When should you upgrade your software?

Over the weekend, a friend asked me what I think about MacOSX Lion (he knows we are a Mac-only shop). My answer surprised him: We have not even begun to evaluate it.

I took the opportunity to run him through our upgrade policy, which can be depicted nicely as an infographic:

 

Essentially, our Macs fall into three categories:

• Production Critical Systems, where we do all the heavy lifting for our clients. If these systems don't work, we not only face missed milestones, but probably some very serious time rebuilding the machines. Thus, we are most carefully when upgrading these.
• Production Systems, for tasks such as writing, emailing or billing. While essential, we can easily switch these tasks to other hardware, with only minor (or no) impact on milestones.
• Test Systems, which is hardware that is not in daily use and can therefore be used to test before we deploy in our production environment.

In an environment like this, OS upgrades are the hardest to pull off. During a brief stint in the data center world, I learned that you should never upgrade the OS of critical systems until at least 6 months after the upgrade was released. Similarly, we don't even touch a new OS until the first maintenance release and don't put it in production until the second maintenance release. In other words, let others find and worry about bugs.

In the case of OSX 10.7 Lion, we felt that the first maintenance release was so small, that we would wait for the second maintenance release before starting to test. Also, we aren't in dire need for any of the new features, so if in doubt, we'd rather sit it out a bit longer than jump in too early.

That's why we have not even begun testing Lion.

 

Sequentia Environics featured in Gartner's Digital Marketing Service Providers report

 

One of our customers, Sequentia Environics, were distinguished in Gartner’s Competitive Landscape: Digital Marketing Service Providers report. Joining the ranks of McKinsey & Co. and Accenture, they are the only firm noted for social community development to support activities such as advocacy marketing, content marketing, crowdsourcing, consulting and measurement.

Congratulations to well-deserved recognition!

Screenflow 3 released

Screenflow from Telestream is our favorite editor for Corporate Demo Versions. They just released version 3 of the software and were kind enough to include the following quote by us in their press release.
"ScreenFlow 3 provides huge productivity improvements for us," said Veit Irtenkauf, CEO and co-founder of Digital Dazzle, LLC. "In the past, we had to use third-party tools to highlight specific regions of the screen, blur sensitive information and draw freehand video annotations. With ScreenFlow 3, we can now do these directly inside the video editor, which speeds up our video editing workflow and allows us to turn around customer change-requests more quickly. ScreenFlow remains our editor-of-choice for our corporate video services."

YouTube and Vimeo Video Compression Guidelines

Many of our customers want to host the videos we created for them on video hosting platforms under their own account.  The most popular hosting platforms remain YouTube and Vimeo.
After a client selects a hosting platform, we then optimize the compression settings for that platform. For clients who wish to optimize the compression settings themselves, we offer guidance as to which settings are best for the hosting platform they wish to use.
Most platforms post their recommended video and audio settings.  For example, visit YouTube or Vimeo to access the YouTube guidelines or the Vimeo guidelines for best compression settings.
And if you have special compression needs, just ask us - we can help you with any of these.

Image courtesy of stock.xchng user sibaudio

Press Release: Digital Dazzle Sponsors LiNC 2011

 

 

 

MILL VALLEY, Calif., May 16, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital Dazzle just announced their Select-level sponsorship of this week's LiNC 2011, Lithium's annual user conference.  Digital Dazzle is Lithium's vendor of choice for partner marketing videos and collateral.  As such, many of their corporate videos and brochures will be featured at the conference.

Digital Dazzle's Partner Enablement Videos solve the main obstacle to forming productive partnerships.  70% of all partnerships fail to drive revenue because partners are not willing to invest in a partnership until a pipeline of leads is built.  Yet, traditionally a pipeline can't be built without a significant investment.  Digital Dazzle videos alleviate this Catch 22 and enable a company to:

• Bring partner integration solutions to life before they exist;
• Vividly demonstrate key differentiators and benefits of partner solutions at a reasonable cost; and
• Begin preselling joint offerings in just 15 days.

 

A case in point is Lithium's use of Digital Dazzle's demo videos in their partner program. Henry Bruckstein, Director of Alliances at Lithium, reported, "Their unique ability to understand the business benefits of the project, translate that into a script and then design amazing looking mock ups has allowed us to accelerate our partner program to the tune of 5 new launches in a single quarter."

In today's fast moving, competitive, and complex business environment, savvy companies are using promotional demo videos to accelerate business development and shorten the sales cycle in order to drive revenue and gain market share.

About Digital Dazzle

Digital Dazzle, a boutique marketing agency, helps clientele achieve and maintain industry leadership through state-of-the-art corporate demos and videos, PowerPoint presentations, marketing collateral, web design and partner marketing consulting services. Working with such market leaders as Wipro, Cognizant, Alcatel-Lucent-Genesys, Lithium, Vovici and Teletech, our compelling storytelling delivers the quickest path to building strong brand connections that influence analysts, partners, customers and buying behavior. Founded in 2008 by Veit Irtenkauf and Sharon Rushton, Digital Dazzle is a privately held LLC with headquarters in Mill Valley, California.

 

For the complete press release, please see PRNewsWire

11 Ways to Leverage Your Corporate Video and Maximize ROI

Are you fully leveraging your corporate video?

Oftentimes, the pressure of an upcoming event (i.e. a sales presentation to a potential "major" customer) pushes a company to get off the fence and finally create that video they had been thinking about for ages. Yet, after the event passes, they let the video grow stale. If this has happened at your company, then you did not come close to realizing your video's ROI potential.

A professionally produced, compelling and concise video can become your least expensive, most effective lead generation and sales tool, when leveraged across multiple platforms and within various campaigns. This is especially true because a well-crafted video hastens audience engagement and understanding for superior influence.

Here are 11 ways to leverage your video and maximize ROI:

1. Place your video on your website's home page or product's page.
2. Give every salesperson and reseller access to the video (via DVDs, downloads from your website or from video services like Vimeo).
3. Include a link to your video in your marketing emails.
4. Present your video at trade shows or conferences. Show it on a large screen and put it on a constant loop so that attendees can easily view it and be attracted to your booth.
5. Upload your video to a service such as YouTube or Vimeo, make a company page and place your video on it. This will make it easy for others to embed your video on blogs, online communities or wherever your product or service is being talked about.
6. Post your video on your Linkedin page and other networking sites.
7. Place share links within your video for viewers to share the video with their contacts on Facebook, Twitter, or Yahoo.
8. Make the video available internally (i.e. via downloads from your website) and keep all your employees on the same page through consistent and concise messaging.
9. Present your video to analysts, investors and partners.
10. Reference your video in press releases to gain more media exposure.
11. Include a link to your video or embed it directly in your webinar invite emails to increase webinar registrations.

Are you ready to get started on a new corporate video or other marketing project? Schedule a call with Digital Dazzle and, based upon your parameters, our experts will craft an exceptional experience that will educate, influence decisions, and incite action.

 

Announcement: Consolidating Feeds

Dear Readers,

We're consolidating multiple feeds over the next few weeks, so if you get this message more than once, please stay on the Digital Dazzle feed and feel free to unsubscribe from the other feed(s).

Thank you for your understanding

Veit