One of our clients - the Maritime and Coastguard Agency - decided on Monday that they wanted a podcast on the vital importance of lifejackets at saving lives at sea before the start of the Southampton Boat Show this Friday.

We quickly agreed the core objectives of the video with the client and created an ideal shot list script with outline voice-over. We then looked at what archive footage we had that we could use. Having found the gaps we realised we needed some close filming scenes of drowning and lifejacketed people in the water. We had to source a pool, lifejackets and a volunteer who would be happy to drown for us! 

Yesterday we did a quick location check and sorted out the video logistics and health & safety issues. We got client approval for the script and started to edit the archive footage ready for the new footage.

We shot the footage this morning (Wednesday) and added the standard MCA podcast 'header' and 'footer'. We then recorded the voice-over, added the credits and uploaded them onto the MCA podcast page. We have about 30k RSS subscribers a month so we should get a good number viewing the video in short order.

A US based newspaper group, the Chicago Sun-Times News Group, has used Pluck to build readers forums, blogs and communuties.

As with any organisation an active customer base is essential to maintain loyalty and allow 'up-selling'. In these challenging times for newspapers with declining circulation and advertising revenue having a community will help reduce this decline. The big question is - 'can it halt it'? Judging by the lack of newspapers being bought by the younger generation I doubt it. Todays 16 - 30 year old takes most news content online.

An interesting post on how US local newspapers are adding video capabilities. What is useful is to see how they have scaled back their initial thoughts on costs based upon the output needing only to be 'web quality'.

There are some really interesting ideas for corporates. When I was at Tektronix we had a number of business units in Europe. Each managed by its own VP and self sufficient. The challenge for senior management was there was little or no understanding across the divisions on what the others were doing. This meant any opportunity for cross-selling products was lost. I was in Corporate Communications and so funded a batch of video and still cameras and loaned them out to the divisions to film events and activities. We then took the tapes and made a monthly video news story. This was almost 15 years ago so the video had to be duplicated and sent by tape to each office to use in staff meetings but it did help.

Today with internet connections the opportunity for companies to work with video to help improve internal and external communications is much more powerful and cost effective.

Sun is to start its own live internet radio/podcasting seriers based upon social media and called 'Socially Speaking' The show joins other Sun 'open forum' inititives that have the objective of building and supporting communities.

Cadence have experienced strong participation in their first month of operation

Facebook now has now hit 100m users.

Marriott Hotels have established an online community to allow guests to post comments and share experiences.

How Sun has developed its own social media to improve employee networking and hence communication and co-operation.