Your Church on the Web: Clear Message, or Private Joke?

There's more to getting your church on The Web than just techies and a little extra loose change.

We have all experienced the story of the 1950s broadcast clown at the end of the live show, who thought his microphone was shut off, making the offhand comment to the stage hands, “That ought to hold the little %@#&-ards  for a while.” See note*

Of course, after the phone calls started coming in, and the TV station manager got wind of what had just happened, it wasn’t long before Uncle Don or Bozo probably had a solid grasp on the concept of the difference between what can be said in front of a narrow audience of co-workers, and a broader audience of thousands of consumers.

The same lesson needs to be grasped by those organizations testing the waters of the Internet for the first time; for example, making their church services public by publishing them to the web via MP3 Audio, Archived Video, or Live Streaming.

A church can be like a small club; folks become comfortable with the handful of those founding the group. You’re close friends who share few secrets. In a few years the club is larger and things are done a little differently because with larger crowds comes more responsibility to propriety and information handling. The difference between private jokes and public information is vast, thus more decorum is needed.

After a while, the numbers can grow even more, therefore the responsibility grows to the level of a civic responsibility among neighbors and community leaders.

When the progression is in steps and gradual, these graduations are more natural. Learning different ways to handle information, imagery and punctuality comes as needed and at a measured pace as the crowd of the audience advances from single digits to dozens and then to hundreds and beyond.

But what happens when you release your church services to the world at large in one giant step; all at once? There are no graduating steps. There are no months of learning new procedures and finding the right individuals to write just the right words in the weekly bulletin, the newspaper ad and general announcements.

Going from ten to a thousand can happen overnight if the church is plugging into the local cable access channel or being invited to take over a large radio station’s prime Sunday time slot that was recently vacated. When this happens, those responsible for the church’s reputation will be very happy later on if The Message is crafted carefully and dressed in decorum and appropriateness.

When you click the start button on the software that turns on the live streaming camera and microphone, you are actually opening a magic window that lets into the very auditorium, people that you have been trying to invite for months and years. But you are also letting in everybody else as well. You are allowing in folks who may not understand everything that you and your group are about, and in this litigious society, it is not difficult to be caught unawares by forces bent on destroying your efforts at disseminating the gospel, as well as those who are simply disgruntled individuals with nothing better to do than make a point by “reporting” your words as they inferred them, regardless of your harmless implication.

So, remember not to be shocked by the first phone call or letter that comes from an unlooked for corner of your community with less than glowing candor. Better yet, prepare to avoid problems by narrowing down your public message to one that sticks closer to the authority that leads your decisions. For Bible preachers, this is a little simpler when they stick close to the message of The Gospel as it is presented in The good old fashioned Bible.

It is much simpler to explain a statement one makes publically when it comes directly from the pages of God’s Word.

And, the main content is not the only thing about which we should be concerned. Those young boyos back there running the sound booth are now in charge of the public’s perception of all that this church stands for. And without years of training and education, they have just graduated from the Assistant Pastor’s teenage nephew to the church’s in-reality video producer/director.

If you are now hosting a live streaming web service that runs simultaneously as your regular services, what words are they putting up over the screen while you’re talking? Even if the information is harmless, is it accurate?

Another thing; if your church web site is publishing a list of links from which the general public can download your recorded sermons, what exactly did you say about the President of These United states three Sundays ago?

Let me set some of my regular readers at ease at this point. I did not write this article from a personal need to make some point about any particular preacher I know; least of whom would be MY pastor in Longview, Washington. Pastor House is extremely circumspect in his public and private language and speaks clearly to everyone, but sharply to those he certainly intends to. (What exactly does that mean? Email me and I will elucidate for you.)

Bozo and Cookie. WBBM TV, Chicago

And, in our church, I am one of the sound guys that operates the live stream. I am 55 years of age and have a degree in Media from a recognized school back east. So, you see, I was NOT talking from personal need, but from career experience. So, take heed. Yes, especially you, Bunky.

From radio to TV, and from Live Stream to Archived, your message lives forever so make sure that you control those auxiliary outlets with the same care you prepare your sermon.

And, that clown on Chicago or New York TV and Radio would have been much better off sticking to

the format handed to him by the station manager.


