Nowadays when marketing online, video has to be part of your arsenal. But appearing in your own video can be daunting, and, you may feel the need to outsource the video production in order to get a professional look and feel.

This can be slow and inflexible. Imagine you’ll spend time and money getting a great video made, only to find you have to go around the same process in order to make a change to it, which isn’t practical.

There will be times when a professional video is required, but for many of the every day, quick videos that you need, you can do worse than use a service like Animoto.

We use Animoto often, and feel we’ve pushed it to its limits as far as communication is concerned. To do well with it, you will need a PRO account. Without a PRO account you can’t use the videos you create on your commercial sites. Note though, that even with a PRO account you cannot create videos for your commercial clients. Each commercial site has to have it’s own PRO account. I feel its important to point that out.

Animoto’s Good Points

The first good thing to say about Animoto is its ease of use. Anyone can make a convincing video with it, but most people only use Animoto for trailer type videos. I’ve used them for communication videos too, with some success.

1. Anyone can make a video with Animoto
2. Anyone can make a video with Animoto quickly
3. You just upload some photos and a couple of very short video clips
4. Add some text
5. Select some music or upload your own
6. Select a style
7. Then click create – your video – 5 mins later it’s ready

Animoto’s Less Good Points

Here’s my wishlist for Animoto :

1. I’d like to see voice added to Animoto. Right now you can really only do music effectively.
2. Animoto have recently added a lot more video styles to the PRO account but they could do with even more.
3. I’d like to see more stock images and video clips provided – as in hundreds more, with a greater variety of background color. A lot of the video clips are dark and these don’t look good in mostly light colored video styles, and vice versa.
4. There isn’t enough room for text. Animoto only allows for text slides with two lines of text – 22 characters on the top line and 30 on the bottom. This is quite restrictive.
5. Animoto does not allow for transparency so you can ‘t do anything clever with text overlaid on images dynamically, for example.

Tips On Using Animoto

1. Get a PRO account – you can’t do anything until you do that.
2. Write a lit of points you want to communicate using two lines of 22 characters and then 30 characters.
3. Select some photos and either have the same number of photos as texts, OR fewer photos/videos than texts. I find that it’s better to have more textual slides and only to use a few images/videos to illuminate your written ideas.
4. Don’t forget you can stretch an idea across two or three text slides (given the current restriction on text size
5. Use instrumental music only as music with words will detract from your written message

Some Examples of What I Call Communication Animoto Videos

This is a review for MarketMeTweet. Before I get into it, I think it desperately needs a new version which is now predicted for June 28th 2010. The interface is difficult to use but the idea behind the product is excellent, so read on. Click the image on the left for a video preview of the upcoming version 2.0 features of MarketMeTweet.

A few months back a new Twitter Client was released which looked good in theory. It’s name was MarketMeTweet. When it was first released apparently Twitter changed their mind on a deal they’d made with the developers and removed the means for MarketMeTweet to provide (for me), it’s key selling point – individual linking out for users’ tweets.

When this happened I put MarketMeTweet to one side and have only today picked it back up again. Thankfully the developers managed soon after launch to get Twitter to reinstate the necessary permissions and so pass true Tweet branding onto users.

Up until now I’ve been using TweetDeck exclusively to send and receive tweets. TweetDeck looks like this and has a great user interface:

Take a Closer Look at Some Individual Tweets

Note that each TweetDeck tweet is branded with a clickable link to the Twitter client that was used to send the Tweet. In these cases, these are the Web, Echofon and TweetDeck and .

If a user clicks on the link (as indicated by the pink arrows above), they’ll be taken back to Twitter, Echofon and TweetDeck respectively.

MarketMeTweet Allows Branded Tweets Back to Your Own Site

Now that I’ve set up an account for our Slickr Flickr WordPress Plugin, you can see that my tweets from that account are linked back to the Slickr Flickr Website. The blue arrow shows you the link where normally you see a link to TweetDeck or similar.

