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Quick Friday factoid for the vendors out there. The state of Maine has put out an RFP for audio and web conferencing. This article has the contact information: http://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/news/2012/03/28/6220756.htm
Please do not contact me… I’m just passing on the article link. I have absolutely nothing to do with the project or the bid process!
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This review of Fotolia rounds out my series on stock photography (see the article) with the last of the three stock photography sites that I have extensive experience with. There are plenty of others… I just don’t have the first-hand knowledge necessary to do a fair review of them.
Fotolia works much like the previous two sites I reviewed. You can start with a basic keyword search and then narrow the results by various criteria.
The main advantage of Fotolia for me is its pricing. As with the other sites, you have a choice between buying credits and applying them towards photos or buying a time-limited subscription.
The smallest number of credits you can buy is 10 for $13. Again, I will give my standard disclaimer that these sites change pricing policies often, so my examples are only valid on the day I write them! Credits expire 1 year from the purchase date. I found the pricing per photo tricky to understand at first. Each image is available in a variety of pixel dimensions labeled like shirt sizes – from XS up to XXL. But the number of credits needed for an XS or an L varies from image to image. Some pictures are as cheap as 1 credit for an XS. Others may be as much as 10 credits for an XS. If budget is a concern, make sure to use the search filter for “Max Price”, which lets you specify the most you are willing to pay for an XS (with the understanding that larger sizes will increase proportionally).
Much better for my needs when pictorializing many slides in a presentation is the subscription plan. Fotolia gives you two choices for subscription plans, and I found the naming confusing again. The two plan types are “Daily” and “Monthly” – but they each are offered in time spans of month-long durations. The difference is that a “daily plan” lets you download up to a given number of images per day over the course of a month. If you don’t use all your allowed downloads on a given day, tough luck… your allowance doesn’t get increased for the next day. You need to be a serious volume user with constant daily needs for graphics in order for this plan to make economic sense.
The plan that worked for me was the monthly subscription. This gives me one month to download a given number of pictures. The lowest price is $75 for 50 images. It doesn’t matter if you download all 50 images on the first day of the month or spread out your downloads over the course of the month. $75 is a figure I can easily justify when working on one or two PowerPoint decks.
With the subscription plan, you automatically get the biggest version of the image. That is fantastic for doing editing, cropping, or resizing since you never run the risk of ending up with a grainy or fuzzy expanded image. However it does mean you need to compress your pictures in PowerPoint, as those gigantic pixel sizes can really expand your PowerPoint file size.
The search filters include the layout orientation, primary color, and “isolated” – an easy way to find images on a white background for use on white slides or for turning into transparencies.
Fotolia’s categorization didn’t thrill me. They let you select high level categories such as “Objects” or “Business” and then drill down into subcategories below that. Each selection resets the display and you need to scroll back to where you were in the filter display. It eventually does help to focus in on images matching your criteria, but it’s a bit cumbersome.
I found that the models featured in Fotolia’s image collection are overwhelmingly Caucasian. Many looked Scandinavian or Northern European to my eyes. Yes, you can find other ethnicities, but they make up a small percentage of the offerings. As an example, I just typed in “Computer” in the category of “Business People” and looked at a grid of the first 100 results. There is not a single Black, Asian, Indian, or Hispanic model in the group.
I like Fotolia for the 1-month subscription option, offering me 50 high resolution images on my schedule, with less chance of wasted money. Search facilities are adequate, photo diversity is not quite up to the level of Dreamstime or iStockPhoto. This would be a good first option, with the other sites used sparingly on a credits basis to fill in the gaps you can’t satisfy through Fotolia.
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ReadyTalk just announced a new feature that lets webinar organizers create and distribute a press release as an integrated step during the scheduling and setup of the event. You can read details and see screen shots on the ReadyTalk blog at this address: http://j.mp/rtalkpr
This is a fantastic concept, and I am not aware of any other web conferencing vendor with a similar capability. Sure, there is nothing going on here that couldn’t be done manually through standard press release creation and distribution services. Anybody can write a press release, include hyperlinks, and pay for it to go out on the wires using any of the myriad press release distribution vendors. But small businesses or webinar administrators might not be comfortable with that process. The first time you go through the motions, you wonder if you are doing things correctly.
