Laura Creekmore

Screencasting: Sitting over your customer’s shoulder

Screencasting is one of those ideas that might have sounded weird when people first started doing it: You’re going to shoot a video…of yourself using the computer…and I’m going to watch it?

But screencasting is becoming widely used a tool to enhance the usability of sites. It’s my first go-to recommendation when a customer is building a help section for their site.

Because while written instructions can be very accurate, it’s so much easier when you can just show them where to click. [This is a great example of matching the medium to the message.]

Do you ever have to help someone with a computer task? Your first instinct is to say, “Give me the mouse,” right? With screencasting, you are doing the next best thing. Even though you can’t sit beside your customers as they use your site, you’re still showing them how to do it.

[Caveat: I’m presuming that you have already done the hard UX work to make your site as easy as possible to actually use. If you’re using screencasting to paper over bad technology or bad navigation, don’t bother. It’s not a panacea. But it is a powerful tool to walk customers through common processes on your site.]

crowdSPRING, a crowd-sourced design and writing market site, has built a number of screencasts for their own site — and today they offer some helpful tips to create your first screencast.

We love to create screencasts for our clients, but I’ll give you a peek behind the curtain with my two cents for creating your own screencasts:

We use Screenflow and we really love it. It’s powerful, but it’s also intuitive.
It’s absolutely worth it to buy the external microphone [even for small projects], and decent ones aren’t too expensive.
Buy The Screencasting Handbook. It’s more than worth the money, and the Google Group that Ian Ozsvald and ProCasts manage is also a wealth of information.

Let’s start a content strategy meetup in Nashville

Content strategy is still emerging as a discipline, but I know a lot of people working on it here in the Nashville area. Several other cities have created successful content strategy meetups, and I’d love to help create one here in Nashville.

For some ideas about what a content strategy group might do, look at the Atlanta group’s recent programming.

I’ve also posted a call on Digital Nashville. Please email me [laura at creekmoreconsulting dot com] and let me know if you’re interested. We’ll aim to get something going this summer!

We’re too meta

Perhaps digital media isn’t the only industry that suffers from the intense naval-gazing we see around us. And I really didn’t mean to sound so disparaging right here on the front end.

But sometimes it just drives me crazy to read all the inside baseball blog posts.

I had to explain the word meta to my 10yo daughter last week. She’s not allowed to watch Glee, but she’s quite culturally aware, and so we’ve shown her selective clips of one song or another when they feed into the public understanding.

So we showed her the Glee version of Don’t Stop Believin’, the Ohio State response, and Glee’s Safety Dance. [Grr. Having trouble finding quick links to working versions. Will update later as I’m able.] And so the word meta came up.

And how I love that word.

You see, I’m a semantics girl at heart. I could argue what is is for a week. I’m in content strategy for a reason, and it’s about feeding my analytical soul as much as it’s about helping my clients make stuff happen.

But at the end of the day, we need to make stuff happen. And the self-referential, meta culture in digital media can confuse the process.

Don’t make it so hard to talk about things that you can’t make them happen. Name a goal, pave the path and make it happen.

Unmanaged Content: Whac-A-Mole or Many-Headed Hydra?

Regardless, it’s not good.

Don’t feel bad; you’re not the only organization out there with a less-than-complete handle on your content. For organizations that have embraced the web for years, it may even be a bigger problem than for newbies. Because the longer you’ve been in this business, the more likely you are to have some legacy systems that never got adapted into a content management system….you know, because:

We don’t use the information on that microsite much.
It works fine the way it is.
So-and-so is the only one who needs to manage it and he’s familiar with that old system.

But what happens when:

You do need to use that information?
It no longer works?
So-and-so doesn’t work here anymore?

Ah, but that’s what happens to other people, right? Ahem.

Unmanaged content — the content you can’t name, or place, have forgotten entirely or that no one ever told you existed — will continue to loom over your head, portending your coming doom, until you physically capture and catalog it.

Ideally, you can put uncorralled content into your content management system once you find it. But even if that’s not possible due to technical constraints, a complete catalog of what you have will make your life easier.

Don’t wait for your content to find you — Murphy’s Law will bite you every time. Get out there and find that stuff!

Community management: Keeping all the balls in the air

I was talking with someone yesterday about online community management. I am still grateful to discover that I’m talking with someone who presumes that online communities require management.

I told her that I think of online community management as juggling. You have several simultaneous tasks:

Care and feeding of site members [tech support]
Content strategy [Even on user-generated content sites, the institutional tone you set is critical]
Nurturing people who share

If you let any of those balls drop, you endanger the community.

It’s a pretty broad way of thinking about community management. There are a lot of other items we could add to the list, really — technical structure, communication/marketing, etc. But I’d argue that many of those other items could fall under one of these three big categories.

