Saturday, October 30, 2010

Study: Americans Get Majority Of Exercise While Drunk

Amplify’d from www.youtube.com

Study: Americans Get Majority Of Exercise While Drunk
TheOnion
See more at www.youtube.com
 

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

HOW TO: Optimize Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Amplify’d from mashable.com

HOW TO: Optimize Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

There’s nothing like the basics to help bring things back into focus when you feel lost. In “Marketing 101,” the acronym AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. This is the most simple and rudimentary of sales and marketing funnels and is still incredibly relevant today when it comes to social media and Internet marketing strategies.

AIDA Marketing Diagram

Each section of AIDA represents a section of your sales and marketing process and can help you set your expectations, decide what to monitor, and visualize the relationships between each part. Understanding the flow of the tools and tactics will also help you get your measurements and analytics in line with your goals.

Here’s a closer look at the breakdown of this marketing funnel, some tips on how to apply it to your social media strategy, and a look at how the model is evolving in the social media age.


Awareness


Awareness is social media’s bread and butter. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and other networks are built for this. You can’t easily display your inventory via Twitter, set up a shopping cart on LinkedIn, or fill orders through YouTube. These networks are not going to be your point of sale. Instead, they are your communication and outreach tools — the spokes that lead back to your hub (sales page, blog, site, etc.) where you will be making your conversions.

Awareness can take many forms, but its main goal is getting people to know you exist and that you can solve a problem they might have. At this level, conversations, interaction and content are king. A few metrics you might want to measure around your brand are conversation frequency, increased mentions and sentiment.


Interest


Now that you have their attention, you need to get customers interested in your product. You can bolster interest with offers and compelling reasons why you’re better than the competition, and how you can solve customers’ problems. Features and benefits weigh heavily in this level, and social media can help you kick their interest into high gear.

If you’re running a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign and have some targeted landing pages set up for your products or services, those are what you want to link to — not your homepage. Even if you’re not utilizing paid ads, the same strategy of linking to targeted pages through social media is applicable. A few of the metrics you will want to look at here are CTR (click through rate), retweets (of deals and links), and conversations about specific products.


Desire


Social media can help bolster desire through communication and engagement, but to fully satisfy someone’s desire to buy, you need to have a site that is streamlined and optimized. Recently, I tried using a popular car rental site to make a reservation, but it was so difficult to navigate that I gave up, despite having a great discount code. The unmanageable user interface killed my desire in two minutes flat, and my business went straight to the competition. Your site makes a huge impression, and people will judge your company by it.

Take the time to go through your site and optimize the presentation and the shopping cart experience. Testimonials gathered from linkable social profiles are a great asset.

Take the customer from interest to desire with a clean, easy to navigate, info rich, and functional site. Some of the metrics that matter at this level are bounce rate, time on site, pages viewed and incoming links.


Action


Now that your customers are itching to buy your product, and their money is burning a hole in their PayPal pocket, you need to seal the deal. At this point, your site is your number one tool, and while social media can influence the action through the previous levels, it’s not going to have the same influence here. You need to make it easy and obvious for your customer to complete your desired action (purchase, sign up, lead form, etc.).

The action is also where you can finally calculate some of your end metrics, like conversion rate and ROI. This is where you can see how everything is performing and the final impact your work is having. Often, these are the metrics that your boss (and your boss’s boss) are looking for.


New Additions to the Marketing Funnel


Over the years, the traditional AIDA has evolved and added two extra levels. These levels represent not only a shift in the technology and methods that are used to market, but the people behind it.


Loyalty


How are you getting your customers to buy from you again? One very simple way to stave off any buyer’s remorse is to follow up via the same social media you used to get customers in the first place. If you know they purchased via a link on Facebook, send them a Facebook message saying “thanks,” and provide them with your customer service contact info. 

Perform customer service on Twitter. Monitor the online conversations around people who are already using your product and see if they have any questions or problems that you can resolve quickly. You can build social loyalty programs and use the communities you create to keep customers coming back. This is where CRM (Customer Relationship Management) can play a leading role, and many social CRM solutions are emerging to fill that need. A few things you might want to monitor here are repeat buyers, the use of loyalty codes, sentiment of mentions post-purchase and sentiment of specific products.


