First, let me back up a second.

I’ve been getting a lot of calls and emails lately from vendors wanting to make me an app version of my University’s alumni magazine. The magazine apps I’ve seen have been mostly flip-book PDF style apps and they’re expensive to create and maintain.

While driving home in the snow last night, I had a realization. Yesterday, Apple released new software called iBooks Author, free software that will allow people to create multimedia rich books that can be read in the free iBooks app on the iPad.

The light went off. While Apple is aiming this at textbook authors and publishers, there’s no reason we can’t easily create rich multimedia versions of our college magazines using it.

So, last night, I did it. I downloaded iBooks Author and in 15 minutes had a story laid out including photos, an interactive slide show and dynamic image with hot spots and text.

The application is super simple to use, easier than Word, and creating the dynamic elements is very easy. Here’s the interface, I had a few extra guides turned on.

As you work, you can preview your work on an actual iPad, if you have one. You connect it, and a proof shows up in your iBooks 2 app. You can then scroll through the pages in the real app, interact with the elements, highlight, take notes and so on.

This just changed the game.

I made an iBook in half an hour. Imagine if I spent an hour on it.

If I’m not charging for my magazine iBook, and I imagine many institutions wouldn’t, you can distribute the file on your website. If you want to sell it, you’ve got to go through Apple (and they’ll take their 30% cut, thank you very much.)

iBooks Author requires a Mac running OS 10.7.

While meant for K-12 and textbooks, I think they’ve given us higher ed folks a nice present as well.

In Alaska, an oil drilling team struggle to survive after a plane crash strands them in the wild. Hunting the humans are a pack of wolves who see them as intruders.

I was watching a trailer for the film, and was surprised to see the end credits for the trailer:

and this:

I can’t decide if this kind of social media marketing is genius or dumb.

What is the marketing gain for this movie if I tweet something with the hashtag #MickeyLiddell? Will that influence my social circle to go see this film?

I’ve been trying out the new Facebook timeline feature for my profile since before the holiday break. Now that I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, there are things I like about it and things I don’t. I like the header design, and the fact that you can get a lot of information about a persion in a quick glance. Below the fold, so to speak, it goes a bit pear-shaped. It’s tough, when scrolling quickly, so see what’s newly posted and what’s older.

Some items are pinned to a center line with a dot, signifying their timing, but other boxes seem to float, such as the friends box and other information, such as recent tracks I’ve played in Spotify.

Anyways, as you can see above, one of the key parts of the Facebook timeline profile is the header graphic, which is something you can select. I must have gone through a dozen photos until I found the right one. In the end, I ended up tweaking it quite a bit in Photoshop to get it to fit just right. My photo is one I took when I was in Cardiff, Wales in 2009.

I would guess that in the next few months, as these become more prevalent across Facebook, we’ll see them start to roll out to fan pages as well. I’m not sure how the timeline will work for brands, as I think some of the display of information on these pages can get a bit confusing.

Despite that, when the time comes I thought we’d all want to customize that header for our brands/colleges/universities/whatever, so I created a Photoshop document template all set up and ready for you to design with. I laid out the “notch” where your profile picture is inserted by Facebook so you can make sure text or other graphical elements that are important aren’t being covered up.

Here’s a ZIP file.

If you’d also like, here’s a torrent version.

I saw this video today that really breaks down what the bill is and what it will mean to web users. I can imagine higher ed sites could be targeted quite a bit.

We’ve been testing Gravity Forms here as part of our WordPress CMS, allowing users easy access to be able to make forms and manage them right inside WordPress. So far, our tests have been positive, and we’re set to open it up to all our users.

We’ve run into a challenge though as we get ready to roll this out. When set up and turned on in one of our sites (we run multi-site), only administrative users could access and see Gravity Forms.

We set up our campus users as editors, so they can’t go and switch themes and install rogue plugins. Even though the plugin was installed, editors couldn’t see Gravity Forms. They could see all our other functions and custom post types, but not Gravity Forms.

I wrote to their support, who suggested I use yet another plugin. That’s fine if I was just running one site, but at 140 sites and growing, I can’t be spending all day in that plugin turning things on and off. I figured there’d have to be a way to give the editor role access.

Enter some code. It’s one of the things that I really love about WordPress. With a bit of good code, you can do a lot of different things.

I added the following to my functions.php file, making Gravity Forms see that the user role of editor had the correct privileges and could run it. After some trial and error, I found the following snippet of code worked for an editor:

	function add_grav_forms(){
		$role = get_role('editor');
		$role->add_cap('gform_full_access');
	}
	add_action('admin_init','add_grav_forms');

So far, so good. I can make new forms, see entries and more as an editor, and I think I won’t have to manage this with a plugin, which is good to avoid that overhead where possible. Here’s what an editor sees now. The other things (taters, tots, etc) are custom post types we’ve developed.

