ZimmComm – New Media, LLC

I have absolutely no idea what Steve Mays (left) did to this poor tv cameraman to elicit this expression and I don’t want to know.

I think it’s just part of the wackiness that’s become iPhone-Mania.

See a lot of coverage of this historic event in the news.

Here’s a video Steve did this morning which includes an interview with Mr. Number One In Line:

I’m sure Steve will have more posted on his site later.

This is outside the local AT&T store here in Jefferson City, MO. There were people lined up even here to get their iPhone before anyone else. I think the store kind of overdid it on the security thing. They were locked up tight with a police guard outside. At 6pm they let in the first nine people. You can see number one going in this photo. Then they locked it back up again.

One of the reporters outside said that a customer stopped by to pay her bill but they wouldn’t let her in. Now that’s crazy.

While I was standing there taking these pics a guy who looked like the store manage walked up in an AT&T logo shirt. Even he had trouble getting in. He wouldn’t do an interview either.

I stopped first at another local AT&T authorized dealer and they said Apple wouldn’t send them phones for today’s launch. Why?

I need to buy one for the winner of a drawing we held in our trade show booth at the National Agri-Marketing Association convention a few months ago. I’m not standing in any line to wait though.

So why should you care? Apple is going to revolutionize mobile content delivery. That means the information and way you communicate with your clients. Think about it.

I did go to the Apple Store just now and got this message saying I need to come back later. I guess that’s what I’ll do.

ZimmNews is the monthly electronic update of all things ZimmComm New Media. If you’d like to be added to the list to receive it please send me an email.

If there is one word to describe ZimmComm this year it would be BUSY! And we LOVE it! Our clients are just fabulous to work with and even though we are working hard we are really enjoying our safari in this new media frontier.

So, what have we been doing lately? For one, we have a few more contract part-timers helping us out. John Davis, a 20-year veteran broadcast news reporter, has been posting on Domestic Fuel since January. He has been a great help. Also, a new media world professional by the name of Laura McNamara is now trained to help us with on-site events with photography, interviews and posting. She helped out with the Indy 500 and quickly became an event blogging pro!

Where have we been lately? Since NAMA, we’ve been to Dallas, Memphis, Atlanta, Kansas City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Des Moines, Lexington, Indianapolis, Ontario, Nashville, Washington DC and a soybean field near Laddonia, MO. Some of the highlights include – interviewing Jay Leno, using a BIG boy lens to shoot some awesome photos at the Indy 500, covering the Country Music Association Music Festival, and watching soybeans grow.

Watching soybeans grow? Yeah – you’ll read more about that on AgWired in the weeks to come.

Where are we going? Upcoming trips include: the Iowa Corn Indy 250, the Fuel Ethanol Workshop in St. Louis, the National Appaloosa Horse Show in Oklahoma City, the Cattlemen’s Beef Board summer meeting in Denver, the Ag Media Summit in Louisville, American Coalition for Ethanol in Minneapolis, Farm Progress Show, and IFAJ in Japan.

Ag Media Summit will feature two ZimmComm workshops – Blogging for Business and Podcasting for Publishers.

Sponsor opportunities – currently available for Ag Media Summit, ACE, Farm Progress and IFAJ. Be our sponsor for online coverage of these events on our websites and receive the kind of coverage described below. You have access to all the content we create to use for your own post-event purposes which can include your newsletter, website, commemorative DVD’s, custom loaded iPods, etc.

Updated rate cards – now available for DomesticFuel, AgWired and World Dairy Diary. Please contact Chuck and he’ll send you one and a custom proposal if you’d like.

Some recent event coverage summaries:

Indy 500 – 52 posts (2 websites), over 1,000 pictures, 1 online photo album (222 photos), 25 audio interviews
CMA Music Festival – 34 posts, 635 pictures, 1 online photo album (236 photos), 1 online slide show w/music (79 photos), 11 YouTube videos, 19 audio interviews
Propane Days – 12 posts, 38 pictures, 1 YouTube video, 9 audio interviews

ZimmNews is being emailed to over 1,600 of Chuck’s agricultural marketing industry contacts. These are very influential people in the biz. Hey, you’re getting it aren’t you? If you’d like to sponsor ZimmNews let Chuck know and he’ll work out a sweet deal!

That’s all for this issue of ZimmNews.

