Multimedia Mailings

Home Office Computing, Jan, 1999 by Mike Espindle

Whether you attach audio to e-mail or produce sophisticated presentations, technology helps you spread the word

YOU'VE FOCUSED YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE TO address market needs, added special pricing incentives for return clients, and implemented a dozen other Small Business 101 strategies to make your company stand out from the competition. But if you're still sending out standard promotional bulk e-mail and off-the-rack printed presentations, you may be missing the boat.

Why not juice up what you send out electronically? Depending on the technology and strategy you choose, do-it-yourself multimedia mailings can pay off big-time, with e-mail that demands response and promotional materials that effectively convert prospects to sales. Something as simple as an audio file that clearly introduces you and your business to potential customers might do the trick. Or maybe it's time to burn your state-of-the-art Web site onto a CD and send it out in place of a plain old press release. You'll be surprised at how cost-efficient these technologies can be, and how easy it is to separate yourself from the competition.

Small audio dynamite With the ubiquitous adoption of the MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) e-mail standard over the past several years, it's now possible to attach virtually any kind of digital file to an e-mail message and be certain every recipient can accept and view it. "If you can make it, you can mail it" is the mantra of the MIME age. And just about anybody can make a quick audio file. All you need is a microphone-equipped, sound-card-sporting Windows PC. Check your manuals: That little slit next to your notebook's screen might be a built-in mike. And the contraption that you never hooked up when you bought your multimedia PC that actually looks like a microphone will do the trick, too. If you're still stuck, you can pick up an inexpensive device through your local audio retailer or via a computer equipment mail-order catalog. Even top-of-the-line desk microphones for PCs, like the Telex Voice Commander (www. telex.com), retail for $20 or less.

Once you've set up your hardware, open up the Sound Recorder utility (it's under Windows 95 or 98's Accessories/Multimedia menu), hit the record button, and start talking. You may have to play with the recording level settings (via the Multimedia control panel) to get the sound just right, but it's otherwise intuitive.

Most businesses should stick to short introductions, contact information, customer testimonials, and the like. But this technique can work for almost any quick sound bites: reports from the field, FYI memos--anything you think a customer might want to hear. Save your recording as a WAV file and you'll be ready to attach it to e-mail and send it out.

Does size matter? As a rule of thumb, you don't want to attach files larger than 1MB (between 60 and 90 seconds of high-quality audio). If your sound file's too big, record a shorter message, record the original again at a lower quality, or, if you're absolutely convinced that customers need to hear every word you have to say, compress the file.

Another nifty audio idea is sending audio files out to clients as a complimentary gift. Thousands start their computers to the voice of Homer Simpson or Austin Powers every morning, and many TV shows and movies have promotional Web sites that offer free downloadable WAV clips that replace boring default system sounds. Conduct a quick Web search, gather up some good ones, and send them along to clients as a freebie. If their taste matches yours, they'll remember you fondly down the road.

Video star Until recently, there were no great bootstrap solutions for creating homegrown digital video. If you already had a taped commercial or other sample of produced video, you could get it captured and converted to a digital video file at your local video service bureau. You could also install a video capture card such as Intel's SmartVideo Recorder II (www.intel.com; $200) and an editing program like Adobe Premiere (www.adobe.com; $560), then use your camcorder to create a short clip. But the one-time expense of producing a traditional commercial or setting up your PC as a video workstation that you might use once or twice a year has been prohibitive for most home-based businesses.

Enter Sony. In addition to delivering high-quality still images, its Mavica digital cameras (the MVC-FD81 and MVC-FD91, $899 and $999 respectively) feature a new e-mail video mode. The handheld camera records up to 10 seconds of full-motion video and audio and saves it to a standard 3.5-inch floppy as a small, sharable MPEG video file. Now, when you think about it, 60 seconds is plenty of time to tell your story, especially with full-motion video and high-quality audio. (You can create a longer presentation by lowering the video resolution and sound quality.) Plus, the still shots you take (saved as high-resolution JPEGs) are also a snap to view and share on your PC. You'll find some sample clips on Sony's Web site (www. sony.com) if you want to see the quality first hand.