Common Craft in Inc. Magazine

A few months back April Joyner of Inc. Magazine contacted me to talk about the growth of videos as a sales tool.  I wasn't really sure what the article's angle, but spoke from our experience in working with clients on videos that explain their products.  The article is now online and in the print magazine.

My big points came out (mostly accurately) as:

• It's not about how something works, it's why anyone should care about
• The script is really important, write it first
• Keep it short

The article also profiles the video experiences of iPhone app company Smule, Kiva Systems and has a mention of our friends at Wistia.  Check it out.

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Coming Soon: More Videos on Financial Responsibility

Here's a question for you: Were you taught about financial responsibility when you were young? 

When I ask this question, the vast majority of people respond with a quick "nope." I sure wasn't. In my high school I learned to recite a poem from BeoWulf in Olde English, but never learned about 401ks or compound interest. In light of the current financial crisis, we want to do our part to make sure people understand the important elements of personal finance and being financially responsible.

The First Three

This is why we've focused the first part of this year on videos about financial basics.  We started with very basic videos, meant to be prerequisites for more complex topics.  We've covered Saving Money (including Compound Interest), Borrowing Money and Investing Money.  With these in place, we're ready to release our next three in the series.  I won't divulge the titles just yet, but they're all meant to help people understand how to be more financially responsible.

Finance is Boring - But Doesn't Have to Be.

We see two big problems in learning about managing money.  First, our financial system is filled with complex terms. It's difficult to care about financial information when you don't recognize the words.  Second, most materials about finance are deadly boring.  For these next Money videos, we've put a lot of effort into making the videos easy to understand, but also entertaining and fun. You won't find finance videos like these anywhere else.

For Whom?

We often have specific people in mind when working on videos like these.  There are usually two audiences:

1. Learners - These are the people who need to learn about financial responsibility. They are students in classrooms and seminars, they are website visitors and employees.

2. Educators - These are the people who need better ways to educate others. Our goal is to provide these good people with accurate, useful and engaging videos that will help learners grasp and even care about financial responsibility. This is the audience we expect to license the videos.

Expect the first of the videos within a week from now.  We'll look forward to your feedback and ideas...

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A Model for Applying Common Craft Videos

People often ask how our presentation quality videos are used in professional and educational settings. From talking to educators and influencers, we've learned that our videos are often used to introduce a subject - to get everyone on the same page at the beginning of a class, workshop, etc. Recently, as part of our planning for 2009, we came up with a model that helps tell this story.  We call it the A-to-Z Scale.

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Teaching Social Media?

As you may know, we've published a number "in Plain English" videos over the last year or two that are related to Social Media.  Taken together, there are 9 of them on subjects from Wikis to Twitter.  We've learned along the way that:

1) Professionals like you find these videos useful for introducing social media concepts to others.
2) You would prefer to use "Presentation Quality" versions that are downloadable and look great on screens of all types.
3) You love quantity discounts.

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Teachers Make Our Day

Hi, I am a teacher at a middle school in Ohio, I just shared your electoral college video with my kids and thy got it!!!!!  Your explanation is the best I have ever seen.  Now my kids want more of your stuff.  Just thought you'd like a big cheer from Ohio.

Here's to kids getting it! Yay!  The video is here. 

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Wow, Thanks So Much for the Feedback

We are blown away with the response to the recent post "What Videos Should We Make?"  Not just the quantity (over 50 comments and lots of email), but the quality.  It's exciting to see suggestions that have opened up new ideas and ones that fit with a couple of the themes that have been top-of-mind. 

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Our Videos at One Year: Facts and Figures

Well, as of today it has been exactly one year since all this video craziness began.  On April 22, 2007 we published RSS in Plain English.  We never guessed these videos would take us so far - it was just a problem that begged to be solved.  Did you ever see a blog post with the same name from 2004?

Since our work is in front of people often, we both feel a little self conscious in talking about the numbers behind the videos. We don't want to seem ostentatious or too self-promotional.  But, at the same time, I think that exposing some of the figures provides context and hopefully examples of the power of Social Media.

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Our New Adventure: The Common Craft Store

As I wrote recently, we've been thinking a lot about Common Craft's future.  In the coming year, Sachi and I want to make even more videos for you - videos that are useful, both on the Web and in the workplace. We've recently created a new resource that will hopefully help us get there.

Today we're announcing the roll out of an early version of The Common Craft Store.  It looks like this:

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Talkin' Bout My Education

Looking back at my education, I wasn't a great student.  I made decent grades and went to a good university and grad school, but school was never my thing.  Looking back, I can pin-point a couple of points at which I lost faith.

It was sixth grade and I was in a math class with Mrs. Paine (it's true - Paine).  The subject was least common denominators.  I didn't get it.  My worksheets came back with red marks, but I didn't really understand what I was supposed to be doing.  The class moved on while I was caught up in trying to memorize the details. Instead, what I needed was an understanding of the reasoning - not how, but why. It was at this point that I fell behind and began to dread math, as I do today.

Another example was college and grad school - I went to business school and took a few accounting classes.  Again, the light bulb just didn't go on. I passed, but not because I fully understood the reasoning of Accounting as I do now.  I remember the first day of my first accounting class.  The instructor went directly into T accounts, debits and credits, revenue and expenses.  I felt blind-sided.  My first reaction was to try to memorize all the debits vs. credits instead of looking at it from a broad perspective of how money flows. I had no context to build an understanding.

Looking back, context is what I have always missed in education.  If someone could put a new idea in the context of the real world or show me how it enables other things, I would get it.  It's just my learning style - I need the big picture before the details make any sense.  By diving directly into T accounts and least common denominators, I got caught up in trying to memorize instead of understand.  What I needed to know was why - why this works the way it does - and why it matters to me.

So, I think the connection to our style of videos is obvious.  They are based on all the things that don't work for me in education. When I see explanations on the Web, the remind me of school - they assume too much.  They sometimes dive directly into how something works and spend little time on context. 

For me, it's a big problem - a problem that I believe others feel too.  When it comes time for me to try to explain something,  it just feels right to look at the world from the perspective that would have made sense to me that first day of accounting class - build meaning with context first, then explore details.

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Common Craft - (Nearly) A Year Later

It's been almost a year since we published our first paperworks video - RSS in Plain English in April of 2007.  Since that time, we've been watching every comment, every blog post and every email.  We are lucky to have fans like you that have shared our videos and helped us learn so much.

It's through watching these conversations that we've been able to see new ways for Common Craft to have a bigger impact in the next year.  We'll be more specific soon, but for now, I'd like to share some big picture perspectives on how we see you and ourselves. These perspectives will drive the changes you'll see in 2008.

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