With videos and podcasts being all the rage in the Real Estate industry, I was inspired to take our Help/FAQs section up a notch by creating video guides that demonstrated how to use various features of our site.
I described the video masterpieces I would create, complete with
cool transitions, special effects, and voice narration and eventually
convinced the others that Camtasia Studio 4
was such a great screen recording, editing, and publishing program that
it was surely worth its $299 price tag. I had visions delusions of grandeur, of Academy Awards for my "Managing Property Permissions" video and proudly showing my "How to Create a Detailed Listing" video at the Sundance film festival.
I decided to start with an easy one: creating an account. Now, creating an account takes about 15 seconds-- most of which is spent trying to remember your mother's maiden name before deciding to just change the question we ask when you lose your password. I recorded the screen as I went through the process of creating an account and then went to town editing my short screencast. When I finally sat back to admire my video, I learned to my dismay that 15 seconds was ample time for me to have created the worst screencast ever produced.
As I watched in horror at the neon orange post-it notes flying across the screen, the words of my Drawing 101 professor (critiquing my final VIDEO project) echoed in my head:
"I love your attention to detail--you must have used a ruler to make all your lines so straight! I know art really isn't your thing, but I admire your attitude."
Well, I hope his willingness to focus on effort rather than ability is shared by all, for I went on to create over a dozen more videos. The majority of the video tutorials I made were meant to act as guides for property managers and to assist them in creating, editing, and activating their properties' listings and managing their companies. They may not be winning any awards, but they serve their purpose and, hopefully, will help answer some of the more common questions we receive. Here is the directory of help videos, check some of them out.
Now,
if you are interested in watching videos that demonstrate how you can
use HotPads to search for apartments and rental homes... you are
spared.
Screeniac.com has created a very impressive screencast that provides a very thorough guide for using many of the features of HotPads. We thank Molly for taking the time to highlight our site and producing such a great video, complete with voice narration! (For the record: Screeniac used Camtasia Studio 4 to produce the screencast too...) They also have a number of other screencasts to check out.
*If you assume that the value of a picture in terms of words remains constant... and 1 picture= 1,000 words... then is the value of a video simply the total number of frames (or pictures) in a video X 1,000? Seems to make sense, but I would bet that there would be some sort of diminished return going on.
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