Selling with Content

How to use LINEAR MASKING to tailor your HITACHI HDTV camera’s color reproduction

All  Broadcast & Professional HITACHI HDTV camera models can adjust their color reproduction using seven different color masking or matrix presets. You can use the same presets to adjust all your HITACHI cameras at your facility so their output has the same color reproduction characteristics.

When you received your new HITACHI HDTV cameras they came with the MASKING preset we call, “standard.” This is one of the presets our factory believes optimizes the color  reproduction of your HITACHI cameras. But some of the other presets may have more appeal depending on the kind of shooting you do. It’s easy to switch back and forth between them, so you can try them out with the shooting environment you are in. Here are the steps to selecting these MASKING presets using the on-screen menu display:

The MENU should be visible and superimposed on the video output from the PIX BNC on your CCU or the MON BNC directly on the camera head. 

 1. Navigate to the TOP MENU and place the cursor on COLOR:

2. Select  COLOR to get: 

3. Place the cursor on and select MASKING to get:

4. Notice the MASKING 1 page above, place the curson on that line and navigate to:

5. On the MASKING 2 page you will find a line item called PRESET TYPE.  Navigate to and place the cursor on that item.  Scroll the data control to select the preset masking desired.

Below are picture and a brief description of each of the  7 preset color configurations you can select.

Masking OFF (no color correction)

 

Hitachi Standard

Compared with the other presets, colors will look a little warmer overall, with skin tone saturated just a little bit beyond basic skin tone. 

 

ITU – 709

International Telecommunication Union (ITU) does research into color reproduction of cameras and color saturation.  ITU standards apply to Europe United States Japan, it's a worldwide standard. Most high end cameras have a preset that will shoot on this standard. 

 

EBU

If you want your colors to have a European flavor try this. This preset represents the color standard created by the European Broadcast Union (EBU). This standard has a little less saturation in the skin tones, but more color saturation on cyan and blue. If you shoot a lot of sports of green field with a blue sky this preset is worth a try.

 

SMPTE – 240M

This preset is based on SMPTE, created in North America. This preset works well if you are broadcasting or streaming standard definition, because it has less saturation in the skin tones.

 

SMPTE – WIDE

This is the second preset based on SMPTE, also created in North America. In a similar color balance to  NTSC with emphasis on reds compared to green, skin tones might look a little bit greenish.

 

NTSC

This preset is best if you are shooting on standard definition.

 

The fundamental theory of using a LINEAR MATRIX to define your HITACHI HDTV camera’s color reproduction characteristics is that these adjustments do not and, should not affect your luminance values such as Gain, Gamma, Flare and Black Balance.

This is just the basics. If you are more ambitious, all HITACHI HDTV cameras’ colorimetry also can be adjusted via Six Vector color correction masking as well as a third function called Skin-Tone masking. 

How blog content became a pool company's best salesperson

This is  great video produced by Michael Seltzer, owner of the Social Media Examiner. Seltzer interviews Marcus Sheridan, owner of River Pools and Spas who tells his story of how posting blog content, as part of an inbound marketing program, turnred his business around after it tanked in 2008 when the recession hit.  

There are several videos about Sheridan's story, but for me, this one stands out because Seltzer digs out the details. We find out how content became Sheridan’s best saleperson, and exactly what kind of content he posted. I especially like this story because it is about selling swimming pools, not the latest high tech gear that has a lot of intrinsic interest. No, nothing with that much sizzle, swimming pools. If this approach can work selling swimming pools, it can help sell anything.   

 

Read all of Seltzer's helpful commentary about his interview: How to Use Content to Increase Your Sales

User stories: great for sales support, poor for SEO or converting sales leads

Of all the content that companies create for marketing, “user stories” confuse the most. The confusion comes from its extremely uneven performance at different marketing functions.

For salespeople, a well written story about a successful user, who has a situation similar to a potential customer, is a big help in closing a sale. But buoyed by positive feedback from the sales department many marketers overuse this type of content and apply it for less appropriate functions. The problem is that while customers in “similar situations” find user stories interesting, customers with dissimilar situations do not.

