until it’s cleared up.

Many horse people like to connect and share information via Facebook, so until something better comes along, it’s probably a good idea to share private details sparingly when it comes to Facebook.

(Note – due to the Memorial Day holiday, this ‘Monday Morning Quickie’ turned into a ‘Monday Early Evening Quickie’ – hope you’ve enjoyed it anyway!)

Thank you to all of our armed forces and their families, past/present/future,  for your service and your sacrifices both small and large.

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!