ReadyTalk has made the connection between scheduling a webinar and promoting it easy and template-driven. They automatically put you into the press release software (iReach from PR Newswire) with default text and the registration link for your event already embedded in the template. All you have to do is edit the text to better suit your preferences and select a distribution/payment option.
I have long advised webinar marketers to use press releases as part of their webinar promotion strategy. A press release is a great way to get your registration link picked up by search engine indexes and associated with your topic keywords. This tight integration makes the process just convenient enough that more small businesses might give it a shot.
If you are thinking of trying this out, I’ll offer a few snippets of advice from my career in corporate marketing:
Read my article on writing an effective webinar press release.
If your company has a marketing or corporate communications department, check your verbiage with them for approval. You won’t believe how much those people care about what goes out as an official announcement with the company’s name on it! If you do an end-run past them in order to save time, somebody will end up yelling at you.
If there is ANY chance your company might go public within the next year, consult your legal department before putting out press releases. The slightest bit of exaggeration or future tense announcements can come back to haunt you during an IPO.
If you have the luxury of no formal departments and corporate structure to deal with, use that flexibility! Stand out from the boring, watered down “company-speak” press releases they are forced to put out by using some humor or hyperbole or a conversational style. Look at what has happened to the guys at Dollar Shave this month by daring to be different!
Don’t forget to track effectiveness. ReadyTalk lets you construct campaign-specific URLs for registration. Use a unique URL in your press release so you can see if anybody followed it to your webinar.
This is an exciting integration and demonstrates that webinar vendors need to start thinking about new ways to increase the total value proposition for their clients. Assistance with marketing and promotion is a constant request from webinar organizers. Kudos to ReadyTalk!
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I am continuing my series on the use of stock photographs in presentations (see the article) with reviews of a few stock photo websites that I have the most experience with. Today I look at Dreamstime.
Let’s start with the most important (and positive) thing first. Dreamstime has the best search engine in the business. And that is a huge functional advantage. It does you no good to have 3 million photos available if you can’t find one that works for your needs.
In addition to standard keyword searching, you have a variety of advanced filtering options. Just as an example of SOME of the options available, you can select based on:
Search results are not always perfect, since someone has to associate the properties of each image, but it’s a great way to narrow in on an appropriate image.
Model diversity is very good on Dreamstime. Many ethnicities are represented.
The pricing model allows either a storehouse of credits that can be applied against individual downloads or subscriptions allowing multiple downloads over a period of time.
Credits expire if they are not used within one year. The lowest purchase option is 8 credits for $10 (as always, pricing specifics can and do change without notice… Check to make sure my information is still valid when you read this). You can find small, 72dpi images available for 1 credit. But getting up to a full slide size at 300dpi is more likely to cost 5-17 credits.
Subscriptions are also available. Unfortunately, they recently did away with the option that was perfect for working on a single presentation. I used to buy a one-week subscription at 10 images per day, which was just enough time at a low enough cost to fully populate one or two slide shows. Now the shortest subscription available is one month at a cost of $240. This lets you download up to 25 images a day at any resolution and size. That can be a great deal if you actually need that much volume, but any day you don’t download 25 images is wasted money. So for the average person trying to “pretty up” a slide presentation, it’s overkill and too expensive.
I recommend Dreamstime for businesses who can afford to spend a little more for the convenience of faster/better searching and who do enough photo work within a month/quarter/year to justify a subscription. For most purposes, the quality and selection is every bit as good as iStockPhoto with a lower price and better usability.
UPDATE JAN 13, 2014: I am happy to report that the service has reintroduced a short-term subscription plan that is more appropriate for single-project use. You can buy a one-week subscription allowing 5 total downloads ($39 USD) or 10 total downloads ($69 USD). Since photos can be downloaded at high resolution and large pixel size, this can save money over credits usage for high quality images.
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I am continuing my series on the use of stock photographs in presentations (see the article) with reviews of a few stock photo websites that I have the most experience with. Today I look at iStockPhoto.