Stu Marks works as a media consultant at large and is based in the Portland Oregon market.

*note: Snopes

 See about getting your church on The Web. Visit www.EZWebPlayer.com.

The 3 Big Secrets to Successfully Tweaking Your Social Media Marketing

From one of my LinkedIn friends I read a short article today that really could be presented as a multiple seminar series from coast to coast or even globally on advertising to social media and the delicate aspects of outbound frequency marketing. I suggest that all who market something (that means everyone reading this) should read the short article. Link at bottom*.

Added Advertising Opportunity

The basic rules of successfully marketing never changed one iota with the arrival and maturity of The Internet and its symbiont social media. But, it certainly did get more complexed. With the added opportunities of social media, email and now web video, the increased out reach marketing power has enriched mostly the small to medium sized businesses and enterprises as we can now all compete with "The Big Boys" who used to have a corner on the market in reaching the masses through syndicated national and global TV, radio and printed advertising initiatives. Yes, the Internet is that powerful. Like the small town hero bringing a gun to a New York street fight, the Internet has been the great equalizer.

But, what one does with this great power and how one does it that is the great decider of fate in the small business's future. It's because the Internet is not a single marketplace, it is the avenue upon which the various market places thrive and operate, that prohibits a simple approach that reaches for one saturation level, which used to be The Rule. Now, one needs to be savvy to the instant and short term results of one's Internet outbound initiatives; sometimes making weekly and daily changes instead of quarterly and monthly.

It is for this reason alone that social media gurus who have been hired to place their golden hands on the controls of Business's social marketing modules are demanding and getting the the big bucks. A position that used to be an afterthought filled by the secretarial pool/lobby receptionist/graphic artist hobbyist is now at least a $60k position to start in the big city; with dental.

The Golden Secret; Media Segmenting

So, here's the main rub, each social avenue: Face Book, Twitter, the company blog-- maybe a Word Press site-- has its own saturation level decided by how well one's outbound messaging is being opened and the calls-to-action are executed. If you noticed all of the qualifying layers in the preceding sentence, then you are getting an idea of the complexity of the social media marketing task at hand.

It takes a few weeks for a new operator to get a handle on what the next step might be in any given industry, market and business. After that the tweaking begins. Usually the successful operator will cut back in many areas but step up in others; carefully watching tracked responses from readers/viewers.

1. Articles are written with relevant keywords that are chosen by searching for what buyers of the product are using in Google searches. These articles are published in the company's blog with just enough frequency: weekly, daily, etc, to elicit a high percentage of favorable responses without over saturating which tends to drop favorable responses over a short time.
2. Email blasts are broadcasted to the harvested database of emails in possession of the company through Internet harvesting, forms and physical harvesting through offline marketing events like trade shows and  snail mail-outs. These are handled with their own eye to reaching that perfect saturation level. Too many email blasts in a month and the responses drop off. But, not enough and missed revenue becomes a factor.
3. Web videos (videos created specifically for web viewing) are produced; often with alternative modules ready in the wings in case there is room for more frequency with changing content. Web video might be where the largest payoff is for those who have figured out the resources necessary and can recognize what works, and maybe more importantly, what doesn't.

Web Videos are the Real Gold Mine

Web videos are so powerful when done right because Western culture is so geared towards instant gratification, and video pays off in a big way, instantly. Good visuals with a powerful supporting audio track (or vice versa) are where the big payoffs are. And, fortunately for those funding these video gold mines, more is not better. Actually, the opposite is true; shorter is almost always better, to a point. And, the good news is that web video does not have to be prohibitively expensive. The old days of exclusively Hollywood type investments are over. The all important message for the week can be encapsulated into a 30 second to two minute web video for a fraction of what TV commercials go for. No more $10,000 production price tag for that 30 second TV spot that hasn't even reached anyone yet because you still have to buy the ad time for another $30k.

I operate a small media production unit in SW Washington. I am also on the executive staff of a web media hosting company based in Chicago that serves the globe through cloud hosting. Thus, I have a corner on the market for those small businesses to which closely I live and work.