If your user story is written about a Fortune 500 customer, potential small business readers will yawn. Don’t expect a big city retailer to be interested in reading a user story about a small town store. Other kinds of content more easily cross these divides, for example, trend stories in a small market can be as relevant in a big one. I spend many years with a trade magazine where we were always amazed at the extremely low readership scores that user stories received. Where routine articles in the publication would be read by anywhere from 40 to 60% of subscribers, user stories consistently received scores in the 10-15% level.

In a study I will be releasing through Alethea Research in January, I tracked the customers of 34 different suppliers in a market and asked them to check if they felt if supplier provided “user stories,” motivated them to be more likely to want to buy products from the sponsoring suppliers. About a third (36%) said user stories positively motivated them, but this was a significantly lower score than many other content forms received. In addition, the customer bases of the individual 34 companies had different scores. For the customers of the company with the lowest score, only 29.6% said user stories positively motivated them. At the other end of the spectrum, 49.3% of customers of a different company said they were motivated by user stories. That's about a 20% spread between them. Lower scores seemed to go to companies whose products and solutions were better established and understood, companies with products that were generally newer or more unusual received higher scores. There seems to be less interest in reading user stories about prodcuts that are well understood or more familiar.

Bottom line: marketers need user stories. If you can create a series of them covering the typical usage situations of your products you can help your sales staff close sales. Keep in mind that the popularity of user stories will vary company to company, and product to product, depending on how new, unusual, or newsworthy products are. But just because your sales staff loves user stories don’t think they will help with your web site's search engine optimization (SEO), build readership for your newsletter, or provide down-loadable content to fuel a lead generation program. For those functions, there are other kinds of content that will do a better job. To hear more about my content usage study, sign up for my "Marketing Broadcast" newsletter.

Exploiting content marketing's dirty secret: most content is a commodity.

Content marketing is becoming a victim of its own success. As more organizations invest more in content development (Hey, everybody's got a web site!) the sheer volume of content being released goes way up. The more content that is created means that more of it will be similar and thus it becomes a commodity.

The number of websites alone has doubled in the past three years (chart below). More sites, more content.

Total Sites Across All Domains
August 1995 - November 2010

 

Today, smart content developers are shifting their efforts from content creation to UNIQUE content creation.

Research your market.

Before you can create content that is new, you need to know what kind of information is common. It is not enough to understand your reading habits, you need to know about everyone else's.

Hire journalists to tell your story.

There is big difference between a company announcement and a great story. Journalists are trained to find unique stories. It is a skill in its own right.

Hire bloggers to tell your story.

People who write in a market every day know what is commonly covered and what is not. Bloggers can often find different stories.

If you can become a provider of unique content you change the dynamic of the content flow around you. Why? Because you become a content originator, not just a content repackager.

In 1997 my book, Tough Calls, came out. As the first national release of an unknown business writer expectations were low. My publisher told me most business books sell less than 3,000 copies in their lifetime and if I could hit that number I should be happy.

But my book had a secret weapon build into it: an imaginative survey that offered new insight into problem customer behavior.

Within a year of the book's release I had been asked to share survey insights with appearances on CNN, CNBC, Wall Street Journal TV (twice), and The Fortune Business report. Book sales were bolstered by international translations. The Korean edition alone hit the 3,000 copy mark.

You can click on the picture to see a video clip from four of my 1997 television appearances. Unique content sells!

 

A history of content marketing in under 3 minutes

Digital media has made it easy for brands to embrace content marketing and tell their story. But companies have created user centric content for hundreds of years before. This short video timelines the history of company created content starting with "The Furrow," a customer magazine published by John Deere in 1895, right up to the present. Along with a rocking sound track from Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute this video offers great perspective.   

  

Message to marketers: "We are all publishers now."

Content creation for traditional media and public relations is very different from creating content for a content marketing program. In this short video, content marketing guru Joe Pulizzi explains the difference.