Advocacy


Advocacy is the dream of any marketer. It’s the “sweet spot,” where your customers do your marketing for you. It’s when customers love your products, brand, services and people so much that they can’t help but talk about you. This is why you want to make it easy for people to share your brand. Any hindrance to this — be it a bad website interface or an anti-social company ethic — will really discourage this extremely valuable source of traffic and interest.

If it’s an option, I’m far more inclined to click on a “Tweet This” or “Like” button than I am to take the link, shorten it in bit.ly, and post it to my various social networks. Remove any barriers to advocacy and then both encourage and reward it. Some metrics to look at here are mentions, conversations and referrals.


The problem with AIDA


As you can see, the levels of our old friend AIDA can get a bit muddy, especially when it comes to the areas of awareness and interest. This has given birth to dozens, probably even hundreds, of fresh interpretations. The main thing to remember is how the funnels flow and to set your measurement and expectations accordingly.

You also don’t need to live and die by this funnel. People can easily skip a level or go through multiple levels at once. It’s not a perfect model, but then nothing is. But keep AIDA in mind as you shape your social marketing strategy. It should help you focus and prioritize your goals for success.


More Business Resources from Mashable:


- Social Media Marketing 101: In-House Team, Agency or Consultant?
- Why Social Media Is Perfect for Brand Ambassador Campaigns
- 4 Winning Strategies for Social Media Optimization
- Why Twitter Is a Big Win for Small Businesses
- Should Your Company Have a Chief Marketing Technologist?

Read more at mashable.com
 

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Henge Docks - MacBook Docking Station

Amplify’d from www.youtube.com

Henge Docks - MacBook Docking Station - Demo Video

Henge Docks has created the first truly comprehensive docking station solution for Apples line of notebook computers. This means you can quickly, easily and cleanly incorporate your MacBook computer into a desktop setup or your home theater system, so you get the best features of a laptop, desktop and media center PC all from one computer.

Henge Docks patented design doesnt require any hardware, software or settings changes to your computer. In fact, every current MacBook is compatible with our system, right from the factory.

For more information visit us on the web at http://www.HengeDocks.com

Read more at www.youtube.com
 

Friday, October 22, 2010

Browser Statistics by Month

Amplify’d from www.w3schools.com

Browser Statistics Month by Month




















































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































2010 Internet Explorer Firefox Chrome Safari Opera
September 31.1 % 45.1% 17.3% 3.7% 2.2%
August 30.7 % 45.8% 17.0% 3.5% 2.3%
July 30.4 % 46.4% 16.7% 3.4% 2.3%
June 31.0 % 46.6% 15.9% 3.6% 2.1%
May 32.2 % 46.9% 14.5% 3.5% 2.2%
April 33.4 % 46.4% 13.6% 3.7% 2.2%
March 34.9 % 46.2% 12.3% 3.7% 2.2%
February 35.3 % 46.5% 11.6% 3.8% 2.1%
January 36.2 % 46.3% 10.8% 3.7% 2.2%
           
2009 Internet Explorer Firefox Chrome Safari Opera
December 37.2 % 46.4% 9.8% 3.6% 2.3%
November 37.7 % 47.0% 8.5% 3.8% 2.3%
October 37.5 % 47.5% 8.0% 3.8% 2.3%
September 39.6 % 46.6% 7.1% 3.6% 2.2%
August 39.3 % 47.4% 7.0% 3.3% 2.1%
July 39.4 % 47.9% 6.5% 3.3% 2.1%
June 40.7 % 47.3% 6.0% 3.1% 2.1%
May 41.0 % 47.7% 5.5% 3.0% 2.2%
April 42.1 % 47.1% 4.9% 3.0% 2.2%
March 43.3 % 46.5% 4.2% 3.1% 2.3%
February 43.6 % 46.4% 4.0% 3.0% 2.2%
January 44.8 % 45.5% 3.9% 3.0% 2.3%
           
2008 Internet Explorer Firefox Chrome Safari Opera
December 46.0 % 44.4% 3.6% 2.7% 2.4%
November 47.0 % 44.2% 3.1% 2.7% 2.3%
October 47.4 % 44.0% 3.0% 2.8% 2.2%
September 49.0 % 42.6% 3.1% 2.7% 2.0%
August 51.0 % 43.7%   2.6% 2.1%
July 52.4 % 42.6%   2.5% 1.9%
June 54.2 % 41.0%   2.6% 1.7%
May 54.4 % 39.8%   2.4% 1.5%
April 54.8 % 39.1%   2.2% 1.4%
March 53.9 % 37.0%   2.1% 1.4%
February 54.7 % 36.5%   2.0% 1.4%
January 54.7 % 36.4%   1.9% 1.4%
           