I don’t know the history of the stock photography field well enough to state definitively that iStockPhoto was the first stock photo site for the general public rather than media professionals, but it was the first one I ever heard of. Back in 2000, every image was free (sigh… What a charmed time that was!). Then for a number of years images were very inexpensive.
In 2006, Getty Images bought iStockPhoto, beginning a series of ever steeper price increases. Now I hardly ever use the site because I can find cheaper alternatives elsewhere. But there are times I do go back to the old warhorse. Its longevity means it has an astonishing number of images. Many are exclusive to iStockPhoto. I find things there that I can’t find anywhere else. The sheer volume of choices means that you have a better chance of finding diversity in the models as well.
The only practical way to buy a small number of images from iStockPhoto is to purchase credits and then use them on each image you want to license. The smallest number of credits you can buy at one time is 6 (at a cost of $10). Note that these prices and purchase policies can and do change. They may be different by the time you read this article.
Each image costs a different number of credits depending on the size and resolution. It’s hard to find an image for less than two credits even at the smallest possible size (useful only for adding a tiny bit of detail to a slide). Professional images that look like fancy brochure covers can cost anywhere up to 100 credits or more. Obviously this is not practical for spiffing up a one-time slide presentation.
iStockPhoto also lets you buy subscriptions. A subscription gives you a certain number of credits per day to use on downloads. A subscription can remain valid for 3 months, 6 months, or a year. But unused credits expire each day. So every day you don’t buy an image, you effectively waste money you’ve already spent. And because you are limited on the number of credits you can use per day, it can take many days to download a large number of images to populate a full deck of slides.
I find the current pricing scheme unreasonable for the average business consumer. There are simply too many lower cost options out there.
Search options start with a keyword (as is true for all stock photography sites). You can narrow your search based on price range, aspect ratio (horizontal, vertical, or square), and dominant color (great for finding white backgrounds for instance). Additional options include specifying pictures including or excluding people and those that have been categorized in one of iStockPhoto’s groupings.
Response time is excellent. Searches come back very quickly.
This is only tangentially related to my main topic of stock photography, but I should note that iStockPhoto also includes licensable video clips, audio clips, and Flash animations. You can use your credits to buy those other media formats as well as pictures.
I recommend iStockPhoto for high volume enterprise users whose priority is high quality rather than budget concerns. It has the best variety and diversity in the marketplace. Search tools are good, but not the best in this field. You may want to use iStockPhoto as your failsafe when you can’t find an appropriate photo on any other site.
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Images purchased from a stock photography site (see my article) are almost always provided in a JPG format. JPG does not allow transparent areas in a picture, so when you slap it on your slide, the background will cover up anything underneath. If your slide background is white, you can usually find images with a white background. These can merge in smoothly if you use the PowerPoint Format-Send To Back command. But if you have a slide background with a different color or need to overlay multiple images, you’ll require additional photo manipulations to make it work.
The past few versions of PowerPoint have included a command called “Set Transparent Color.” This is very easy to use. You click on your image and click the command in the Format group. Then you simply click on the background color in your picture and it magically becomes transparent. Unfortunately, this process often leaves a jagged outline around your image or leftover bits that didn’t exactly match your color selection. It also only works on solid, single-color backgrounds. I have never been very happy with the results I get.
This is one area where upgrading to PowerPoint 2010 is tremendously helpful. Microsoft added functionality in this release that can make your life much easier. A new command on the Format bar is “Remove Background.” It lets you drag a box around the main subject area you want to keep and tries to guess at the other background parts that should be made transparent. It does a very good job with simple backgrounds such as all black or white with an obvious foreground image that stands out. But you have additional control if PowerPoint guesses wrong. You can use an onscreen pencil to mark parts of the picture to keep and other parts to make transparent. When you are happy with the selections, you finish the process and get a much smoother transparency.
Of course the highest level of precision in making an image transparent comes via the use of third-party image processing software. Well-known examples include GIMP (downloadable for free) and Adobe Photoshop. These utilities can have a significant learning curve, and are not appropriate for the casual presenter just needing to place a quick graphic on a slide. But once you learn your preferred program, you can produce very nice looking results. You will need to resave your image in PNG or GIF format so it can retain the transparency settings. From then on, you can import the altered image into any desired slide.
