Here is a link to Darren Strange's blog and a demo he did using the new Sharepoint Server and OneNote 2007 as a blogging site/tool combination. Darren has been in Microsoft around 9 years. The blog entry is interesting for a couple of reasons but one stood out in my mind, that being his use of YouTube as the hosting machine for his demo.
(Hopefully, his response would be 'of course, why not?' which would be my point.)
Lots of people might take snarky shots at Microsoft being behind, 'forced' to use it and all that nonsense but there is a bigger issue which is important to companies looking to get closer to the customer.
By simply capturing his demo with some off the shelf screen capture technology and tossing this up on YouTube, presto, instant availability, no paperwork, no friction. This applies to big companies like Microsoft as equally as it does the garage start up.
Your company, big or small, will (over time) have an increasing portion of your success determined by how close you can get to your customers and how personal you can make that interaction.
Do you encourage your team to share with the world? You should.
thanks for the kind comments. With this medium, I can record a demo in 30 minutes and within a few days have more than 5000 people sit and watch it. These are people who are interested too and are our target market. Just think what it would cost to do that via "conventional" marketing channels. What would you do? Do a road trip of events? That would cost a fortune in time and money. this was free. I'm lucky that I work for a company that really gets what blogging is about and encourage us to blog but I believe blogging radically changes the way we will engage in a dialogue with our customers. I will be recording a lot more demos as we move towards launch. Thanks for the encouragement :-)
Posted by: Darren Strange | August 17, 2006 at 12:15