When you buy MarketMeTweet and set it up, you can add one or more Twitter accounts. For each Twitter account you create an application (which is just a way of saying that you will be specifying MarketMeTweet as the application to Twitter, but parameterized with your link). Once that is done, anything you tweet will contain the link out (but of course you have to be using the MarketMeTweet client for this to work).

What Sucks About MarketMeTweet?

I really don’t like the user interface. Take a look :

• At the time of writing, it does not give tooltips when you hover over some buttons
• When you schedule a Tweet there is no log of that having happened in the schedule box.
• The reply campaign doesn’t indicate which reply template was sent.
• The user interface window is not resizeable – it’s quite small (compared to TweetDeck which is customizable) and everything in it is squashed up.

These were my first impressions. Assuming I can hone the use of the Reply Campaigns I can see this would a great way to start getting relevant followers. The user interface does seem a little clunky to look at and to use but it’s going to improve with version 2 which is due out very soon.

The Good News! There’s A New Version Coming Out Soon

The developers have cited this list of planned updates :

• Resizable interface much like other rival management tools
• Tab Based Layout
• Tweeting from multiple Accounts simultaneously.
• Custom Search Panels
• Faster interface
• Moveable panes
• Custom location targeting, – very exciting for marketing
• Email alerts, you’ll be able to get email alerts for all sorts of things, searches, @replies
• Facebook, posting to facebook and even posting to fan pages
• Google URL builder
• More URL shorteners, going to give you TINY URL, OWLY and more.
• Custom Reply templates for reply campaigns (enhanced a lot).
• Enhance following and unfollowing to make it so much easier.
• Searching twitter bio’s for matches (very cool)
• ping.fm integration

The price is currently $59 but the developers have said it will be going up in the last week of June 2010 when version 2.0 comes out. Better get your MarketMeTweet now as it’s a one off payment which will include the upgrade to V2.0. And judging by the new features and the developer’s enthusiasm for the product, I think this is a winner and I’ll be using it for my marketing on Twitter.

This blog post contains affiliate links. I don’t believe in promoting anything I don’t use myself so you won’t find desperate over enthusiastic product reviews on this site. If you click on a link and subsequently buy, I may be compensated.

I’ve just received an invitation to sign up to a new publishing website called Fortitude. Yet another article publisher?

It’s an obvious thing to say but you never know with new sites – they can be they the next big thing or the next flop. Should you pay to sign up up? Certainly if you do, you can play your part in the creation of great quality articles and maybe even get paid.

Fortitude is run by the current owner of Qondio which is a relatively successful mini publishing site. Qondio publishes intel rather than full on articles and allows you to generate backlinks based on short pieces of quality writing.

More About Fortitude

There are two ways to join Fortitude. You can pay for a year (just over $23), or sign up for free. But you can only write articles if you pay for an account so I just paid for mine. My motivation is that I want my articles to generate backlinks for SEO purposes. If you sign up for free you can’t contribute articles but you can still be an affilliate for Fortitude. It isn’t a multi-level affiliate program but it does have what they refer to as strong residuals.

They state that if any articles you write make the front page (due to them being considered good enough to get there) you will be paid between $10 and $100 for each. An article makes the front page if human reviewers (the members of Fortitude) say it should. So it should be fair and the quality should also be maintained.

Look At These Article Categories

Another difference with this particular site is that they categorize articles in a different way to most others. Normally if you post an article you have to put it into a box according to it’s subject; politics, blogging, programming, cooking for example. But on Fortitude you categorize an article as one of the following :

Well, nice that they’re included but I don’t suppose many advertisements will make it to the front page!

That aside, this new site should be good for your online marketing efforts. When an article is submitted it can have up to 10 external links appended to it (all are nofollow) which means you can link out to your own web properties where appropriate. If the content is quality – as it must be – people might actually READ it. So your links may actually get clicked on a by a real and interested human being. Not that I am anti-robot but trashy $3 article robot bait is taking over the internet, don’t you think?

Further each article can contain up to 25 images.

Maybe Fortitude is a small step in the right direction.