It is much simpler for me to create a short display video for a local business and get that video in front of thousands of potential customers, than it is for that business to create a video and advertise locally on TV. And, I can do it for pennies on the dollar and still maintain a reasonable profit margin.

Just my existence in the marketplace proves that there are many more marketing options out there than there were just five or ten years ago. And, in a failing economy driven by factors that are much more Washington DC factored than locally based, this is a good thing from which all can profit.

Feel free to contact me for questions on marketing in this digital world.
email me at StuMarksez@gmail.com

*The mentioned article
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/06/the-curse-of-frequency.html

Other resources
www.ezwebplayer.com

Another Bad Example of Local Advertising

Advertiser's name, phone and web address blurred to rob them

of free advertising at my expense.

Here's a great guideline for advertising at large. Look at the mailed card to the left, and don't ever mail out stuff like this for your business.

This is a scan of a real card that I got in the mail today.

When it comes time to look for a top shelf, professional and above reproach medical services provider, this company will be the last on everybody's mind.

Web Sites are NOT Dead

By Stu Marks

White Paper

Limelight Networks recently released a white paper on digital presence that announced that Custom Web Sites for your business are now dead. They are so sure that Facebook type templates are doing such a great job handling your branding and customer interaction that you no longer need to maintain your custom web site.

Limelight Networks Dead Wrong

Even though they are correct in instructing business owners that they need to engage their customers through their content, instead of just laying it out there in the electronic brochure which is what the custom web site really is, I feel that Limelight Networks is dead wrong in discouraging companies from using their custom web site as the information hub from which all of their digital assets are reached.

Here’s some reasons why;

A custom web site is under complete control of the owner. Facebook type social media (which is what Limelight is suggesting replaces the custom web site) changes often. Many of the changes create severe animosity towards Facebook. This animosity can easily transfer to the company that majors in social media instead of their own digital brochure.

In the world of marketing, Branding can be everything. It is on the same par with the age old, “location, location, location”. If you want to support free branding to Facebook, Twitter, Droid, LinkedIn, You Tube,  Vimeo and Google, that’s certainly your privilege. But the truth is, the largess and momentum that exists with the large number of users on You Tube’s juggernaut does more than simply provide you with that enormous pool of potential customers, it is also an enormous pool of competitors to which your videos are attached either by association, or Internet hyperlink.

You Tube, for example, is not a neutral vehicle upon which your branded videos can safely reside; The Internet, however, is a neutral vehicle and was designed precisely for that neutral purpose of being the everywhere-reaching, unbranded vehicle that we can all use for safely advertising our message.

These companies that are posing themselves as safe advertising vehicles have great value in most cases and should NOT be ignored. But the flaw in the Social Media Only plan is that, you are giving up complete control over your branding and the secure firewall that SHOULD separate your message from your competitors’. That truth is not going to go away anytime soon.

Here’s a detail about just You Tube that will make the light go on for you.
The public is used to taking a thought, and going to You Tube’s search field online and typing it in. Therefore, if you can be found on You Tube this scenario is what will happen possibly hundreds of times a week;

Potential customer here’s or see’s your company name or product model and goes to You Tube’s search engine to type it in. They get a number of choices in a long list from which to choose and they either choose yours, or one of your competitors’. Even if they choose yours, You Tube can easily display your competitor’s videos right next to yours that can be easily watched either by the PLAY AUTOMATICALLY tool that You Tube has turned on by default, or can be accessed by simply clicking on it at any time.

Face Book. Anyone can buy advertising space on Face Book. The same for LinkedIn as well as most others.

One of the safer ad buys is Twitter, for now. Check out your Twitter home page. No advertising cells there, right? Well, that can change at any time. But Twitter is also home to millions of users every week, and your customers and potential customers can be reached through that medium. I just wouldn't invest my entire marketing department in a medium that limits The Message to 140 characters. Using Twitter requires following some simple rules, but is certainly worth using if your goal is to point customers to your electronic brochure.

Yes, Twitter does have a measure of the same competitive drawback as Face Book and You Tube. The topic a customer is looking at, at any given moment, is sensed by Twitter and it looks for competing posts to list in your customers’ Discover window. No way around that, either.

