The Mindquarry screencast I wrote about before, got spiced up with the song Revolve by His Boy Elroy, which is available under a Creative Commons license.

Here’s what I did technically:

First I hit File > Export in iMovie and clicked on “GarageBand” to transfer the video to the GarageBand application included on my Mac. In GarageBand, I added the song to the audio track. It was necessary to adjust the music to the video, e.g. to highlight a switch of the topic with the music. After some trial and error, I learned how to cut, paste, move parts of the music and also that you could simply extend a part at its beginning and end (cool!).

When the audio work was done, I wanted to add the music credits at the end of the video. I added the missing clip in iMovie and wondered how I can get the extended video into GarageBand. The trick is actually, that GarageBand will automatically load the new video because it is linked to iMovie.

It was more hassle to find a way how to get the audio track imported to iMovie. I think I only found a workaround yet: 1) Export from GarageBand to high quality video (640×480), 2) Import in new iMovie project, 3) extract audio track in iMovie. I’d be glad to hear if someone knows a better way?

From iMovie, I exported the video in a format optimized for YouTube. The video settings have been described in my previous post Screencast for YouTube with iShowU and iMovie on Mac. I configured the audio settings as follows:

• Format: AAC
• Sample rate: 22.050KHz
• Channels: Stereo
• Bit rate: 24kbps

Today, I uploaded a short screencast about Mindquarry to YouTube which will be included on our Web site.

I created it with iShowU and iMovie on my Mac and uploaded it to YouTube. It took some research on the Web as well as trial-and-error to achieve a good resolution in YouTube’s 320×240 video size. Here’s a short how-to:Download and install iShowU (I used 1.41), pay the $20. iMovie should already be installed on your Mac.These are my settings in iShowU:

• Audio: Turned off, because we later add music to the screencast within iMovie.
• Video:
  • Framerate: 15
  • Size: 100%
  • Quality: Max
  • Compression: Apple MPEG4 Compressor
  • Mouse: Record in each frame
  • Recording area: I used different ratios to show an overview or details. They all scale down well to the 320x240px size of YouTube videos:
    • 320×240
    • 427×320
    • 640×480
    • 854×640

Now start recording with iShowU.

Start a new iMovie project in MPEG-4 format (automatically sets the ratio to 640×320). Import the screencast files (File > Import), insert them, move them around, cut them, add images, audio, effects, etc.

When done go to File > Export in iMovie, choose QuickTime and from the drop-down that you want to define your own settings, click “Share”. Before saving the file, change the screen size by clicking on “Options”, there on “Size” and choose “320 x 240 QVGA”. For all other options, use the default settings (e.g. frame rate at 24).

The text effects in-between the screencast clips have been created in Keynote, which is part of iWorks. It’s a great presentation software with nice text animations. Keynote allows you to export to QuickTime movies which again can be imported to iMovie. The descriptive subtitles at the bottom of the screencast clips have been added within iMovie, just make sure you disable “Black background”.

Now I just need to find a good CC-licensed music for the screencast …

Useful resources:

• Making a Screencast with iShowU and iMovie
• How to produce a screencast in iMovie that doesn’t look like crap

My search for a PR agency in the USA for Mindquarry has lead to some good results. I am waiting for feedback from some promising potentials. Below is the Q&A I sent to them.

Some of the questions should be answered by your marketing strategy which you hand out to your PR folks. Nevertheless, with a young company like Mindquarry, your marketing strategy is likely to change while you introduce new products and gain new experiences. Hence, I want a PR agency flexible enough not only to shape a story and message with you, but also to keep an eye on how the results of a PR campaign impact your general strategy.

Use the list at your own risk 🙂

Profile of PR Agency

• Where do you see do Mindquarry and your PR agency fit well together?
• Why can you help us best to be successful? What’s special about you, what’s your PR “trick”?
• Do you see critical aspects, anything where you or Mindquarry need to adapt to work together smoothly?
• How big is your company: How many employees, how many customers?
• Please name all Open Source clients and your team members who work(ed) for them.
• Please name your 5 best known customers and your team members who work(ed) for them.

Profile of Mindquarry

• How would you describe the profile of Mindquarry?
• What are strengths and weaknesses?
• How would you position Mindquarry in your PR, what’s the core message?
• Do you see a large disadvantage in Mindquarry not yet having an office in the USA? Which interim solution would you suggest until the office is in place?

General PR Approach

• What would be the general PR approach you’d suggest to gain visibility of Mindquarry? Starting with social marketing / community evangelism then moving towards “traditional” PR? Or mixing it right from the start?
• Please list the minimum actions you would perform to ensure the success of Mindquarry PR.
• How long will it take, to achieve the goal?

Focus Groups

• Please give us an idea which focus groups you would address and the reasons why?
• Also, who are the focus groups you would leave out, why?

Channels and Collaterals

• Which channels would you address?
• Which magazines/journalists would you approach? Where do you want to see a news or article appear?
• Are there in general conferences or trade fairs we should not miss?
• Should the PR be in sync with our appearance at events or is this less important?
• Any bloggers you have in mind whom you could ask to write about Mindquarry?
• Do you think http://www.mindquarry.com is ready for the upcoming PR campaigns? What would you urgently change?
• Do you plan to make use of http://www.mindquarry.com within your PR? How?
• What kind of marketing collaterals (e.g. brochures) should Mindquarry provide or adjust for your PR?