2007 Internet Explorer Firefox Mozilla Safari Opera
November 56.0 % 36.3% 1.2% 1.8% 1.6%
September 57.2 % 35.4% 1.2% 1.6% 1.5%
July 58.5 % 34.5% 1.4% 1.5% 1.9%
May 58.9 % 33.7% 1.3% 1.5% 1.7%
March 58.7 % 31.8% 1.3% 1.6% 1.6%
January 58.6 % 31.0% 1.5% 1.7% 1.5%
           
2006 Internet Explorer Firefox Mozilla Netscape Opera
November 60.6 % 29.9% 2.5% 0.2% 1.5%
September 62.1 % 27.3% 2.3% 0.4% 1.6%
July 62.4 % 25.5% 2.3% 0.4% 1.4%
May 63.0 % 25.7% 2.3% 0.3% 1.5%
March 64.7 % 24.5% 2.4% 0.5% 1.5%
January 66.0 % 25.0% 3.1% 0.5% 1.6%
           
2005 Internet Explorer Firefox Mozilla Netscape Opera
November 68.9 % 23.6% 2.8% 0.4% 1.5%
September 75.5 % 18.0% 2.5% 0.4% 1.2%
July 73.8 % 19.8% 2.6% 0.5% 1.2%
May 71.6 % 21.0% 3.1% 0.7% 1.3%
March 72.5 % 18.9% 3.3% 1.0% 1.9%
January 74.5 % 16.6% 3.4% 1.1% 1.9%
           
2004 Internet Explorer   Mozilla Netscape Opera
November 76.2 %   16.5% 1.7% 1.6%
September 79.0 %   13.7% 2.0% 1.7%
July 80.4 %   12.6% 2.2% 1.6%
May 81.9 %   9.5% 2.4% 1.6%
March 82.8 %   7.9% 2.8% 1.4%
January 84.7 %   5.5% 2.4% 1.5%
           
2003 Internet Explorer   Mozilla Netscape Opera
November 84.9 %   7.2% 2.6% 1.9%
September 86.6 %   6.2% 2.7% 1.8%
July 87.2 %   5.7% 2.7% 1.7%
May 87.7 %   4.6% 3.3% 1.4%
March 88.0 %   4.2% 3.4% 1.2%
January 84.6 %   4.0% 4.0%  
           
2002 Internet Explorer AOL   Netscape  
November 83.4 % 5.2%   8.0%  
September 83.5 % 4.5%   8.0%  
July 84.5 % 3.5%   7.3%  
May 86.7 % 2.8%   7.3%  
March 86.1 % 3.0%   7.7%  
January 85.8 % 2.8%   7.9%  

 



































Internet Explorer Microsoft Internet Explorer
Firefox Mozilla Firefox (identified as Mozilla before 2005)
Chrome Google Chrome
Mozilla The Mozilla Suite (Gecko, Netscape)
Safari Safari (and Konqueror. Both identified as Mozilla before 2007)
Opera Opera
Netscape Netscape Navigator (identified as Mozilla after 2006)
AOL America Online (based on both Internet Explorer and Mozilla)



Browsers that count for less than 0.5% are not listed.

Read more at www.w3schools.com
 

Bassnectar - October 23 2010 - 1st Bank Center, Broomfield CO


Bassnectar


with Dan Deacon, Brother Ali w/ DJ Snuggles, Ott., Nosaj Thing, Emancipator, and That 1 Guy


Day: Sat, Oct 23, 2010

Showtime: 7:00 PM

Days until show: 1

Ages: All Ages

On sale now

Ticket Prices*: $35.00-$45.00 VIP $100.00


We are pleased to announce BASSNECTAR'S 1ST BASS CENTER, an event that leaps beyond the sound to bring together a collection of artists, performers and installations that embody the music and intent of Bassnectar. Special guests at this event include Dan Deacon, Brother Ali, Ott., Nosaj Thing, Emancipator, and That 1 Guy. This first ever Bassnectar-produced arena show will feature a community marketplace, a showcase of community organizations, and roving performers that escalate the energy level to new heights. We will announce many surprises along the way and we guarantee every attendee an experience that will sweep through the senses. Join us as we turn the 1st Bank Center into the 1ST BASS CENTER and blow its roof clean off!


