An earlier post, “Need Input from IT Marketers Who’ve Hired Freelance Customer Success Story Writers ASAP“, introduced a project that fellow success story writer, Pamela DeLoatch (b2bstorytelling.com), were working on.

The idea was to create a series of video interviews for b2b marketers interested in how to get the best from a freelance B2B case study writer.

Today’s post is an update on that project.

Pamela and I got a list of questions together from responses kindly submitted by members of LinkedIn discussion groups, created a general interview script, and then took turns asking and answering the questions.

The videos were recorded on Skype using a $20 software tool from ecamm.com known as ‘Call Recorder‘.
Their product’s tag line is:

Transform your Skype audio and video calls into QuickTime movies. Completely automatic, easy to use Skype audio and video call recording for Mac user

And that’s exactly what it did!

Here’s a screenshot of  video 2 (of 6) that’s in my new ‘samuraiwriter99‘ YouTube channel.

The interview went just over the hour and covered the following topics:
(This is a screenshot from the case study videos landing page on my site.)

For a first attempt, and using nothing more than a laptop’s internal camera and a USB headset, I’m reasonably happy with the outcome; although some of my unintended ‘grimaces’ are painful to behold. And that wall-mounted wooden coat hanger apparently protruding from my right temple is difficult to forget…

Having added a ‘freelance-b2b-case-study-writer-video-series‘ landing page, the remaining steps are to:

• Edit the video transcripts into a PDF-based report as a lead generation tool for our case study writing businesses.
• Create some podcasts using the audio channels from the interview and distribute via iTunes, or similar.
• Extract useful snippets from the transcripts and retweet them with a link to the landing page.
• Create a press release for online distribution.

I’m pleased to announce that my ‘tech content rocket’ blog successfully blasted off from the technologymarketers.com platform launch site at 15:10 hours GMT on 23 March, 2011.

Geostationary orbit above a volatile b2b mix of information technology and marketing elements has been completed.

All being well, the tech content rocket blog’s search for intelligent uses of story telling techniques in customer case studies, and for the ongoing evolution of educational marketing approaches to white papers, will hopefully yield new insights into their roles across IT buying cycles.

Back on terra firma (aka this samuraiwriter.com/blog), I plan to delve more deeply into how b2b content marketing for the computer networking industry is shaping up…or not.

- Mark McClure

Case Study and White Paper Writer To The Computer Networking Industry

The outstanding tasks from my samuraiwriter Google Profile post of a few months back finally got some attention.

Although it’s still a work in progress I’m happy with the updated version for these reasons:

• People googling for me as ‘samuraiwriter’ will get some useful info in the ‘About Me’ section.
• My Twitter Feed is easily seen under the ‘Buzz’ tab. (I’m still in two minds about Google’s new Buzz thingymajig… just trialing it out.)
• Samuraiwriter’s Flickr photos display prominently at the top of the profile. (Is that a good or a bad thing? I’m assuming it helps show who and what I am – though probably video would be even more effective.)
• Visitors interested in knowing more can also click on links to my blogs, twitter page, LinkedIn page and FaceBook ‘Fan’ page. (I’m not planning to open up my private FaceBook page to all comers at this stage. The separation between personal and professional seems clearly marked with FaceBook – especially for a mainly b2b technology marketing copywriter.)

Here’s a photo of the revised Google profile page which is presently showing at #8 on page 1 of the Google page for the search term ‘samuraiwriter’. Interestingly, it’s nowhere in the first twenty pages for the term, ‘mark mcclure’.

All constructive opinions welcome on this profile.

Can you work out what I do and who I do it for?

Is there anything you would add, edit or delete?

- Mark ‘samuraiwriter’ McClure
Freelance Technology Marketing Copywriter