As we get ready to launch our new screenshot communication application, Clarify, I have been thinking a lot about all of our marketing communications. I am alway interested to see what other companies are doing, especially when they do it well.

HubSpot has executed what I think is masterful campaign at Dreamforce this week. Here is my simple analysis of how they have created awareness, communicated value and, most likely, generated a lot of great leads. (more…)

I have written before on this blog about how much we love Wistia. To me Wistia is to business video publishing what ScreenSteps Live is to online documentation. Just like ScreenSteps Live takes the headache out of creating documentation, Wistia removes all of the headaches associated with publishing and distributing online video. You don’t have to encode the video in 500 different formats. You don’t have an ugly YouTube player with ads on it. You don’t have to worry about what device your audience is viewing the video on. You just upload the video and Wistia takes care of the rest.

Wistia just posted a video showcasing all of the pain they can remove from online video. It’s called “Why Web Video Sucks”. When I watched it yesterday I cracked up laughing. Check it out below:

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Yesterday I wrote about the benefits I think HubSpot customers will get from the recent Performable acquisition. But Performable customers should get a lot out of this change as well. Here three areas where I see Performable customers benefiting from what HubSpot has to offer.

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Last week HubSpot announced they were acquiring Performable. We have been customers (and big fans) of both companies so I thought that I would give you my 2 cents about the acquisition.

Disclaimer: While I have used both products I have no inside knowledge of future integration plans between the two. What I list below are just things I would hope would make it from Performable into HubSpot.

1. Reverse Funnel Analysis

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As you have probably already heard there were some problems with ScreenSteps Live and ScreenSteps.me over the past 36 hours. ScreenSteps Live is hosted on an Amazon Cloud infrastructure and Amazon had some major problems yesterday which are still going on as I write this. The problems they had affected a lot of sites, including Reddit, Quora and Foursquare just to name a few.

The Current State of Things

Updated 4/25/2011 1:01 PM – Everything was back to normal as of Saturday morning. You can look at the end of the post for the log of updates we posted.

What Happened

Amazon had a failure of EBS volumes across multiple availability zones. Theoretically that isn’t supposed to be possible, but apparently it is. This meant that not only was it impossible get access to the ScreenSteps Live site, but we were unable to start a new instance of the application (or reboot) in an availability zone that was unaffected by the outage since they were all affected.

As a fallback we moved ScreenSteps Live to a new region in the US. This took some time though since as the East Coast Region failed there was a “rush” to start instances in the West which started creating capacity issues.

But even with those issues, in hindsight we can see areas where we could have moved faster and at least saved a couple of hours of downtime. We apologize for this and we will be documenting procedures that will help us be more responsive in the future when a situation like this happens again. We are also making changes to our architecture that will allow us to be more responsive as well.

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. Regardless of what people say, there are a lot of people who do “read the manual” and not having your documentation available to you can have a serious impact on your business. The customers that contacted us were very understanding and we really appreciate it. We apologize that we didn’t do better. We will post updates here as the ability to upload and edit content comes back online.

Status Log

Here are the status items we posted starting on 4/22/2011 (Friday) at 10:57 PM EDT.

ScreenSteps Live

ScreenSteps Live content is now available for viewing. We have disabled lesson uploading and editing until Amazon has things fully sorted out but your customers should now be able to see all of their documentation. If you absolutely need something changed in your documentation today then send us an email at support@bluemangolearning.com and we will help you out.

ScreenSteps.me

ScreenSteps.me is working intermittently. ScreenSteps.me is hosted on Heroku which provides a platform layer over Amazon Web Services and they are working to restore full functionality. At the current time the service seems to be going on and off.

Update 4/22/2011 8:28 PM EDT

ScreenSteps Live is still serving content reliably for customers but we have not brought uploading/editing back online. We will do this by the latest Saturday morning.

ScreenSteps.me was back up for awhile but is down again. We don’t have an ETA of when it will be back up.

Update 4/22/2011 10:53 PM EDT

ScreenSteps.me is back up and operational. Everything seems to be normal there.

Update 4/23/2011 12:42 AM EDT

ScreenSteps Live is back up and fully functional as is ScreenSteps.me. Thanks for your patience through this ordeal.

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The first day at Dreamforce was really fantastic. It started out with some very early morning flights and ended with two very exhausted Blue Mango-ers, but everything in-between was amazing. I have to say, of all of the conferences I have attended I have never seen one that was this well organized.

One of the best parts has been meeting so many of our customers as well as the other vendors that we work with.

A little Dreamforce news, Partick Bowl from First Data Merchant Services Corporation will be showing off ScreenSteps during his session “No Train, No Gain: Developing an Effective Training Strategy”. The session will be held Thursday at 9:45 AM in Moscone West 2006. Apparently he is hitting a hot spot in the Salesforce community because his session is already all booked up. But if you get there early you still might be able to sneak in.

Thanks to our Salesforce users that let Patrick know about ScreenSteps. He contacted us after one our users pinged him on Chatter and told him he needed to talk about ScreenSteps in his session.

The events around Dreamforce have really been fun as well. This morning Trevor and I participated in the Dreamforce 5k. It was a fantastic San Francisco morning and a great way to get ready to stand at our booth for 9 hours today :).

If you are at Dreamforce, please come by and tell us how you are using ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live. We can even show you some cool ways to use the new ScreenSteps.me service with Chatter. We would also love to do a video interview with you to learn how ScreenSteps has made your life easier.

Looking forward to seeing you.

We are very excited to be exhibiting at Dreamforce next week! This is going to be our first Dreamforce event but our Salesforce customers have really been talking it up to us. From everything we have seen so far it looks like it will be a fantastic event.

How to Find Us

We will have a booth in the Exhibitor Pavilion, or what we like to call “Tiny Town.” Since our booth will be slightly smaller than the Salesforce booth we thought you might like a little help finding it. We are booth #7 in the Exhibitor Pavilion.

Exhibitor Pavilion

The Blue Mango Booth

If you are attending Dreamforce then please come by. We are very excited to meet our existing Salesforce customers and to help some other Salesforce users create beautiful documentation :).

You can get a free Keynote and Expo hall pass to Dreamforce by filling out the form here.

We’ll see you next week!

Learn more about Salesforce and ScreenSteps Live

One of our great users, Kevin Burns, prepared a video showing how to use ScreenSteps.me to create email newsletters in MadMimi. I have never used MadMimi but Kevin makes it look pretty simple.

View the video below or on blip.tv.

Kevin also created a great video on using ScreenSteps Desktop with Zendesk.

Do you have any interesting ways you are using ScreenSteps.me? Please let us know about it!

We have been using MailChimp for several years now. It is a great product that makes creating and delivering email campaigns really simple. But adding images to campaigns has always been a pain. You have to:

• Prepare the image in Photoshop or some other image editor
• Export it to disk
• Upload it to MailChimp
• Place it in the campaign

And if you need to change the image you need to go through the whole process again.

ScreenSteps.me eliminates all of these steps and reduces a task that used to take about a half hour down to less than 5 minutes. With ScreenSteps.me I can capture and edit images right in ScreenSteps Desktop as well as add text. Once I am done I export to ScreenSteps.me and I am given some HTML to paste into my MailChimp campaign. That is all there is to it. Here is an example of a campaign we created in MailChimp using ScreenSteps.me.

Watch the video below to see how I used ScreenSteps.me and MailChimp to create the campaign.

Or view the video on YourTube

If you would like to learn more about ScreenSteps.me and how it can save you time in your business then please join us for a free webinar tomorrow on Tuesday, Nov. 16th. You can register for the webinar here.