By combining sound and force with weight, the Bassnectar experience engulfs the senses. It is as physical as it is auditory; the adventure has no rules, no limitations, and no hesitation in fusing the familiar with the strange or the classic with the cutting edge.


Bassnectar is the brainchild of Lorin Ashton, and it exists as an open-sourced musical project that is as diverse as it is heavy, as raw as it is meticulous, and as fierce as it is imaginary. Spanning the spectrum of sonic style, the music covers every genre imaginable and smashes it all into a synthesis of intense, wobbling basslines and hypnotic soundscapes.


Whether remixing, collaborating, writing, DJing, performing live, or working on constant social networking, Bassnectar's music is the lure and social impact is the sincere intention. According to Ashton, "We are so blessed, and so deeply fortunate to be alive and awake right now...it's a basic truth, but it's very powerful. I think privilege confers responsibility, and Bassnectar is a reflection of that opportunity to give back; the motion of my cells bouncing back at the world."

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Sneak Peak - OS X Lion

Amplify’d from www.apple.com
Mac OSX Lion.
Mac OSX Lion Sneak Peak
The power of Mac OS X. The magic of iPad.

We took our best thinking from Mac OS X and brought it to the iPhone. Then we took our best thinking from the iPhone and brought it to iPad. And now we’re bringing it all back to the Mac with our eighth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system. Mac OS X Lion arrives in summer 2011. Here’s a sneak peek at just a few of its features.

The Mac App Store. Coming soon to a Mac near you.


Introducing the best place to discover and buy new apps made just for Mac, right on a Mac. Just like shopping the App Store on iPad, the Mac App Store offers endless possibilities to browse and purchase apps. And it simplifies the way you install apps on the Mac. Just click once, and your new app is downloaded, installed, and ready to go. Learn more about the Mac App Store





Launchpad. A home for your apps.


The Launchpad gives you instant access to your apps — iPad style. Just click the Launchpad icon in your Dock. Your open windows fade away, replaced by an elegant, full-screen display of all the apps on your Mac. It takes just a swipe to see multiple pages of apps, and you can arrange apps any way you like by dragging an app icon to a new location or by grouping apps in folders. Downloaded an app from the App Store? Your new app automatically appears on the Launchpad, ready to blast off.






Full-screen apps. A better way to enjoy the apps you love.


On iPad, every app is displayed full screen, with no distractions, and there’s one easy way to get back to all your other apps. Mac OS X Lion does the same for your desktop. You can bring an app to full screen with one click, switch to another full-screen app with a swipe of the trackpad, and swipe back to the desktop to access your multi-window apps. And systemwide support for full-screen apps makes them bigger and more immersive. So you can concentrate on every detail of your work, or play on a grander scale than ever before.





Mission Control. Mac command central.


Mission Control is a powerful and handy new feature that provides you with a comprehensive view of what’s running on your Mac. It gives you a bird’s-eye view of everything — including Exposé, Spaces, Dashboard, and full-screen apps— all in one place. With a simple swipe gesture, your desktop zooms out to Mission Control. There you can see your open windows grouped by app, thumbnails of your full-screen apps, Dashboard, and even other Spaces, arranged in a unified view. And you can get to anything you see on Mission Control with just one click. Making you the master of all you survey.


Read more at www.apple.com
 

Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding

Amplify’d from lifehacker.com

Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding Required

Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding RequiredEven if you're not a programmer, you can easily create tiny, time-saving applications that breeze through repetitive tasks—renaming large groups of files, executing terminal commands, and much more—with the simple, code-free, drag-and-drop interface of OS X's built-in tool, Automator.

For those of you who don't know, Automator is a program that allows you to create your own workflows, through the use of drag-and-drop actions, that automate repetitive tasks. We've featured numerous Automator workflows and applications on Lifehacker before, but you may not know how easy it is to make your own. You don't need to be a programmer or hacker to make use of Automator, either—anyone can make use of this simple (yet powerful) tool, no matter what menial task you need to automate. Here's a quick guide to using it, as well as a few examples to get the gears turning.

