I attended the e-learning SIG program for ASTD Austin last night, hosted by National Instruments and led by 360training. Working through all of the new social networking technologies that affect training, we only tackled half the list, so we're continuing next month! The biggest surprise to me was the power these technologies could bring for product marketing, beyond their great usefulness for training. Here are my ideas, based on what I heard:
[1] YouTube: video material hosted there gets fabulous numbers of hits and Google visibility. Idea: post iMIS feature demos and guided tutorials there, embedding them as needed into our own sites and training. Given the 10-minute limit (which is good per usability), chop up iNNOVATION keynotes, presentations, etc. into focused topics. (On the site, search on "labview" to see NI's demos.)
[2] Connexions (cnx.org): training material developed and shared there gets huge numbers of hits and Google visibility; NI said they get far more hits here than from their own website, which is why they're investing in it. Idea: post iMIS demos and tutorials there (embedding YouTube videos, ideally!). Publish starter/seed materials there for solution providers to customize and extend, and make it easy for them to collaborate. (On the site, search on "labview" to see NI's courses and also their tutorials on how to build such training.)
[3] Second Life: what started as a cyberpunk playground is exploding into a virtual classroom that universities and nonprofits are leveraging to reach and train people: an interactive, social learning space. Companies are building presences there both for the product visibility and the chance to interact with users they might not otherwise reach -- Dell, for example, has an island; Sweden runs an embassy to attract potential visitors. Given that the NFP/educational focus is so strong in SL, it would be wise to explore how we might place iMIS in easy reach of those groups and communities. Note that there are PG-rated servers. Example: Am. Cancer Society call for SL volunteers.
Can't wait for the second session!
All good stuff, to be sure,
All good stuff, to be sure, but a few caveats about YouTube and SecondLife.
YouTube is indeed great for many types of product demos. I recently consulted YouTube first when searching for a new professional-level (music) keyboard. Based on the various company-produced and amateur-produced demo videos, I narrowed my search list quite a bit.
However, YouTube is not so good, IMO, for software product demos. The video size is too small to display a screen clearly even at the best resolutions, and YouTube automatically applies a lot of lossy compression to any video you upload, making it far more "grainy" and pixellated than the original you uploaded.
As for SecondLife, I need to first point out that I am a long-time denizen of SecondLife (2+ years now) and that I own and operate an entire island sim and have done extensive development in SecondLife. I am familiar with the culture inside out, as well as being familiar with the foibles of LindenLab.
SecondLife is no platform for serious business, despite LindenLab's serious PR/Marketing efforts to position it as such. Their platform is so incredibly unstable that it's almost comical. They have *one-way* communication with their customers. There aren't even forums for two-way communication. All communication is in the form of a Blog that only LindenLab can post to, and they lock most of their posts against replies. They did this because the user community was *constantly* bashing them on the forums and it was making them look bad to the businesses they were trying to woo.
Then there's the fact that their entire development/maintenance philosophy is not based on killing bugs or making the platform more stable; it's based on "we let our developers work on what interests them". So they'll spend months on developing a new feature like voice communications instead of squashing crippling, chronic bugs.
Finally, if you are a casual observer investigating SecondLife as a potential extension for your business, is it made clear to you from your reading that no more than 40 avatars can inhabit the same sim at one time? And that at about 25+ avatars, the sim performance crawls to almost slide-show framerates? Is it made clear to you that users need a *good* gaming-quality workstation to run the SecondLife client at acceptable framerates even under the best of conditions? A typical workplace computer will not cut the mustard. Is it made clear to you that the video streaming technology is limited to QuickTime format only?
If you want to give a product demo or hold a training class or whatnot in Second Life, are you prepared for the embarrassment of incredibly slow response times and framerates, and even a total crash of your sim during the event? Are you prepared for a "grid attack" where griefers spam your sim with self-replicating objects (usually containing offensive images) that freeze up every client and potentially crash the sim?
SecondLife is great, don't get me wrong, but it's a libertarian, wild-west, free-for-all. For personal/hobby/social/artistic use it's a great thing. For business use; not so great.
If you want to give product demos and training, you can do it more reliably and inexpensively through webconferencing tools such as WebEx and Sonexis.