While vendors are sweating it out at the DEMO conference in Arizona to deliver the perfect pitch, user-generated demos are turning marketing on its head.
The art of the demo is executing a perfect script that shows off the best of your product, a triumph of Murphy's law with the perfect message. But not only is Murphy rigorously enforced, vendors can't control the message any longer. We all know that blogs and other open source media have decentralized messaging, but what happens on the network when the demo is the message?
Screencasting demos is really cheap and easy. So simple, in fact, that users of software are developing their own and sharing them. While they may lack professional production, there is something real and visceral about peering over the shoulder of a user openly playing with a product.
Demo production is in the hands of everyone, more diverse stories can be told. Jon Udell developed a screencast to tell a story about how Wikipedia works, tracing the history of a page. The result condenses years of ad-hoc collaboration into 8 minutes of motion and narrative. this story is far more instructive than if Wikipedia was a commercial organization and scripted its perfect demo.
John Broughton asked the big question: Is screencasting the future of learning (about software, at least) - short movies that are easy to create without professional help?
Socialtext user Raymond Kristiansen put it like this:
I really would love to see more screencasts showing how People use software. Not some idealized screenshots that do not show the context.
So he produced his own user-generated Socialtext demo. His first question was if this infringed on copyright, but we encouraged him to share it openly. It doesn't bring out the best in our product, but watching him create a new workspace and listening to him click his keyboard in the dark of Nordic night shares how he really uses the tool.
As it gets easier to create, remix and share media -- expect your customers to generate their own demos. Your first instinct may be that this is a loss of control, and to shut it down. But encourage the creation of these artifacts, or they will be created despite you, and they are a vital new part of the conversation we call marketing.