One of the easiest ways to use Automator involves creating workflows that perform batch operations. It only takes a minute or two to put together a workflow, thus saving you tons of time renaming files, cropping photos, or converting PDFs to an editable format.

Anatomy of a Workflow

Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding Required

An Automator workflow is a simple series of actions that perform in sequence. You can select any number of actions from Automator's large library, and drag them into whatever sequence you want. When you run the workflow, Automator will go through each step, pushing the output from the last action into the next action. Thus, you can have an action that grabs some files, pass those onto an action that edits them, pass those edited files on to another action, and so on. It's essentially programming for the non-programmer—you tell it what to do each step of the way.

Batch Rename a Group of Files


Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding Required

Let's say we have a series of files that we want to be able to look through, but their filenames are a mess. A common example of this problem involves digital photos. Every time you copy photos from your camera to your computer, they have names like PICT_001, PICT_002 and so on. Say you want the filenames to actually convey something about where the photos come from, like "Italy Vacation 001", "002", and so on. Or, if you prefer, you can add the photo's date and time after each filename, so you know when each photo was taken. With just the action "Rename Finder Items," you can manipulate a group of filenames any way you want. You can even change a filename's case or find and replace text. For this example, we'll assume each group of photos is already sequential, and that we just want to give them a more descriptive name.

Start up Automator and select Workflow. In the left sidebar, you can view your library of actions, organized by category, like "Music" or "Photos". You can also search for an action using the search bar at the top if you know what you're looking for. In this case, head up to the search bar and search for the Ask for Finder Items action, since we want the first part of this workflow to be our decision on what files to rename. Click on it in the left sidebar and drag it into the main window. Hit the Allow Multiple Selection checkbox, since we'll be renaming files in batches.

Then, head back over to the search bar and type in "Rename Finder Items". Drag that action over to the main window, under your Ask for Finder Items action. It will give you a popup, asking you if you want to add a Copy Finder Items action, to which we'll answer no—we want to change the original files, so leaving it as is is okay. Hit "Don't Add" and configure the action as you want. In this example, we want to rename all the files sequentially, so choose "Make Sequential" in the top drop-down, add the number to a new name ("Italy Vacation") and choose to start the numbers at 1. You may also want to force the numbers to have 2 or 3 digits (i.e. adding "01" to the end of the first file instead of just "1"). Try running the workflow by hitting the Start button in the upper right hand corner. It will ask you which files you want to tweak, and then rename them all in one fell swoop. Check out the video above to see an example of this in action.

Batch Crop Images

If you have a handful of photos that are the wrong size, but don't feel like cropping them one by one, you can send them through an Automator workflow that will crop them all down for you. Of course, make sure you're generous enough with your shots that nothing gets cropped out by accident.

Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding Required

To do so, just drag in the "Ask for Finder Items" or "Get Selected Finder Items" actions—depending on how you want to use the app—into the workflow. Alternatively, you could add the "Get Selected iPhoto items" if you're an iPhoto user—this will just grab the selected photos in iPhoto instead of going through the Finder.

Next, drag the "Crop Images" action into the workflow. You can set it to fit the height, width, or a relative edge of the image to your specified dimensions as well, thus resizing the image at the same time. Automator shows a few example photos in the action window so you can see what each option will give you. Note that in this case, you may actually want to add a "Copy Finder Items" action in between the ask and crop steps—that way, you don't accidentally ruin any photos in the automation process.

Extract Text from PDF Files

Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding Required

Let's say you've been given a bunch of PDF files that you want to put into a text editing program, like TextEdit or Microsoft Word. Our workflow will start the same as the other two—with the "Ask for Finder Items" action—and then continue with the Extract PDF Text action. Choose Rich Text (so you don't loose your formatting), save the output to your Desktop (or whever else you want), and let 'er rip. After selecting the PDFs you want to work with, Automator will provide you with a new set of editable .rtf files on your Desktop that you can now work with.


Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding Required

With workflows like this, you can make it even more useful by turning it into a droplet with a small tweak. Just delete the "Ask for Finder Items" action (since the droplet will get input from the Finder directly), and go to File > Save, choosing "Application" from the dropdown menu in Automator. Now, you can just drag a selection of files onto the application's Finder icon, and it will run using those files as its input.



