On Location in San Francisco

We’d like to say we left our hearts in San Francisco, but the truth is we were too busy producing web content for the ABA to see much of this city by the bay.

Team Manning was hunkered down for a week in and near the Moscone Center, the site of the American Bar Association’s Annual Meeting.  Mitch, Mike and Doug spent long days and nights shooting, editing and posting video clips to the group’s primary communications site www.ABANow.org.

Photo by Phil Coblentz

Our team was kept busy with quick turnarounds of video content such as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, new ABA president Stephen Zack and David Boies, the attorney who successfully challenged California’s ban on same-sex marriages. It was a fascinating time to be in San Francisco considering this ban was overturned while the meeting was occurring. Not that we had a great sense of what was going on outside of our edit room. Our late night work schedule limited our opportunities to get to see the city. So while there were few cable car rides, we were able to have some amazing Chinese take out.

The upside of all this hard work is the traffic to ABANow.org skyrocketed during this event. This clearly establishes ABANow as THE source for news of the ABA’s two yearly meetings. The number of visitors was nearly 6 times greater than a year ago at the 2009 meeting when ABANow was launched. And the number of visitors for the 2010 Annual meeting was nearly double that of the group’s midyear meeting in February.

To prove they were actually there, Mitch and Mike took advantage of their one day off to shoot this little travelogue of Mike in San Fran.

Mike is Cinematic from Mitch McLachlan on Vimeo.

But next trip here are a couple of the places recommended by fellow Manning staffers:

• Curtis’s recommendation was the Toronado with more than 80 beers on tap
• Amy’s recommendation was the Slanted Door for the view of the bay and amazing Vietnamese food