I wanna wish all of you brave people and stalkers who read my blog a very merry Christmas!!May your day be filled with lots of love, happiness,laughter and good food!!

I have a little something for those who were still not hit by the Christmas spirit(and for those who just wanna have a good laugh) :

http://elfyourself.jibjab.com/view/dmle6SimMHczBp5T

Unfortunately wordpress does not support this video format (or I am just too stupid to add it) so you need to click on the link if you wanna see 4 little Jules dancing for you

Ho Ho Ho!

This is very funny. You can do it to yourself in www.elfyourself.com

According to The Daily Mail, Prince Harry created an ElfYourself and sent it as his Christmas greeting this year!  About time dancing elves made the trades, though the site missed the most important thing, a link!  So in tribute to the idea of a royal ElfYourself, we cooked up a royally awesome equivalent.  Enjoy!

Update: Not to start a tabloid war, but the Sun has the original video!

And you thought your face on the elves was funny. This look behind the curtain at how we made ElfYourself’s singing medley was far too ridiculous not to share.  Special props to Devin and Ian for being hilarious at all times.

We busted the old tree out of the box this week, adorning her with candy canes, ElfYourself ornaments and the occasional Nasty Santa doll left over from a few years back.  For a star, we made good use of a JibJab beanie cap with a dart stuck on it.  That’s just how we roll here.  Now add a few empty bottles of beer and we’ll really be showing our Christmas spirit!

For one final look behind the scenes at ElfYourself, we’ve posted a Facebook album with our 37 favorite photos.  Enjoy!

Meanwhile, has anyone seen this awesome video of the elves arriving in New York City? Epic!

When it came to getting dancers for this year’s Hip Hop ElfYourself we knew exactly who to turn to… the incredible talents of the guys fromSickStep! You may recognize the moves of JibJab’s favorite dance crew from our last foray into break dancing, the aptly titled Breakin. Luckily they were cool with donning elf outfits and entertained us for hours on end with their sickest of steps.

Most of our dances are set against a blue or green screen so we can easily remove color in post production and place the elves in a vibrant environment. With ElfYourself HipHop we placed down white mats that we would end up keeping in the final video as a snowy dance floor, plus it gave the breakdancers a surface comfortable enough to do their most complicated tricks on, and slick enough not to destroy their costumes.

When Office Max started ElfYourself back in 2006, the elves had a fairly simple dance routine in a very specific green outfit. To the untrained eye, it would seem that the classic outfit hasn’t changed much over the last three years, but secretly it has seen a few upgrades. We learned our lesson last year, when we pushed the classic green costumes to the limit while creating Disco and Country dances. We tore big holes in the pants which we had to edit out in post production, quite embarrassing for our elves.

With a breakdance topping this year’s list of new dances, we had to step up the elasticity and provide tights and seams that wouldn’t burst, no matter how many propeller spins the elves might do. Creating the perfect Elf costume was no easy task, but our costume designer Adam (below) stepped it up and made us some amazing threads that held steady. Thanks for keeping pants on the elves, Adam!

Meanwhile, Office Max put together a viral sensation in New York that had hundreds of costumes in motion. Don’t ask us how they got those hats to stay on, the answer can only be elf magic.

Já fiz o deste ano

The ElfYourself experience is rolling and we wanted to highlight some of the new gifts, available only in our ElfYourself store! Along with the usual greeting cards, mousepads and mugs, you now have the option to get your face on playing cards, ornaments and BLANKETS!

Of course, any new products we considered went through tons of testing. And that meant putting employee heads on early models of the blankets, creating abominations like this cozy clone comforter.

We have dozens of those test blankets hanging around. Too bad it doesn’t get freezing cold in Southern California. As the holidays approach make sure to get your orders in soon for the best pricing! Since these are created individually, it can take up to a week to manufacture and without premium shipping, up to an additional 14 days for the USPS to deliver. We would recommend ordering before December 3rd for the best rate, and before December 11th to make it in time for Christmas!

Nogle har måske prøvet tjenesten elfyourself.com, det er en tjeneste som på lige fod med de andre tjenester man kan finde på jibjab.com gør det muligt at sætte et billed af et ansigt ind, som derefter benyttes i en animation. På elfyourself er denne animation en jule-alf, som man kan kan sætte op til 5 billeder ind af, og så kan de fint stå og danse der. Det har vi haft det ret sjovt med på arbejdet, kan jeg afsløre

I sidste kunne uge kunne man opleve flere hundrende elver i NY, for at reklamere for det nu igen var ved at være tid til at benytte elfyourself igen. Det er OfficeMax, der er sponsor for siden, der betale for optoget/reklamen/flashmob’en, og imponerende er i hvert fald!

se elverne i aktion her:

In today’s blog we wanted to feature one of the coolest uses of Starring You we’ve seen… celebrities retweeting and sharing fan-made JibJabs. Just because we think it’s awesome. So pardon us as we go from behind the scenes production blog to gossip rag, because cere are some celebrity endorsed Starring Yous that we’ve seen over the last few months!