Resources and Costs

• How many of your team members would be involved in Mindquarry PR?
• Will we have a dedicated point of contact? How much of her time would this person allocate to us? Who would assist her?
• What kind of help would you need from Mindquarry?
• A rough estimate: how much would the minimal PR cost?

Controlling

• How would you benchmark the success or failure of your Mindquarry PR?
• How would you correlate it to sales figures (conversion)?

The major goal of Mindquarry’s marketing strategy for 2007 is to reach a high visibility in the North American (NA) market. To achieve this goal, Mindquarry seeks a PR agency located in the USA.

Requirements:

• located in USA
• record of successful PR campaigns for Open Source companies
• excellent contacts to leading IT media and stakeholders
• staff member(s) with good reputation in IT blogosphere

Matches with your PR agency? Please contact me: sandro [dot] groganz [at] mindquarry [dot] com.

About Mindquarry

Mindquarry was founded in the summer of 2006 by three graduate students of the Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam, Germany. The founders set out to build better tools for knowledge workers,the result – Mindquarry, the Open Source Collaborative Software for file sharing, tasks management and Wiki editing. For a fast startup, Mindquarry got financial backing through the Hasso Plattner Ventures; Hasso Plattner being a co-founder of SAP. More information about Mindquarry is available on the Internet at www.mindquarry.com.

1 week ago, we had a meeting of the executive management team of Mindquarry where I presented the envisaged Mindquarry marketing strategy for 2007. Let me share some of the basics with you which you should not miss in your marketing strategy presentation.

Focus Your Activities

The most important aspect is of course to focus our marketing activities. It’s very critical especially for startups to do this right. For example, Mindquarry had a German Web site until recently, in parallel to the English version. We dropped it, because we will focus on the international market in 2007 and the visionaries as well as early adopters. These groups usually understand English very well. Getting rid of translations in this early phase of our business will allow us to concentrate on basic marketing activities.

Define Your Niche

It was also important to define the niche of Mindquarry well. We decided to go for “Mindquarry, the Open Source Collaborative Software”. As you can see at our Web site which got relaunched today, we added this to the logo in the header. Wikipedia and a good friend of mine helped me to sort out the niche.

The niche implies that Mindquarry is a new product in a new market, as the term Collaborative Software is not yet as widely known as for example Enterprise Content Management or even Operating System. It is of course a challenge to position our product well, especially because it addresses a rather new market in the Web 2.0 space. Open Source can certainly help us to achieve a high visibility.

Organisational Success Factors

I identified two critical organisational success factors for our marketing:

• Coordinate well between sales, marketing and development from the early days. Otherwise, business and product development will lack behind.
• Coordinate marketing campaigns between teams with the goal to push a message out to the market at once.

Remember that you will also have to address your community, which will include developers of other companies as well as their marketing and sales personnel. Hence, take care of internal and external coordination.

Marketing Style

Mindquarry is a Web 2.0 company, hence we will also do a lot of social marketing. This means, we will heavily make use of communication tools such as blogs, podcasts, Wiki, etc. This includes that I will happily share with you what’s going on within marketing at Mindquarry (as I do here). My vision is to make Mindquarry’s marketing a public project to some extent, where Mindquarry asks for feedback before or after we implement something. For example, you might have guessed that our CEO does not quite like the green download button 🙂

Marketing Execution and Deliverables

Don’t forget to think about what you are actually going to do when you define a marketing strategy, for example:

• your team resources and how you would like to grow the team
• events you plan to attend (trade fairs, conferences, etc.)
• collaterals (brochures, business cards, etc.)
• the infrastructure you need to manage marketing (task manager, file sharing, etc.)

Coaching

Especially in an Open Source company, marketing is a lot about coaching your colleagues in doing marketing themselves. This includes how to do good customer or conference presentations, how to write a nice blog entry, etc. In the end, if you give to your colleagues, you will get back from them – and this is what will keep the wheel turning and ensure a good coordination between marketing and other teams.

Of course, marketing coaching also includes your Open Source community. There will be externals who will approach you because they plan to write an article about your product. Help them and offer to review their text!

Check out Ian’s excellent entry A Marketing Model for Open Source for more on Open Source marketing strategies.

On Friday last week, Germany’s biggest IT news site Heise News wrote about the first public release of the Mindquarry Open Source teamwork software. Another big German IT site, Golem, also wrote about it.

This brought the Mindquarry Web servers almost down to their knees due to traffic caused by downloads of the Mindquarry software. At Friday, we had around 100 gigabyte changing owners caused by 2500 downloads, 7000 unique visits and 30 000 hits.

1/3 of the traffic has been caused by the two German sites, with 25% of visitors coming from Heise, 9% from Golem. The biggest share, about 28%, actually came from StumbleUpon, 5% via del.icio.us, 33% from various other sites.

The aftermath of the release PR can best be seen in the Google results when searching for “Mindquarry”: Before Friday, it was 17 000, right now they are at 500 000.

Update: Forgot to mention that Lars also blogged about the release PR aftermath.