Managing ownership of content: Print vs. web

I’m not above taking a free handout — and so when Kristina Halvorson helpfully posted some questions she’d been asked at a recent forum and asked those of us in the content strategy community to tackle one, I viewed it as a great gift. [Thanks, Kristina!]

How can content strategy begin to resolve ownership issues between print content creators and web content editors?

Unless you’ve been lucky enough to build only new web properties in brand new organizations, you’ve faced this issue. I spent years in the publishing industry, and so this hit home for me. It’s not unique to publishing, though: Most organizations that have been around a while and that do any sort of marketing are creating printed materials. And even today, many folks’ first instinct is to say, “Take that [press release, brochure, magazine article, ad from the newspaper] and put it on our website.”

But here’s the key point: No one ever says, “Take that [brilliant Flash demo, interactive chart, quick checklist, photo slideshow from the convention] off our website and print it.”

That would be a stupid thing to say, wouldn’t it? Great web content is optimized for the web, and it’s not cost-conscious to try to re-purpose it — it just doesn’t make any sense.

So if your organization is struggling with who “owns” the content — and you’re not alone — try to reframe the discussion.

Figure out who owns the information. This is important. Someone needs to be responsible for collecting and managing the information, and they need to share it with everyone who needs it.
Designate the person[s] who manages the print interpretation of the information.
Designate the person[s] who manages the web interpretation of the information.

In a small organization, all three of those roles might be filled by the same person. But in many organizations, the first role is distinct from the latter two. And the larger you get, the more likely the print and web content management is handled separately.

Regardless, it’s critical for the entire group to interact. But we should all recognize that slapping articles from a newsletter onto the website does nothing more than create an archive. If that’s all you want, super. If you want web content, you have to craft content that fits the medium.

America’s broadband access issue

If you’re reading this right now in America, chances are high you’re on a broadband Internet connection provided by a company like https://www.eatel.com/. You’re likely to have a decent amount of disposable income. And, if you’re like me, and you’ve had broadband for more than 10 years, it’s probably difficult for you to imagine how you might navigate the world today without it. Businesses nowadays have become reliant on broadband as a way to run their businesses online, this blog post explains broadband internet. However, not everyone is running their business through broadband.

More than 100 million people in America today don’t have broadband. For many, it’s available, but not affordable, If your broadband costs more than you think it should then usave’s broadband deals might be just what you need. Unfortunately for some, especially in rural areas nationwide, it’s not even available yet.

I’m having a hard time figuring out how people who can’t access the Internet can really participate in the modern economy effectively. How they can access an education. Train for any jobs but the most manual of labor. Provide opportunities for their children to learn.

It’s not to say it can’t be done. But I’m so far removed from the pre-Internet world that I can only imagine how difficult it is.

There’s a nationalistic strain in our politics that likes to say America’s the best — whatever the measure. But here’s a place where we were the best, and we’ve rapidly fallen behind.

We’ve got a lot of challenges, particularly when it comes to rural access. Our nation is physically large and physically diverse. But we’ve gotten electricity and telephone service practically everywhere. This must be no different if we plan to remain competitive against nations that don’t have our resources — but that can hope to best us with better communications and technology access.

Here’s a great overview of the broadband situation.

Paying for stories is a bad business

Apparently this idea still hasn’t gotten all around in the journalism world — but paying for stories is a bad business that doesn’t end well for anyone, except those who walk away with cash in hand.

If Gizmodo hadn’t paid for the lost 4G iPhone, it seems likely we wouldn’t be talking about the criminal investigation now underway. For the same reasons we don’t pay a witness to a crime for testimony, we can more easily trust news stories where no cash changes hands. In today’s world, it’s hard enough to trust journalism….paying for stories complicates things a lot.

Now, I will say this is a weird situation. I suspect some would say it’s analogous to Consumer Reports’ daily business — they purchase all the products they review, in order to remain objective. Yet in this case, with the product in question clearly NOT available on the market, I can’t figure out why Gawker would OK the payment [beyond the desire for the massive publicity it’s gotten….and perhaps that’s enough?]. Though it’s after the fact, it seems ethically similar to paying someone to steal the device, and I think we can all agree that that’s outside the bounds of propriety. Isn’t this just accessory after the fact?

The only way to win the fight for attention

Even in today’s still-uncertain economic times, I would argue that most marketers’ biggest problem is getting the necessary share of time, not share of wallet. In my working life, the time clutter problem has gotten to be the biggest issue for people in the modern economy, across industries.

And nonetheless, we’ve got products and services to sell to businesses and consumers who are just like us — suffering from calendar and inbox overload.

You can cut through the clutter momentarily with a media sensation — the right ad, the right YouTube video — or with PR, good or bad, surrounding something that catches public interest. But if you’re not making your customer’s life better and simpler, you’re not going to win in the long run.