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If you buy stock photo images from a commercial website (see my article), there is a good chance you will be offered a choice of image sizes and resolutions at different price points (not all stock photography sites work this way, but many do). There are two separate measurements associated with the image.
The first measurement is the image size in pixels. You should see two numbers… height and width. A 640x800 image is made up of 640 pixels in the vertical direction and 800 pixels in the horizontal direction. Notice that this does NOT correspond to any specific size in inches. A 640x800 picture would fill the entire screen of a monitor running in 640x800 resolution and would show as a smaller rectangle on a monitor set to 1080x1920. The physical screen size of the monitor determines the physical size of your image when displayed.
The second measurement is DPI. DPI stands for “Dots Per Inch” and relates ONLY to how the image will be printed. In some circles, the term has been updated to PPI for “Pixels Per Inch” – but this is still uncommon on photography sites. High DPI (usually 300 on the stock sites) means the picture prints smaller, with more dots of ink per inch on the paper. This translates to a higher quality printed image. A low DPI (usually 72 or 96 on these sites) makes the image print larger but more “grainy”, since there are larger gaps between the drops of ink.
If you don’t care about the print quality of your images, just ignore the DPI measurement. It has zero effect on the visual quality of the picture on your slide. But for highest visual clarity, buy the largest pixel size picture you can afford. You can always shrink down the graphic to make it smaller on the screen. It will still look swell. But if you go cheap and buy a small graphic and then try to expand it to fill your slide, you’ll end up with a fuzzy picture. Your goal is to never expand a graphic image from its original imported size. You always want to reduce the size on the slide to suit your needs.
When you purchase the image, save it to a directory on your hard drive. Then use the “Insert Picture” command in PowerPoint to import the picture from the hard drive using its file name. Avoid the temptation to copy and paste images onto PowerPoint slides. Copy and paste in PowerPoint results in lower quality and higher PowerPoint file sizes.
If you need to change the size of the picture on your slide, always grab the resizing frame by a corner, never a side. Resizing from a corner retains the aspect ratio of the picture so things don’t get stretched or smooshed unnaturally. Don’t worry about the picture being too large in one of the dimensions at this point… You can crop it to fit the space available.
Here’s another tip. If you want your picture to fill the slide, start by sliding it to get one of the corners aligned with the corner of the slide. It will snap into place as it lines up. Then as you resize the picture (using the corner!) it will snap into place as you get to the opposite side of the slide. Pictures almost never match up with your slide size in both dimensions. Don’t worry… Just expand it to cover the full slide and let the image extend past the edge that doesn’t fit.
Once you have the general size where you want it, use the Format-Crop command in PowerPoint to remove the unwanted extra parts of the image. This is an important step in reducing file size. But you need to add one more step. Once your presentation is assembled and finalized so that you are happy with all the graphics, click on any picture on any slide and choose Format-Compress Pictures. This brings up a dialog box. Make sure the command applies to all pictures in the file and choose “Delete cropped areas of pictures.” This eliminates the cropped bits and cuts down the file size. If you leave out this step, PowerPoint retains the cropped information just in case you ever change your mind and want to uncrop the image.
By the way, the compression command also lets you reduce the DPI of images on your slides. This is another great way to reduce file size. But be careful… You can reduce DPI to the point where slides look ugly when printed! You may want to save the file in two forms… One for distribution and printing, and another for use on screen and for emailing to others for review. Compress the heck out of the second version, safe in the knowledge that you have a higher resolution version still available if needed.
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You still just have time to register for my free webinar on best practices in B2B lead generation webinars. I am presenting on Thursday, March 8 at 10am California / 1pm New York. You can click this link for a local time zone conversion: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20120308T10&p1=137
Adobe Connect and B2B magazine are sponsoring this educational online session. I will take you through the entire webinar lifecycle, with tips and specific guidelines to help optimize your results in each step.
Registration is available through this link: http://ow.ly/9vWPV
See you online!
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I’m pretty sure this is a first for the industry. AnyMeeting put out a press release today announcing the ability for anyone to run a web meeting with absolutely no signup and no account.
The company refers to the new service as “AnyMeeting Now.” You simply go to the company’s home page and click the big green button at the top of the page labeled “Start a meeting now!”