The Answer

Use social media in a limited way to point customers to your company site. At your site, you can impart information, white papers, research, order pages, pictures and even your own videos without danger of them being led away by competitive messaging.

Host all of the content that is text or photos on your own server. But videos, since they are much larger in file size and require much more bandwidth and therefore cost and expertise to manage, can be hosted on a server owned by your Video management host, like EZWebPlayer.com.

Using someone like EZWebPlayer, instead of hard coding a player yourself, offers you the ability to virtually host your own videos, without the cost of having a programmer on staff.

Check out EZWebPlayer here.

End of a Year-long Project.

I just finalized the last episode of a project on which I've been working for one year. It was a patriotic, one-episode-per-day radio show featuring the book, America's History is His Story, by R.G. Yoho, the Western novel author.

Click on the picture to see more about the book.

The radio network on which the episodes air daily is here,
http://wvgvradio.com/. Look for the Program guide for times.

The book is a collection of little-known facts and well known American historical accounts expanded. It also fights against the face of history revisionists who just can't stand that America really is a Christian nation and that there is a reason that Washington DC is completely inundated with Bible quotes and scripture permanently embedded in the concrete and marble edifices that broadcast for all to see the truth of The Bible and God's involvement in the founding of this great country.

Best PhotoShop Tip for Your 2013 Vacation Photos!

My friend, Jim Harmer (more of a trusted acquaintance) has ferreted out a little known feature of PhotoShop that is a major find for the average vacation shooter.

You can take killer photos of cool structures without getting there at 5am to beat the other 10,000 tourists with the same idea.

Take a bunch of fixed, tripodded shots only a few seconds apart of the same scene, load them into Photoshop, and this little known feature will magically remove anything that was a moving object (like walking humans). I looked up the feature in my CS5; sure enough, it was there all the time. It even has a cool wizard that walks you through and even loads the right pics for you.

Click on the photos here to see Jim's article

Fit Every Video Perfectly Into Every Frame -- Every Time

Make it easy on yourself to get your video to web at the right size, the first time and every time.

A group of Player choices displayed by EZWebPlayer.com

The easiest way to handle fitting a video into a player on the Web properly so that there are no black filler bars on the sides, top or bottom, is to employ a web player that automatically senses your video's shape. My favorite web player is EZWebPlayer.com because it actually includes "Autodetect" as one of its default player profile settings. This is obviously a large help to all web video uploaders such as myself.

Creating videos that fit perfectly wherever they land is a lot like framing pictures. Nobody tries to frame an 8 x 10 portrait with a 12 x 12 frame. They don't match. You'd end up with something filling  the extra space by default; whatever was back there -- cardboard, paper, empty space -- whatever. And the same is true for fitting the video into its web player properly.

This short article explains a few basics so that the novice can get a better handle on how to proceed when placing videos on the Web.

Why the Confusion? Who's Idea Was This Anyway?

The video camera manufacturing community didn't have enough Monday morning planning sessions before they all started releasing their latest video camera creations on us, the buying public. Actually, the obverse is true; they are in hot competition with each other and each is trying to out-do the others in the never ending task of gaining our attention and more market share. Therefore, new features, formats and cosmetics are constantly being poured out the doors of Japanese, Taiwanese and Malaysian factories to be loaded onto the big ocean going cargo ships to be unloaded on California docks so that Best Buys all over The U.S. can eek out an ever decreasing profit margin to the millions of us who have to have the latest and greatest video gadget [ ** insert wind-sucking breath-rush here ** ].

Thus, we have a lot of different video cameras with a lot of different capabilities; including digital 35mm cameras that also double as really high end video cameras.

As far as frame size and shape goes, the result is that there is no longer a true standard default video frame size; it just no longer exists, because each manufacturer decided to have their cameras shoot in Wide as well as Standard, both of which can be anywhere from 1920 pixels wide and up, down to a postage stamp size of 100 pixels and smaller. There are some more heavily used shapes and frame sizes than others, but basically, the sky's the limit. This is actually a good thing as it allows us, the end users to have more choices.

So, when you pick up your video camera to start shooting for the first time, at what default size and shape is your camera set? Since no manufacturer is forced to follow the same "default" settings, there is no good all encompassing answer to this. You may not even know in what frame size you are shooting until hours of video have already been captured. And Heaven forbid that more than one person used the same camera, and someone changed the settings in mid project.