These are just a few simple examples of how you can use Automator to work with multiple files, but there are a ton of actions available to you for any given situation. Just look at the PDF section of Automator's library—you can turn a bunch of PDF files into images, set their metadata, watermark them, encrypt them, or do any other number of things. Spend some time poking around in Automator to see all the things it can do—it will help you save a ton of time on some of those more tedious tasks.

While Automator is great for dealing with a large number of files, you actually have a lot more available to you in Automator than just running through menial jobs. Whats really neat about Automator is that it can add new features to certain programs that weren't originally available through the GUI. For example, if you want to create a symbolic link (which is incredibly useful for Dropbox enthusiasts), you have to open up Terminal or download a separate app to do so. Instead of doing that, you might as well turn that task into a small app or context menu item, using the "Run AppleScript" or "Run Shell Script" action in Automator.

Sync a File or Folder with Dropbox


Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding Required

One of the things I always find myself wanting is a way to sync files outside my Dropbox with the click of a button. Sadly, neither Dropbox nor OS X have this feature built-in, but I can make my own context menu item for the Finder with Automator. Just open up Automator and hit Service in the opening window. Services (as they are arranged in Snow Leopard) are custom context menu items or menu bar items that you can add to pretty much any Mac program. For this example, we're going to create a service that allows us to right-click on a file or folder in the Finder, hit a new "Add to Dropbox" menu item, and sync that item to Dropbox through the magic of symbolic links.

When the workflow window comes up, change the dropdown menus at the top to read "Service receives selected files or folders in Finder". Then add the "Run AppleScript" action to the workflow. Copy the code below, replacing the text that was in the Run AppleScript window:

on run {input, parameters}

repeat with i from 1 to (count input)
set posix_path to POSIX path of (item i of input)
if posix_path ends with "/" then set posix_path to ¬
text 1 thru -2 of posix_path
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "/"
set filesname to quoted form of text item -1 of posix_path
do shell script "ln -s " & quoted form of posix_path ¬
& " " & "~/Dropbox/" & filesname
end repeat

return input
end run

This will create a symbolic link of the selected files or folders in your Dropbox, ready for Dropbox to sync them to your other computers. Make sure you change the "~/Dropbox/" path on the 10th line if your Dropbox folder is located somewhere else. Then, just save it with whatever title you want (something like "Add to Dropbox"), and you'll find it in the Finder's context menu whenever you right-click on a file. Alternatively, Services are also always available in the menu bar by clicking on the application's name and going to Services.

Automate Just About Anything on Your Mac, No Coding Required

Again, this is just an example. You can turn pretty much any AppleScript or shell script into an Automator action, giving you nearly limitless possibilities if you're willing to roll up your sleeves a bit. Sure, Automator is still a "no coding required" application, but if you're willing to do a little bit of code (AppleScript and terminal commands are pretty easy to learn), you cam make much more complicated workflows. In fact, Services like our previously mentioned Middleman, which syncs iTunes with non-iPod devices, and the Cut and Paste for the Finder actions were created in Automator using AppleScript and shell scripts.

Also note that, if you don't feel like messing around with scripts, you can download third-party actions to your computer and use those (as long as you don't want to distribute your workflow—it will only work if the user has installed the necessary third-party actions). If you ever have a need for an action that isn't in Automator, check around Apple's Automator action database or sites like Automator World to see if they have something that will work. Also, for what it's worth, the above script is a modified version of this script I found over at Macworld. Even if you don't have a ton of scripting experience, searching around the net for existing scripts can be extremely helpful.


This is just a smattering of ways you can use Automator. Automator has a ton of other functionality in it, like Services (mentioned above) or the ever-useful Folder Actions, which allow you to do things like print files from your mobile phone or remote computer. We've barely scratched the surface of all it can do, and really, you're only limited by your imagination (and perhaps scripting abilities). Be sure to check out the other workflows we've featured, and share your own favorite uses for Automator in the comments.

Read more at lifehacker.com
 

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Celebrity Voices in Car Commercials - 2

Amplify’d from www.autotrader.com
Wait, I Know That Voice... Car Commercial Celebrity Voiceovers

Chevrolet – Tim Allen

Yes, that's Buzz Lightyear you're hearing in the new Chevy Cruze ads that launched September 7. The Golden Globe winner (for Home Improvement) is the most recent star to do automotive voice over.

