My youngest daughter Kate was at Trevaskis Farm in Gwinear, Cornwall last Saturday 9th July, where she was a mini-chef during their Big Weekend food festival. Above is an edited video, which was useful in helping me get to grips with Final Cut Pro X

I gave a speech yesterday (Tuesday 7th June) at the Institute of Financial Planning’s CFP Conference. It was a great day with some excellent speakers, though on grounds of humility I exclude myself from that statement! In the video I talk about my career journey from McDonald’s to where I am now, and how that journey has led me to champion the education of the masses about simple financial planning. To this end I set up MeaningfulMoney.tv for which I have won two industry awards in the last six months.

I hope you enjoy the video. Let me know if it raises any questions by contacting me here

One of the most useful aspects of social media is the search function. Twitter especially allows you to search for any word or phrase and to narrow the search results to within a set number of miles of a specific location. Think of the benefits of being able to search for people talking about your particular business niche within striking distance of your locality.

I have frequently executed these searches on the Twitter website, but now have them running permanently on Hootsuite. It took me a little while to work out how it should be done, particularly with Hootsuite, but it finally dawned on me that the best way to get it to work was with a geocode, rather than using the place name. The latter is fine if you live, say in London, but I found that both Hootsuite and Tweetdeck struggled when searching using the name of my town, Penzance.

Here’s how I got it working:

1. Find your geocode

To do this, go to this site and drag the pin to where you are. The geocode is then displayed in the longitude and latitude boxes under the map

2. Add a search stream to Hootsuite or Tweetdeck

To do this, click ‘Add stream’ and then, in the pop-up dialog, click the Search tab. Then enter your search term and the geocode as follows:

Advisor OR Adviser OR IFA geocode:50.1186,-5.53711,100km

You can see that the search string is in three parts:

• The search term(s): Advisor OR Adviser OR IFA – here you can use Boolean arguments to your heart’s content
• The Geocode, in this format: geocode:latitude,longitude,
• The search area: 100km. Note that this can be in miles if you prefer, just substitute miles for km

Click ‘Create Stream’ at the bottom right of the dialog and you’re good to go.

The process is the same in Tweetdeck, just click the PLUS button at the top left, choose your account, select Search on the right of the dialog and enter the search string as above.

3. Engage in conversations

It’s a good idea to monitor these searches. Tweetdeck has especially good and tweakable alerts so you know when a new tweet has appeared within your parameters. There is so much happening on Twitter, you may well need to refine your searches so that they reflect what you want to hear, but once you have, monitor the stream(s) regularly. In just the last few weeks, I have intercepted two tweets from people asking their Twitter followers if they knew a good IFA in the area. Neither have become clients because they don’t fit my client profile, but both were surprised that a local IFA was monitoring Twitter and delighted that I had responded. How do you think that looks to them? Who do you think they might recommend to their friends in future?

If you have a good experience of using searches to find conversations relevant to your business, let me know in the comments below.

Video is my thing, as you may or may not know. Click the link to MeaningfulMoney.tv on the right if you want to see what I mean.

I often get asked what kit I use to do my videos, so I thought I’d post it here:

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Camera: Sony Bloggie MHS-CM5 – http://www.sony.co.uk/product/dph-mobile-hd-snap-camera/mhs-cm5

Mic: Audio Technica ATR3350 – http://www.thomann.de/gb/audio_technica_atr_3350.htm

Recorder: Zoom H1 – http://www.zoom.co.jp/english/products/h1/ – The mic plugs into this, but it has an internal mic too – brilliant quality

The video from the camera and the audio from the recorder are then pulled into Final Cut Express on a MacBook Pro 15″ with a 2.53 GHz Core i5 processor and 8Gb RAM. Graphics are produced in Adobe Fireworks CS5 and then edited in using Final Cut. I edit at 720p HD, 30 frames per second.

When fully edited, the whole lot is rendered using H.264 .mov format but in medium quality to keep the file size/upload time down. YouTube handles these files really well.

The camera can record up to full 1080p Hi-Definition, but I scale it down on the camera settings to 720p, again just to save file size.

This is a sermon I gave ages ago at my old church on the subject of Money & Finance. We were going through Proverbs at the time picking up major themes, and I was asked, given my profession, to do the talk on Money!

It is not-so-loosely based on the main points from a sermon by the great Methodist founder John Wesley. Let me know what you think; here’s the link:

Download audio file (Money-and-Finance.mp3)

I was asked to do a webcast presentation on BrightTalk today. It went pretty well I think, with great feedback from the viewers. You can watch it below:

We woke up to four inches of snow in sub-tropical West Cornwall this morning. Office closed. What to do? Snowmen, snowballs and….a kip on the sofa actually.

I’m so excited! And I just can’t hide it! I know, I know, I know and I think I like it!

This is a short (1:30) excerpt from a Meaningful Money video, prepared to be shown to a Paraplanning seminar led by my good friend Rich Allum. It’s got me thinking I need to produce a promotional piece for MM, but I can’t face doing that in Premiere Elements just yet. Need to get that MacBook Pro with Final Cut very soon!

Re-post from MeaningfulMoney.tv

I am, as you can see, a bit of a fat bloke. I need to shed some pounds, and hope to save some £ in the process. See what I did there?!

This short video explains how I plan to do it. I’ll keep you updated as to my progress