Are you traveling this holiday season? Be sure to check out the Southwest Airlines Blog for some Holiday Travel Tips, including a humorous, but very useful, holiday packing video. There are some great tips here: Do you know the 3-1-1 rule? Did you know you’re not supposed to wrap gifts you plan to take with you? What’s the best way to breeze through security?
Now this is a subject that I can get into… Let’s see, small electronic devices that can make telephone calls, act as my personal information manager, guide me on my travels with GPS navigation, email, chat and instant message, not to mention thousands of other uses that could be performed on the hand held mobile device of our choice! Not a bad set of subject matter to create a blog for, when you first think about it.
Most of the time when we get calls from customers who want blogs, we have to ask the simple, three-letter question. “WHY?” As Handango called out in their very first post, “there are more than 110 million blogs already and 175,000 new ones created every day.” It’s no secret to anyone capable of performing a simple google search, that blogs are becoming almost another form of SPAM. We all agreed at the time that Handango was a prime candidate to enter the blogging community, but the questions behind the “WHY” were the “what, how, who, and who cares?”.
To answer these questions we first performed a little research on the general market to understand the language and contexts for which users communicate. We explored the subjects and the material. Even before we looked at any competitors, it started to become obvious as to where the opportunity came to play for the world’s largest hand held software provider to make its social media debut. In so many categories, blogging is a field of copy cats. There are millions of content poachers who seemingly try to mask their poaching by simply referencing someone else’s authentic content, taking advantage of linking, tagging, and aggregating topics. While there’s a plethora of technical data, reviews, and product comparison information out there, it seems the market was severely lacking in the area of authentic content.
It’s more of a simple recipe than a needle in a haystack. Handango is a company who has a culture and set of core values that told us exactly where to look…and finding the recipe was not far from home. While the customers of Handango arguably can be technically savvy, there are plenty of users who are less interested in the technical data points and more interested in the impact of their mobile devices on their lives. We explored a few personas:
There are so many more stories and scenarios, the list can continue forever. This emerging market is so exciting and after some careful planning, forming a stellar blog team, and deploying a great looking blog, we think that Handango is another perfect storm for creating authentic content that people will care about in this hot technology space. Here are a few great stories generated by the Handango team to kick things off:
Just when I thought I had seen it all, here’s a totally sweet approach to carrying your stuff in an eco-friendly bag that is good for the environment, looks swank, and can double as an emergency patch kit in case you really need one. I’m going to figure out how to get one of these for sure!
When traveling, of course one of those essential tools is my MacBook Pro. Love the computer but HATE the power cord that comes with it. Cool idea how the outer compartment is made just for the power cord and maybe a few other things. Also, love the idea of the vertical configuation, especially when boarding the plane makes sure you don’t bang into everyone when looking for the back-row seat.
From time to time, there’s a lot of traveling happening here at RD2. For me, this is my favorite time to re-activate my blogging activity. Something about sitting on a plane or some random Starbucks in an unfamiliar city where my attention turns to a few things “social.”
Recently, my travels took me to the BlogWorld Expo, where we had fun in the Southwest Airlines booth and took in a few of the activities in Vegas. I hardly noticed, but if you were to look into my bag, there was a hearty stash of gadgets and gizmos that make blogging interesting, easy and fun. Of course, you have to have an appetite to actually use some of the fancy electronics and do a little problem solving along to way, in order to make it worthwhile.
Blogging can be as simple as you want it to be, and can require nothing more than a computer with an internet connection or a phone with a medium level of sophistication to get your content online.
Blogging can also be as complicated as you want it to be, requiring you to pack a treasure chest of gadgets and install some sophisticated software that enables you to properly use all of these fancy gizmo’s. If you learn from my mistakes, and countless hours of relentless experimentation, you can save some time, money and use your energy to create better content.
So, here’s a few tips from the archives on how you can look like and feel like a professional blogger. I’ll break this down into a couple of simple categories:
The Basics / Style:
Hardware Gizmos:
Software Imperatives:
This is where it all comes together. Hardware gadgets are fun and nifty, but none of it matters if it does not work elegantly with your choice of software. My recommendations here come from many different trials of my own and lots of reading on blogs and forums. Until the latest of Leopard and the iLife suite, I had been working with extremely expensive solutions such as Final Cut Studio to make simple video edits. This post is really about coming home to the simpler and more basic tools…because they just work:
These are just a few pointers, and again they are based on a lot of trial and error. You don’t need the extremely high end devices to do the job. You can save hundreds and even thousands of dollars and get the job done with even greater ease. This is coming from someone who has spent the money on the software and hardware and only found that simple is better.
Oh yeah, don’t forget a cool bag to carry all this gear!
Southwest Airlines had a booth at the BlogWorld Expo in Vegas, and I was lucky enough to hang out with them for the show. There was a lot to learn and a myriad of vendors showing off their technologies and services.
For the show, I had my MacBook Pro with iMovie and Final Cut Studio. Pairing my computer with a handy little Sanyo cam, and we were able to fire off a few clips (also seen on blogsouthwest.com). For these videos, Christi and I put together some “on-the-fly, up close and personal” videos. So fun…
Here’s a couple of the rock stars Brian Lusk and Bill Owen. And, I’m not kidding, these guys are rock stars in the community. Everyone at the show knows them. They provide great content and have quite the following.
There’s way too much candy here in the office. Before eating every last piece of candy corn, out came the camera and we took a few shots. Elizabeth finessed the image in photoshop to turn out some Halloween candy LUV. Southwest Airlines is all about Halloween! Check out Gary Kelly’s costume.
Chairs don’t fit me anyway. I’m six feet seven inches short and typically feel uncomfortable in any chair. Then I came across this ScooterDesk. It comes with an adjustable seat, a platform for your computer and what appear to be those hard rubber wheels you would see on some premium skates. It also happens that we are again running out of space at the office. These things are ergonomic, space efficient, and they look like they will force us to better our posture. Sign me up!