Alyssa Milano got her Elf on yesterday, retweeting a fan-made ElfYourself featuring many-a-popular tweeter. This was thanks to JibJabber KittCameo who was on a roll tweeting out ElfYourself vids. He also nabbed a retweet from Nia Vardalos, of Greek Wedding and Life in Ruins fame, and had the peeps of Project Runway laughing!

Musicians have been huge as well… American Idol favorite Adam Lambert tweeted this fan-made Monster Mash with a laugh. Limp Bizkit header Fred Durst showed some love for the Chippendales by announcing this fan-made video to be the latest Limp Bizkit music video. Is there any higher honor?

Mrs. Kutcher herself, Demi Moore passed along some disco JibJab goodness from the twitter-verse… we completed the link here. Greg Grunberg of Heroes fame practically dared users to retweet his Chippendales dance, but he owed the original creation to a fan.

So what did we learn here? Well, there’s pretty much no better way to get some props from your favorite people then by sending them a video starring… themselves! Luckily for you, we have 5 ElfYourself videos waiting to be personalized.

One question we get quite often is “how do you make a Starring You video?”. It’s a simple process, but we found it kind of hard to sum up without visual accompaniment. While you can find instructions while making a video and additional information in our FAQ, we’ve decided to go another step and create a few tutorial videos for first-time JibJabbers.

Here is a tutorial for the new ElfYourself site…

And here is a tutorial for general JibJab Starring You videos on JibJab.com!

Enjoy!

We’ve seen some great shout outs from friends and press since we launched ElfYourself 2009, and we’re so excited, we just had to share them!

TechCrunch had a leg up on the story and posted last night… it wasn’t long before Mashable got in the mix… we were lucky enough for CNN Money to run the press release… and CNET joined in the geeky fun with their own coverage!

But maybe most exciting of all, we had an appearance on Ellen today! You can see Ellen, her mom and co dancing ElfYourself style in her episode recap at the 2:40 mark. She credits her mom’s choreography

What a whirlwind of a first day! We’re excited to get the word out about the elves… hopefully we can nab a trending topic on twitter soon

Office Max and JibJab are excited to usher 2009’s ElfYourself experience in tonight! ElfYourself has some amazing stuff built in this year, and we’ll be going through all the fun things you can do on this blog over the next few weeks. Wait, why are you still reading this? Go on and ElfYourself!

Mad Men is coming back on August 16th with season three.  I’m a huge fan of Mad Men and wrote about the incredible use of a client pitch in the final episode of season one.

I’m also a fan of online interactive campaigns that work.  A few years ago, I wrote about how 36 million people had “Elfed” themselves.

Now, I can put those two things together and “MadMenMyself.” Well, I already did it, see below, and you can too on the Mad Men site from AMC.

Josh and the crew at Sterling Cooper

With Elf Yourself you upload a picture and it overlays on the face of the dancing elf.  That would be too crass for a mad man so you design your own features using palettes of skin color, head shape, eyebrows, mouth shape, hair color and clothing. You then choose your scene. I’m at work, but could have also been in a nightclub or picnic.

Earlier this week, the Charlotte PRSA Young Professionals Group hosted a Lunch and Learn session with Kim Counts, APR, president and owner of Novella PR and vice president of the Charlotte PRSA chapter. The one-hour session included some basics of PR planning that are great starting points for those earlier in their careers and great reminders for those of us a few (or more) years in.

Several tips from Kim below (in bold), with my personal take below.

Financials- Don’t do interviews with business journals if you won’t disclose financials.
How many times have you been in a meeting with a client or your boss and they say something like, “We need to increase our visibility in A-tier publications.”? And by A-tier they mean, The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek.  If you’re going to pitch a story to a business or A-tier publication you have to be ready to answer the

Reporter: "Can you tell me about your financial results last quarter?" Interviewee: "No." Interview over.

likely questions, including: What were/are your financial results last quarter/last year/year-to-date? Also, questions about price, margin, executive compensation. If you’re not a public company and you don’t have to disclose this information, take a step back and ask what you would gain from an interview with the Wall Street Journal, (or even your local newspaper or business journal) where your financial laundry is disclosed. If you don’t have any good news to share in this department think of other publications/websites/news sources that will influence your key audiences and get your key messages out to them. Focus on new product innovations, people stories and investments in new technology.

Crisis Communications – Tell it all and tell it fast.
This pretty much sums it up.  When you have bad news get out in front of it; hiding your negative news is only going to make it worse in the long term. Provide a statement (or spokesperson) that delivers your news quickly and succinctly while sticking to the facts.

Websites- If you build it, they will come … no they won’t.
I must have looked like a bobble-head when Kim said this. I was shaking my head in agreement at every point she made on this one! I experience this with my own website and blog on a day-to-day basis and it hasn’t been an easy lesson to learn. Creativity, maintenance and marketing here are key.  You need to be creative to draw them in, then maintain, market and keep it dynamic to keep them coming back. Kim cited the elfyourself.com website and campaign for OfficeMax for being creative, viral and bringing users back.  

Did you elf yourself? What about other simple and strategic running rules do you keep top of mind?