I can add a new thing to my higher ed career list – taking a TV commercial from inception through editing and into production and onto the air.

The spot was written by our marketing team here at John Carroll University and shot and edited by my long-time friends at Route1a. It aired on cable and broadcast TV in a few midwest cities.

An awesome experience from start to finish.

I often find myself transcoding video into all sorts of different formats, and today I found myself needing to get a video into FLV format for streaming.

While I usually just upload my H.264 MP4′s into a place like YouTube, occasionally I need a different format. I’ve tried all sorts of tools, including FFMPEGX and several online tools such as encoding.com, but I was never completely thrilled with the results. They always take a lot of fine-tuning and Ffmpegx, for example, always seemed to make my videos darker, which wasn’t good.Today, I tried out Adobe’s Media Encoder CS5.5 to take a QuickTime H.264 and get it into FLV. Media Encoder CS5.5 is really geared towards exporting right from Premiere, but it will take external inputs, which is what I did. I was pleasantly surprised by the experience – the process couldn’t have been simpler – I dragged in my file, selected a preset output and hit go. Seriously, that was it.

After the render, I tried the same conversion again, this time changing the preset values and doing a second pass-through at the highest quality level. I was surprised at not only how fast the encode went*, but the file size was very reasonable for this file – which was originally 1280×720 high definition.

Likes:

I like the ease of use and the very large number of presets available in Media Encoder. If doing a simple transcode, it’s easy to get going yet you can also heavily customize the experience. There are presets for video sharing services such as YouTube and Vimeo, which is nice. It will even take Photoshop files, image files, MP3′s and more.

While I haven’t used it with Premiere, I like that you can bring in other file formats and set up a render queue. Setting up a set of renders for web, mobile, and TV usage is a breeze.

Finally, I like that you can set up a watch folder and Media Encoder will start a pre-determined set of actions if a file appears. I could see this being useful if you, for example, had it watch a shared Dropbox folder and then spit out a mobile-friendly video back into that folder for your team.

Recommendations:

Adobe, if you’re listening, I had a few ideas in using this software.

I like that you can have Media Encoder FTP a file to a destination once it’s complete, but it’d be very handy if you could also set Media Encoder to send a file to an Amazon S3 bucket. This would be a nice piece in a workflow if a video could be put in the cloud automatically upon render.

Second, one thing I liked about Final Cut back in the day was the ability to set up a few computers using XGrid to distribute a render to a few different workstations. We’ve got a few machines sitting around that could potentially be used as a pseudo-render farm. It would take the load off my machine and make transcodes much faster. A double-pass, highest quality encode of a 3 minute HD video from H.264 to FLV still took 12 or 13 minutes on my pretty decently powered iMac. To split that off to a few machines would be nice, especially if I’m doing several sizes/flavors/versions of a particular video.

TL/DR:

Adobe’s Media Encoder CS5.5 is simple to use and has lots of presets, yet you can customize it and it will work with video, audio, images and more. It is going to be a piece of software I see myself using quite a bit.

Here are some screenshots from the app. Click on each one to see a larger version.

* – to be fair, my iMac has 12GB of RAM.

Disclosure: Adobe provided me a copy of Media Encoder to try. This did not influence my thoughts on the product or this review. No payment was accepted or offered for this review, nor was there an expectation of one.

A local Saab dealership is holding a contest where 100 people each week receive a Saab to drive around. Our goal as drivers is to get people to be our “fan” on a contest page and to snap the 2 QR codes on the car, one on each of the back windows and one on the interior (which is worth more points.) Contestants also receive points if someone scans a QR code on the car and then visits one of the contest sponsors where there’s another code that earns the customer a discount or benefit. The people I’ve shown the car to so far have been most excited by the fact they get a free coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts if they scan the car. Finally, I’ll receive points for each time I post a photo of the car. I’ve put up a few so far, and the process has been smooth and easy.

After a semi-final round, finalists will select 1 of 5 boxes, each containing a key. If the key opens the Saab, you win the car. Personally, I don’t really need a new car, but I could use the money to re-do our basement, trashed this year in floods.

Anyways, to play the part of good contestant, I need to ask for your help and tap into my social capital. Here’s how you can help. It’s okay if you’re not in the northeast Ohio area or even in the USA, you can “like” me from anywhere, as well as scan the QR code. You might not get a free coffee, but you’ll be helping me out.