Instantly the software starts up a web meeting in your browser. It gives you a meeting link you can share with participants. It gives you a U.S. long distance number and access code you can use for an audioconference. And it lets you decide whether to show your webcam or not. And that’s it. You are in a fully operational screen share-based web conference with a capacity of up to 200 attendees. You can see the names of participants as they join, you can chat via type, you can share your full screen or a named application. You can display polls and show the results.
The amazing thing about this is that you have not filled in a single form, shared your email address with the company, or registered for a trial account. You just click through to their site, have a meeting, and go away. Astonishing in this day and age where collecting people’s personal information is the number one priority for vendors.
I’m not sure how long it will take for this to devolve into a haven for amateur pornography. It sounds like a multi-party version of Chat Roulette once people figure out that they can turn on their webcam and invite strangers to click through to their published link via a simple Twitter post. But in the meantime, it could be a great tool for real business needs for folks who are leery of signing up for trials or free accounts under the assumption that they will be hounded forevermore by slavering salespeople.
I love this commoditization of basic web conferencing. It not only democratizes the field and drives costs down for basic functionality, but it forces vendors to step up their game to justify higher costs for more extensive features and functionality. That’s good for everybody.
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Stock photography sites can be a great way to source images for your presentation slides without having to worry about potential copyright infringement. They also can give you nice high resolution pictures that show up crisp and clear on your slides (lack of proper adverbial grammar notwithstanding).
There are a lot of different sites out there. More than I have the experience to review. Just enter “Stock Photography” in your favorite search engine and you will find many to choose from. Some of the best known sites include the following (this is NOT a comprehensive list):
Some sites have photographs available for free (all or a limited subset). Some sites let you buy credits that are applied against individual downloads. Some sites let you buy a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual subscription that permits downloading multiple photos over that period of time.
It is important to read and understand purchase options and provisions for your site. It can be confusing when you start. If you buy credits, they may expire if unused over a period of time. Some sites price different photos at different levels. Some offer tiered pricing for different sizes and resolutions.
For the occasional single picture to complement a slide, credits can work out nicely. If you are trying to add graphics to many slides in one or several presentations, a subscription often gives better value. The other advantage to subscriptions is that they usually let you download the highest possible size/resolution for each image. It’s always better to have a high resolution, large picture that you can scale down on your slide.
A big difference between sites relates to the search facilities letting you find the image that is right for you. This is not a trivial concern. Many of these sites have millions of images, and it is no fun scrolling through them at random. The sites change and update their interfaces fairly often. At the time of writing, my current favorite search functionality is in Dreamstime.
As a long-time stock photo user, I can tell you of some frustrations you will encounter:
1) Models are overwhelmingly white (American/Scandinavian/European). Yes, it is possible to find models with different ethnic, regional, or cultural looks, but they are severely under-represented.
2) Models in business settings tend to be more attractive than “typical” people. That’s fine for a single photo, but when your entire presentation consists of beautiful people, it can bother some audiences. I have been called out on this, saying that my images don’t represent the “real people” listening to me.
3) Business-themed photos are overwhelmingly sexist and chauvinistic. The boss or person in authority is usually male, the underling is usually female. Female models are far too often dressed and made up provocatively, showing too much cleavage or leg or using a flirtatious pose or expression. I have had comments from audiences about this as well. You have to spend much more search time to find females represented as normal peer-level equals without sexual overtones.
4) Models are overwhelmingly posed looking straight at the camera. This is fine for website shots designed to capture attention, but it can look unnatural and posed when used as a realistic scene on a slide.
5) Keywords are unpredictable to say the least. Get a thesaurus and try synonyms for the concept you are trying to locate. You will also get lots of “false positives” that bear absolutely no relationship to the keywords you typed in.
6) Images are almost always in JPG format, which does not allow transparent backgrounds. Isolated subjects are usually placed against white backgrounds. You will need to use editing tools to make the background transparent for use on a slide.
I will extend this topic in a series of upcoming posts. I will review some of the sites I have used a lot and give some tips for working with images on PowerPoint slides. Check back for new active links as I add more posts on the subject:
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