See the problem?

Compounding the issue is the fact that no two camera operators have the same level of expertise and understanding of

• How video works in general
• What will the video look like when it is deployed to the web or a DVD
• Is there a way to standardize all of the videos after they have been shot
• Why they were roped into being responsible for the company video in the first place

In reality, the higher number of cameras start out with a default video size and shape that will help your first video out of that camera to fit into either a 16:9 wide screen or 4:3 standard. But there is no guarantee.

Good news for existing footage.

There is some good news for the project manager who is stuck with minutes upon endless minutes of videos on one topic, but in eleven different size formats -- or even several different media, like VHS, DVD, 16mm film, etc. There are some streamlining ways to make good use of these different sized and formatted videos. But, the best scenario would be to plan ahead before shooting next time.

At the end of this article, I will briefly explain a "fix" for conforming several different video formats so that one can do something intelligent with them, in one project.

Getting it right before shooting.

Before shooting, decide how you want to share the video when it's all finished. Experienced producers have a grasp on what types of videos do well as Wide Screen, when one should use the standard 4:3 ratio, or when a custom size is preferred. After making that decision, one would set the camera to the desired format, whether it be wide screen, the older 4:3 ratio, or something custom.

If you do not have the luxury of choosing different shooting sizes because of equipment limitations, simply choose the highest quality that is appropriate and available so that you can post edit to whatever you need with as few quality issues as possible.

But, there are some things that you need to know in case you do have the ability to choose frame size and shape. The entire web and video industries are now geared for HD and wide screen. For all business purposes I wouldn't even consider 3D. Let's not go there. Unless you have a 3D-centric issue that requires 3D affects, stay away from it. 3D can severely increase the required post production and disc duplication budget, as well as critically reduce the size of the audience who will even watch your production.

All things being nominal, I would choose HD and shoot in the highest available quality with a frame size at 16:9 ratio, 1920 x 1080 square (1.0) square pixel shape. Shooting at these higher quality and larger sized settings allows for more choices in distribution.

I'm assembling an important project but have so many different source forms. What do I do?

The lowest common denominator for the highest desired production quality; that is your issue. You have a low resolution VHS mixed in with several higher res. DVD quality and higher sources. That lower res. VHS can be treated two ways to be useful. You can either keep it at its lower quality and include it inside the project as a smaller framed Picture-in-picture video, or you can bring the entire project down to the quality of the VHS. The second choice is not recommended, for quality issues.

I vote for the PIP option as treatment for the lower quality VHS clip. The audio will usually be very good, or at least good enough to understand everything, assuming it was recorded properly to begin with.

Other solutions of bringing all to one conformed post production style can include cropping, prerendering into a larger, more complex format like AVI before rendering down to your final h.264, or MP4, F4V or whatever you choose for your final render. Prerendering into an AVI codex, editing all in that form, and then rendering to an h.264 will allow you to adjust parameters like color level, hue, white balance adjustment, light level, black knee adjustment, etc.

These are all basics for a seasoned tech producer/director and should be handled by such if the project is important enough that it will be representative of a significantly important institution or company, and will be viewed by a large viewing audience, whether at an upcoming event, or to be made public in an archive reachable over a long period of time.

In the end, you will still have to make a decision when rendering for the Web to match your final render's size to the player size for the Web. If the player size for the web needs to fit into a 640 x 480 player, then the render should be at that size, or larger but at the same ratio, to avoid the video not fitting properly into the Web player.

"I thought you called this a short article", you might be thinking right now. Well, this is a relatively short article when one considers that for each type of video project, thousands of words can be written on work flow, audio tips, best rendering forms and codices depending on end use and archiving.

Today, a rough search and quick count using Google resulted in over 300 separate video file extensions. A file extension is the video file type in the form ".mov" which is a famous and well-used video file format created by Apple. Other examples are h.264, MP4, F4V, FLA, WMV, MJPG. Pages and pages can be written about each one of these, which I did not intend in this article.

Feel free to contact me with specific questions regarding video formats, editing, shooting and post production.