First, visit my contest page. Scroll down to the lower right, where you’ll see this area:

Click on that “become a fan” link, where you’ll be prompted for an email address. I’ve been promised the emails won’t be spammed by the dealership, but to be safe, use that second or third Gmail account you have for stuff like this.

Second, scan this QR code on your phone:

If you don’t want to go through all the trouble, just visit this link, which the QR code takes you to. You’ll be asked for your location, so it can find the closest sponsor location to you.

So, that’s how you can help. Now, let me put on my marketing hat for a bit.

So far, the contest has been managed and handled very well, which is key. They held an orientation session last week for participants where the rules were explained, forms completed and there was food. There have been constant email communications from the dealer to participants with updates and schedules, which has been helpful.

On Sunday, when I picked up my car, there was a good check-in system, where the last of the paperwork was completed and any questions I had were answered. From there, I was off the pick-up area, where my car was brought up from the lot. I was walked through the vehicle and off I went. All in all, a good system was in place and there were plenty of people staffing the various areas so there was no wait. I’ll return the car on Saturday and expect the same setup upon check-in.

From a technology standpoint, the contest site is set up well, works well in mobile browsers and image uploads by contestants are stored and served from Amazon S3. I don’t know if this is being run by a national company that sells this product to local dealerships, but it’s put together very well and the design is nice.

So, I’m two days in so far. The car’s fun to drive (and fast, thank you, Turbo.) I wish it had a hookup for my iPhone, like my Hyundai does, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Thanks for your help. I’ll update later in the week on my progress.

I’m going to be honest here. I haven’t been swept up in the Google+ hype of the last few months. I just haven’t, I don’t know, gotten it. To me, thus far, I haven’t seen the killer app or need that Google+ fills that Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn doesn’t. So, I haven’t spent a lot of time there, and have seen lots of duplicate content across my various networks.

This week, Google allowed brands/companies/schools to start having their own Facebook-Fan-Page-ish Pages inside Google+. I, like many other web and marketing folks, created a page for my University. The setup process was fairly simple, and I had the profile setup in a few minutes.

Now what?

Do I re-post content we’re already posting to over 5,000 fans on Facebook, or should we be creating content just for Google+? These are the types of questions that I guess many teams are now wrestling with.

Having just spent a small amount of time, I have some questions about managing a Google+ page.

1. Am I the only person who can administrate this page? I see that one the circles/streams available on my Page is one called “Team Members,” but its not clear if I add people to that stream/circle if they are given the right to post on the page.

2. My page displays the 2 people I’ve put in the Team Members circle on our home page, and shows that we have 11 followers, which isn’t bad for two hours. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing a way to see who the followers are.

I can now see who is following me, and choose to add them to one of my circles. This is a marked difference from Facebook’s model, which is more one way the two services are different. If you’re a fan of JCU on Facebook, as an administrator I don’t have access to your page and personal info. Not sure what the right model will be here on Google+.

What circles should I put them, since I’m encouraged to do that in the Google+ model. Students? Alumni? Faculty? Friends? Parents? Sounds like a minefield and a timesink having to determine what bucket a person should go in.

3. Where are the analytics? Facebook’s insights are pretty decent, but so far, I’m not seeing anything in terms of analytics for my Google page. How many times are my posts being viewed? What are the demographics, broadly speaking, of my audience on this site? What are the trends. Google has a killer app in Analytics, it should be really tied in here. If there isn’t marketing stats available here, I don’t see us really spending a lot of time focusing on our Google+ page if we can’t determine the ROI or value of having it.

4. I can add video and photos, but wouldn’t it make sense if I could link my institutional YouTube account and have videos I share there automatically get pulled in here? I could manually share them, but that’s an extra step that seems unnecessary. I should be able to hook the two together.

Honestly, at this point, I’m rather unimpressed with Google+’s page offerings. I think Farhad Manjoo said it well in his post at Slate:

I know this sounds unfair: Facebook had years to add all the features it has now, so why should we demand that Google create a perfect substitute at launch time? But that’s just the thing—taking on a behemoth like Facebook is an unfair fight. Google seems to think about its social network in the same way it thinks of any other kind of software—as a “product” that it can design step-by-step, starting with a small number of innovative features and working up from there.

We as web and marketing folks have been spoiled by Facebook and their fan page offerings, so much so that we expect any competing, new product to have all the same, if not better, functionality.

I’ll be keeping an eye on our Google+ page and placing content there, but it won’t be the first place I think to post content, which Facebook is now for us.

Jack Daniel’s Does Letterpress from Aggrodesign on Vimeo.

Made by Hand / No 2 The Knife Maker from Made by Hand on Vimeo.

TL/DR: A few videos about handmade design work and a few dubstep videos.