Tips for successful screencasts

So today was launch day for this awesome new product we have been working on at Six Apart called TypePad Connect. Connect is the starting point for our vision for the social web. It's totally cool and am so proud to have played my tiny part.

For my newly formed and unfortunately named "genius group" team it was the first time we came together to produce an all round community push to market. There was no press briefing, just blog posts, screen casts and landing pages.

It was truly spectacular to sit back and watch Twitter just explode with comments and reactions. Manic reposting of Cnet, readwriteweb, computerworld articles to ensure that everyone got to hear about it.

My contribution included a screencast. I will never again underestimate what it takes to produce a decent screencast that everyone approves of! But essentially this, as well as the blog posts and other messaging around the site, was the first installment of the "genius group", our merry band of marketers turned customer service experts. My British accent combined with Andymatic's exceptional driving skills and his wonderful sense of humor that has kept us going for two days - resulted in an OK video which goes some way to explaining this most coolest of products.

So here is my aide memoir for my next screen casts...

1) Do not go over 3 minutes. 2 should be your goal
2) Try to avoid too many rounds of approval the copy will sound tired
3) Do not be scared to input humor and personality with linguistic tricks and funny references but don't over do it.
4) Imagine you are talking a good friend through it - it should be chatty and informal as well as informative. Using hand gestures as you speak can help.
5) Show the product, don't try and interpret the product benefits, a good video will demonstrate the benefits - there should be no need to spell them out.
6) Speak standing up if you can get someone else to drive (I didn't do this and you can hear)
7) Smile and imagine being given the best gift ever as you are talking
8) Don't be afraid to over pronounce words, the recording will deaden any sounds you think are unnatural.

The point is great communication and strong messaging, especially on video, to the community can be both easily understood and also easily disseminated on blogs. Hence the message goes further and can last longer as it spreads and grows, without the investment in marketing dollars.

oh - and one more thing - please sign up for TypePad Connect it's just about the best thing EVER!

Marketing is dead!

A few days ago we restructured the marketing team here at Six Apart in order to dissolve the team previously known as the marketing team and reform another, stronger group. We called the group "the genius group" but we could well have called it customer service 2.0.

We are not going to focus on any traditional marketing at all. Solely customer service. Our customers hold the keys to 35m readers across the world. If we can make them happy they can reach many more people than we could ever dream of.

And so marketing died. it's dead. Yesterday's news.

The future is extremje evangelism, as Miz_G will testify. Ogilvy recently picked up some great work we have been doing and used us as an example of cutting edge effective marketing.

Here's what Rohit Bhurgava has to say about our radical new approach.