 

Advertising in an fragmented world is more work

A study from Bain & Company found that in 2005, US commercial websites offered just over 200 million ad impressions for sale to marketers. Three years later (2008), there were four times as many impressions offered (about 800 million).

During that same 3 year period the cost of buying a banner ad in terms of CPM (cost per thousand) dropped by half. While lower costs are good for marketers, the added complexity means more time spent int he evaluation process.

Targeting online audiences gets harder with every passing year because there are more online destinations competing for attention and in need of evaluation. This trend has not slowed down. From 2008 until 2011 the number of online destinations has increased by about 40%.

But there is also opportunity here. As media become more fragmented it becomes easier to make your media buys more tightly focused. Want to reach a highly influential sub-group in your target audience? There could be an influential newsletter or blog. The key is to constantly evaluate the medial landscape in your markets. Sound like a lot of extra work? Yes. But there is opportunity to gain advantage for those willing to spend the time. Download the Bain study

Content creation becomes the top SEO tactic

The series of "Panda" changes to the Google search algorithm that started in February 2011 have shaken up the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world. The stated goal of the changes is to reduce the ranking of sites that post a lot of reused content, and reward sites with original content.

This change may have shaken up how marketers see SEO as well.

In 2010 when the "Marketing Sherpa Search Marketing Benchmark Survey" asked respondents from search agencies to pick the "most effective" SEO (search engine optimization) tactic, 83% chose “keyword research” as the top selection.

One year later, in the 2011 version of the same survey, there were some small changes. The name of the "top box" selection was changed from "most effective" to "very effective," and the mix of tactics changed.

But the biggest change: marketers now consider "content creation" as the top SEO tactic pulling ahead of last year's winner, "Keyword" choice.

In just one year, "content creation" has clearly moved to the top of the SEO agenda. Blogging, the tactic renown for pumping fresh content into websites, more than doubled in importance moving from 15% in 2010 to 31% in 2011.

While content moved up, several "traditional" SEO tactics showed big drops. “Keyword search” dropped from 83% to 43%, title tags from 50% to 42%.

If you want better SEO, think about your content!

See the 2010 result See the 2011 result

Get a Recession Sales Strategy...for free!

It's free! Three training videos of Josh Gordon being interviewed by Susanna Pollack, SVP at BBC America on how to develop a sales strategy for the recession.

These programs were produced by the social media network, The Customer Collective and sponsored by Oracle Corporation. Originally they were behind a registration wall, but not anymore.

Just click to a landing apge where you can play all three videos and download free materials.

In addition, download Josh Gordon's Research study "What is Your Recession Sales Strategy" off the Oracle webiste.

Is your company newsletter "all about us"?

How many company sponsored newsletters are regularly read? Since most are promotional content packaged in newsletter form, not many. These, "all about us" newsletters contain news about the marketer’s new products and new sales as well as stories about company personnel, testimonials, and user stories.

While this kind of information is interesting to people inside the marketer’s company, customers often see it as just promotion. How many people are thrilled to get ongoing promotions in their e-mail in box? Not many. 

Marketers who use newsletters as a promotional tool are missing the bigger opportunity of creating a newsletter that acts as a direct channel to customers. It is not hard to do. Instead of sending promotional newsletters, build ones with content which is 80% non-commercial information that customers want to read and 20% company promotion. When customers are sent information they want to read about, they often look forward to receiving it. When newsletters with customer centric content are sent out: 

• Customers read them more regularly.
• Newsletter open rates go up.
• More customers subscribe. 
• More customers stay subscribed.
• Newsletters can be sent out more frequently (2x per month or weekly). 
• The newsletter builds a positive brand image.
• No one gets accused of being a spammer.
• When the newsletter carries a promotion, it goes to a wider audience that is more receptive to the sponsors messages.  

A newsletter that first follows the informational needs of customers and not the promotional needs of the sponsoring company open an ongoing marketing channel of communication to customers. Creating a channel to customers it is a much bigger win than just sending promotions and hoping for the best.