Does a voice that's known as a toy robot make you want to drive? Listen here.

 

Mercedes-Benz – Jon Hamm

The Mad Men star (and Golden Globe winner) is the perfect choice for a commercial because we know his voice as authoritative when it comes to pitching a product–his TV character is the ad man. His relationship with Mercedes began earlier this year with the Eco S400 ad that debuted during Oscar weekend in March.

Hear if Don Draper has you sold.

 

Lexus – Maurice Lemarche

You may not know Lemarche's name, but you'd know his voice if you're a primetime cartoon fan. The current voice behind Lexus lends his voice to Futurama and has been on numerous episodes of The Simpsons and he voiced the character of Alec Baldwin in Team America.

See if you recognize the voice.

 

Honda – Kevin Spacey

This two-time Oscar winner is one of Hollywood's most talented actors. Though he stumbled over words as Verbal Klint in The Usual Suspects, his voice is smooth and unwavering in Honda's ad campaign.

Hear Spacey's crisp, down-to-earth words here.

 

Hyundai – Jeff Bridges

Hyundai must be glad it tapped this year's Oscar winner to be its voice. The Crazy Heart actor sounds approachable and knowledgeable in the ads. During Oscar season, his ads couldn't air, so the company used backups such as David Duchovny and Richard Dreyfus.

Does Bridges sing too? Hear for yourself.

 

Nissan – Robert Downey Jr.

Downey seems to do no wrong these days. This three-time Golden Globe winner isn't new to voice-over: he did a character on an episode of Family Guy. Nowadays he can be heard in Nissan ads, using his upbeat inflection in an oh-so-subtle way.

Does Sherlock bring the point home? Hear here.

 

Volkswagen – Bronson Pinchot

You probably know him as Balki Bartokomous from the sitcom Perfect Strangers. The New York-born actor is known for his accents; and he uses his talents as the voice of Max, the restored 1964 VW Beetle in the Das Auto campaign for the German company (the spot below also guest stars Sideways star Thomas Haden Church as a laid-back VW Microbus).

Does his voice make you want to do the Dance of Joy?

 

Volkswagen – Ron Livingston

Pinchot isn't the only voice for Volkswagen. Livingston, best known as the star of Office Space, also lends his practical and friendly voice to the car company's ads.

Listen to what approachable sounds like.

 

BMW – Will Lyman

Lyman's masculine, authoritative tone usually takes us through in-depth documentaries on the PBS series Frontline, but he also uses that same refined speech to tell audiences about BMW. And Dos Equis beer.

Hear why his polish fits cars, social issues and the most interesting man in the world.

 

Dodge – Michael C. Hall

Golden Globe-winning Dexter actor, Hall, hasn't been on the A-list for long (he came to attention as David Fisher on Six Feet Under), but he's already using his deep, rich voice for the Dodge brand.

Hear if he should change the C. in his name from Carlyle to Charger.

 

Ram Trucks – Sam Elliot

How do you know that voice describing Ram trucks? Most likely from "Beef, it's what's for dinner," the ad from the American Beef Council and "Only You can Prevent Forest Fires" as Smokey the Bear. He's been in dozens of movies and voiced as many commercials.

Hear the iconic smoky voice here.

 

Infiniti – Liev Schreiber

Schreiber has used his refined, Tony Award-winning voice for Infiniti commercials over the past seven years. You may not have noticed his bravado before, but you'll undoubtedly hear it now.

Get an earful from Naomi Watts's beau.

 

What's missing? Women. Although BMW used Patricia Clarkson in the past, and Cadillac ads featured Kate Walsh, the current crop of TV spots is missing female voices. We'll enjoy the men in the meantime, but will keep our ears peeled for the sultry, sexy sirens' voices.








author photo


Meg Hemphill
is a Los Angeles-based lifestyle writer who covers the good life: style, food, automotive, travel and entertainment. When it comes to cars, it's less about the nuts and bolts and more about the aesthetic, luxury and occasional practicality. A former editor at InStyle, she writes for the Huffington Post and a variety of other publications.

Read more at www.autotrader.com
 

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