General :: Thinking Home Business

Testing the online movie-making tool Xtranormal

This morning I had a direct message (DM) on Twitter with a link to a YouTube video advertising a Superbowl-related service. I clicked through out of curiosity and watched the short video.

If you watch that, you’ll notice the credit that comes up at the end for Xtra Normal, with the intriguing tagline “If you can type, you can make movies”.

I tried it out.

Signup was easy and free.

The interface and the various pre-fabricated scenes, avatars and so on reminded me a bit of Second Life (who ever talks about Second Life these days? Is it still there?) but at a really basic level.

I proceeded to type in a conversation about a topic that has been buzzing along in a forum on LinkedIn, viz. how can you tell if someone is a real social media expert.

Out of a bunch of quite bizarrely attired avatars I chose a couple of conservatively dressed types who looked more like humans than the avatars in the football item above. The result will not will me any prizes. It’s corny, not easy to see or hear, and I am including it here just to illustrate.

No matter what I did I could not get the avatars to the front of the scene as they are in the football item.

So there is a lack of flexibility in being able to mix and match avatars and settings.

No doubt a more skilled user would do something much more interesting and I’m inferring from the text accompanying the exhortation to download the desktop version that it may be possible to be more creative with that. But I looked at the resource specifications and decided I did not need the aggravation of my computer possibly seizing up or slowing to a crawl.

There is a link from the Xtranormal site for uploading to YouTube, but after following the instructions and trying several times, I gave up.

Verdict. Interesting, and I really like the idea of telling stories in novel ways like this, but at this stage Xtranormal is not a good use of my time.

Last few remaining copies of Big Biller at a special close-out price

When my friend and colleague Bill Vick invited me, back in 2006, to collaborate with him on a book about recruiting’s “big billers”, I was intrigued.

The idea was that Bill would interview a range of top producers in the recruitment industry and elicit from them their secrets of success. Then from all those interviews we would put together a book, summarizing the key lessons and insights that had emerged.

An ambitious undertaking, but from having co-authored LinkedIn for Recruiting book with Bill I had a good idea of the esteem he has in the recruitment industry, so I was pretty sure he was not going to have any problem finding outstanding people to interview. And so it turned out.

But what I didn’t know then was how generous the interviewees would be with sharing their experience and advice. Listening to the interviews – and I did that more than once – I was continually amazed at how much they “gave away”, so as to be able to help others achieve success. No “king of the castle” (or “king of the hill”) selfishness here.

Nor were these interviews about one-off or occasional successes. A lot of the stories and comments were about good old fashioned work, but focused, systematic work to produce stellar results. I thought Jon Bartos put it beautifully:

If you look at my average fee, it’s about twenty thousand. It’s not fifty thousand, it’s not a hundred thousand, it’s only twenty thousand. So it’s not huge as an average fee. What that means, with transactions at twenty thousand, is that in order to do a million dollars I need to have five placements on a monthly basis. Now I typically average from five to ten on a monthly basis.

And once the project was done and our Big Biller “audiobook” (recorded interviews on a DVD plus an e-book) was published early in 2007, we realised that we had produced what was effectively a manual for success as a recruiter. But success not just as a recruiter, because the rich lessons about business and life that these highly successful people shared could be applied to any business, any career.

Bill commented on the Big Biller project as follows:

There is no question the Big Billers are a competitive breed and the game they play is not for the faint-hearted. They like to win and second-best is not an option. At the same time they are generous-spirited people and happy to share their secrets of success, for the benefit of anyone who might wish to follow in their footsteps. I was fortunate to be a member of their ranks and their friendship and support created this book.

Over the course of thirty one interviews, recorded live and provided as part of this book in full and unedited recordings, these superstars of recruiting spell out what they do, what tools they use, what drives them to achieve as they do, how they spend their working days, hour by hour, their approach to study and continuing training and the fundamental philosophies that underpin their achievement.

The interviews provide a unique insight into what makes a Big Biller tick. They show, in detail, step by step, how anyone with the right attitude and determination can copy the success of the Big Billers.

With my background in education and training I also saw the audiobook as an excellent resource for any firm which wanted to bring new hires up to speed with the kind of thinking and experience that would help them become top producers themselves. Or as a refresher and motivator for even the most experienced people already on their team.

You could in fact use the book and the audios as the basis for a series of company training exercises over a period of weeks or even months.

Be that as it may, we are down to the last few copies. Because the content, in terms of the shared stories of life and business experience and the lessons drawn from those stories, is effectively timeless, we could probably do a new edition of Big Biller. But as we both like to do new things and are in fact moving on to some new projects with social media, we have decided that for these last few copies it’s “out they go” time.

So we can wrap this up quickly, we have halved the price: the race is to the swift.

The DVD with 10 hours of interviews + the accompanying ebook and guide are for sale now at http://BigBiller.org