Podcasts for Customer Support

[Marc Bryant]

you can put a RSS feed on your support website, inbed it in your product or even in your help.
 
I really don't see Podcasts or Vidcasts (vodcasts) replacing user manuals, I see them more as an added feature some customers use/will use to market their products and help with some of the more difficult issues on a continuing basis.


----- Original Message ----
From: "Johnson, Tom" <TJohnson at starcutter.com>
To: Sean Wheller <sean at inwords.co.za>; Marc Bryant <twmarcb at yahoo.com>
Cc: TECHWR-L <techwr-l at lists.techwr-l.com>
Sent: Monday, August 14, 2006 11:13:33 AM
Subject: RE: Podcasts for Customer Support


What's the mechanism for letting people know about your podcast? It seems like you would need to use very different approaches for training and marketing podcasts. I can't imagine our potential customers are checking Google every day to see if we've put something new out there. Once you get a listenership, the issue becomes finding something new and relevant to podcast on a regular basis.

Tom Johnson
Technical Writer
tjohnson at starcutter.com 

-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+tjohnson=starcutter.com at lists.techwr-l.com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+tjohnson=starcutter.com at lists.techwr-l.com]On
Behalf Of Sean Wheller
Sent: Monday, August 14, 2006 11:49 AM
To: Marc Bryant
Cc: TECHWR-L
Subject: Re: Podcasts for Customer Support


On Monday 14 August 2006 17:26, Marc Bryant wrote:
> Very interesting concept. It makes for great marketing as well.

Yes, I can definatley see the rate of adoption for marketing leading that of 
support, as usual.

>  
> Microsoft and some other companies (apple) do this in a round-about way by
> having developers/designers podcast/blog their products.

I saw that, did you see that CISCO is also doing it? These companies are 
usually the early adopters. Perhaps it is indicative of a new direction for 
the future, although one cannot tell at this stage.

Certainly I can think of one or two customers who would benefit greatly from 
having their own radio station :-) I noticed that Novell is already doing it 
[http://www.novell.com/openaudio]. I must say, it does help keep informed.

I also see a few people doing video casting [vodcasting]. Makes the 
imagination run a bit wild thinking of the videocast user manual.

Hmm I wonder how one would go about developing something like that?


-- 
Ask me about the Monkey.

Sean Wheller
Technical Author
sean at inwords.co.za
+27-84-854-9408
http://www.inwords.co.za
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