When it comes to Web 2.0 tools I know it’s easy to get confused with all the choices out there. Early on I picked WordPress as the online personal publishing platform of choice and apparently I made a decision a lot of people agree with. All our sites so far, either owned or for clients, have been built using this great tool. WordPress just came in first in the publishing category in Webware’s Top 100 Awards.

These are the best Web applications there are. We know because you told us. Over the course of 20 days in May and June, the community of Webware.com users voted for its favorite Web applications. These are the results: the top 100 Web apps, 10 in each of 10 categories, determined by Webware readers and the fans of the sites that made the final cut.There were more than 5,000 nominations for sites to be included in this awards program, which Webware’s editors pruned to a list of 250 finalists. Users then voted on those finalists–there were 489,467 votes cast.

In the media category two of my favorites came in at the top, YouTube and Flickr. Here’s where you can see all of the top 100.

One of the biggest growth areas for ZimmComm New Media has been in the area of event coverage. This is me at the CMA Music Festival last week doing just this very thing. I just had a potential client ask me to summarize what we offer in this area so I thought I’d post it here for you in case you’re wondering the same thing. If you’re interested in a quote for having us provide these services to you just give me a call.

Online Event Coverage

ZimmComm New Media offers a company or an organization a unique way to provide customers and members with near instantaneous online coverage of events that includes pictures, audio and video interviews, video of product displays and demonstrations and text summaries of activities. All this multi-media content is posted onto the organization’s blog site or ZimmComm will create a site for the event. Pictures can be uploaded to online photo albums using services like Flickr which allow visitors to search for individual photos or watch them as a slide show. Video clips can be uploaded and made available via services like YouTube which provides the hosting and a simple player to display the content. The audio may be posted in a click to listen format or in a podcast format where it can be easily found and listened to with popular podcast software like iTunes. All the content is hosted within very highly search engine optimized software/services making it easy to find with key word searches. The site would have a built in RSS feed allowing customers to subscribe to the posts made onto the site. If ZimmComm builds the site we would install web tracking software like Mint which is a very easy to use web accessible statistics option.

A ZimmComm “reporter” will attend the organizational event armed with cameras, recorders and computer. Working under the direction of staff the reporter will take pictures, record video clips and interviews and then edit, upload and post the content onto the website at every available opportunity. The number of daily posts would be determined by the event and the time available for posting. Although the reporter will be equipped with a wireless computer data card it is recommended that the organization provide high speed internet access and a place centrally located to the event activities to set up a secure work station. This could be a media room already set up for the event.

After the event concludes all ZimmComm content (images/audio/video) is provided to the organization on dvd for archiving or use in other organizational communication mechanisms like commemorative event CD’s, newsletters, brochures, main website, slide shows, etc. A very cool idea is to pre-load the content onto iPods which may be given as gifts to significant customers or sponsors or used in drawings or other contests.

It looks like DSL is helping pave the way for a big growth in the number of households with broadband internet access according to a story on eMarketer.

The number of broadband subscribers will reach 567 million worldwide by 2011, up from the current 285 million, according to In-Stat’s “Broadband Gets Big: Global Broadband Subs Hit 285 Million” report. New subscribers totaled 65 million in the 12 months prior to May 2007.

I look at that as justification to fuel the growth of the use of new media by companies wishing to connect to their customers and members.

Here’s an interesting report on how online visitors are using video. I think it adds to the case for why a video podcast is on the minds of a lot of corporate communicators today.

The Kelsey Group just released the results of a survey they conducted which says “59 percent of those surveyed claimed to watch online video, and more than half said they engage in some sort of response activity, such as visiting a Web site, going to a physical location or making a purchase.”

How about a video podcast and use YouTube as part of the distribution mechanism? And keep in mind that Apple TV will be able to stream videos from YouTube. Are you keeping up?

According to the report, production companies such as Spot Runner and TurnHere offer to produce and distribute video ads for small businesses at price points that are significantly lower than those of traditional advertising, bringing video advertising within the grasp of many small businesses for the first time. The report reasons that the value of video may be easier to comprehend for many small businesses compared with some forms of online performance-based marketing.

Additional conclusions offered in The Kelsey Group’s online video report include:
– Small-business video advertising can combine the traditional strengths of pull-based directional marketing, the Internet’s targeting capabilities, and the emotional and dramatic power of television. Given the demographics of broadband users, the online audience reached by these ads would also be well-educated, affluent and more likely to engage in pull-based content retrieval.

You can find an executive summary of their white paper on the subject online.