Creating An Animated Avatar For Your Twitter Profile

Want to stick out in the crowd of avatars on Twitter? Want to catch people's eye as they are scrolling down their tweets, or looking at other people's Followers? Then give an animated avatar a try!

The trick is, however, to find the line between eye-catching and annoyingly distracting. I've seen web cam video used as well as screen recordings. Slide show videos would work as well.

My first attempt was annoyingly distracting, and a Follower asked me to tone it down a bit - which I did. Some people will simply stop following, but that doesn't bother me. I love looking at other people's animations - it's like looking through a virtual window to their soul!

Here's a video tutorial you can watch, but below are some more detailed instructions with more options:

1. If you are going to use a video clip, pull it into a video editing program to grab about 2-4 seconds worth (Twitter avatars must be under 700 kb). Or create one from scratch, like a slide show video, web cam recording or slide show video. REMEMBER that it will LOOP over and over, so watch to make sure there isn't a jarring jump between the end and the beginning of the video.

   Windows Movie Maker, the Commercial Creation Center (http://www.CommercialCreationCenter.com) or Camtasia are great creation and editing tools - you just decide which one is easy enough for you to learn quickly. Save the video as a .wmv if you are NOT creating it in Camtasia. You'll see the directions below for how to "produce" it in Camtasia.

2. The most important thing Camtasia will do is produce the video as an animated GIF. If you have Camtasia (there's a free version available), you can do the creating, editing and outputting in there as well. Choose 150 x 112 pixels as the final size, which is the standard thumbnail size.

   If you don't want to use Camtasia, there is a site that will convert the video to GIF for you (http://www.gifninja.com), but the final file sizes are larger, so you will have to cut your video down even further, possibly to 2 seconds or so.

3. Upload your saved, animated GIF to your Twitter Account Photo. We've seen Firefox give error messages that Twitter is overloaded, but just keep going or switch to another browser. It will take eventually.

Get feedback from your followers about whether or not it is too busy, and refine your photo until you and your favorite followers are happy. But remember, you can't please everyone, so don't bother trying. If you're happy with it, then let yourself enjoy it, and change it around from time to time to break up the monotony.

Now, I didn't come up with this idea - I was just looking at someone else's followers and noticed the tiny image moving. I HAD to click on it, and I checked out their site (it was pixel something - it was a screen recording). I figured that if their moving avatar made ME click on it, maybe others would click on me if MY image moved. And THAT'S how this whole thing happened!

Penny Haynes, http://www.CommercialCreationCenter.com
http://www.MarketingWithAudioAndVideo.com

Marketing With Audio And Video: Krishna De on Branding

Today's video excerpt of our internet radio show talks about what branding is and is not, and what social media and social networking sites do to help your branding efforts.

Hosted by: Penny Haynes Title: Marketing With Audio And Video: Krishna De - Social Media Strategist

Episode Notes: This show is scheduled 7 hours earlier than normal to accomodate our award winning Irish Podcaster's European timetable - and she is definitely worth the effort. Krishna De is a Social Media Strategist and will help you make sense of all that relates to social media and social networking. Bring your questions and be prepared to take notes! Described as one of Europe's leading Employer Branding, Personal Branding and Social Media Strategists by the media and clients alike, Krishna De is an award winning brand communications and leadership development mentor, executive coach, broadcaster, writer, professional speaker and social media strategist. Krishna is the author of '42 Rules of Marketing in a Recession' which will be available in January 2009 and 'Managing Your Personal Brand Online: How to Master the 7 Keys of Professional Success in a Digital Age' and which will be published in Spring 2009 by publishers HappyAbout.com and her expertise is featured in the new book new book "World Wide Rave" published by Wiley and available in March 2009. Be sure to access Krishna's newsletter 'Biz Growth Express' (http://www.bizgrowthexpress.com/) if you want to access free articles and masterclasses to help you become digitally distinctive. Join Penny Haynes live on Mondays for the http://www.MarketingWithAudioAndVideo.com show. Call (724) 444-7444, Call ID: 29763, or go to http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/29763 to listen to our entire shows. Brought to you by the Commercial Creation Center, simple software for newbies to create, upload and post multimedia onto social media and social networking sites.

Podcasting Stuff, and Lots Of It

I never imagined the end when I started at the beginning, but podcasting was just a hop, skip and a jump away when I began Encouraging Audiobooks, my downloadable audio book store. Everyone was talking about doing an ezine, but since my business was audio, that seemed somewhat ludicrous to me. Shouldn't I be doing an audio-zine?

So I got Audiozines.com and named my audiozine Your Voice, in the hopes that others would join me in doing audio articles that people could listen to online or download. And join me they did, on many different subjects. It was fun and exciting. I just wished it was easier for people to download everything all at once, instead of one by one or via zipped files.

I tried hiring people to create some program that would download all of the mp3 files at once, but no one would touch the project. Then, Adam Curry developed podcasting and a podcatcher using RSS, and all of my problems were solved. And everything in my world changed. I officially became a podcaster, although that's what I had basically been doing for a while already.

So now, 2.5 years down the road from starting my original business, I'm basically all about Podcasting. Podcasting stuff is my life and my livelihood. I think about it non-stop, I dream about it, I design for it, I program for it...it's not really a passion. Maybe it is best described as an obsession. I see things that I think could be done that have never been done before, and it keeps me up at night (it's 1:35am EST right now - that is proof enough I would think).

So this blog will be about podcast stuff. I will not add audio to this feed. I will be pure. At least I will try not to podcast here - just blog. Plus, truth be told, I'm testing Blogger out for a new project to see if it is easy enough for my future clients to use easily. So even here, I still have an underlying podcasting motive. Oh well, I'm not going to try and change myself. I will accept this wonderful obsession and make the most of it while I can, even at 1:36am EST.

I don't know if anyone will read this, but it's here for the reading. Here's to 2007 - I'm expecting the best from it from the very start!

Penny Haynes, That Podcasting Site