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Choosing Your Own Adventure:
Interactive Hotspots in Camtasia Studio & Camtasia Mac

When I was in the fifth grade, I was a huge fan of choose your own adventure stories. For the uninitiated, these books didn’t proceed from first page to last page in a linear fashion, but rather branched out in different directions, complete with multiple endings (a happy ending or two, along with twelve or so branches that resulted in the protagonist’s gruesome death).

Unlike standard literature, which is a one-way medium, these books were engaging because they allowed choice to enter the equation. Now the characters didn’t merely do what the author mandated, but you as the reader had a measure of control:

“You’re at home all alone. You hear the sound of breaking glass downstairs. You open the drawer of your nightstand, and pull out…”

• an 8mm handgun (turn to page 49).
• a flashlight (turn to page 66).
• a copy of Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger (turn to page 80).

Both the Windows and Mac versions of Camtasia give you the ability to offer this same level of interactivity to your users by way of clickable hotspots. While these are contingent on using the Camtasia SmartPlayer technology for presenting your content to the world, they’re a great way of giving your users a measure of choice regarding where to go or what to watch.

There are four basic times when you would want to add a clickable hotspot:

1. You’ve got a call-to-action in your video where you want to give folks a clickable link to buy your product, get more information, or visit a particular site you were talking about.
2. You’ve got an infographic or other densely populated information screen in your video, and you want to pause playback and give your audience a chance to digest it all before clicking to move on.
3. You want to simulate working with a program or web application. The user clicks the button in question, and the video proceeds as if she had clicked it in the real world.
4. You want the users to watch only those sections of video that directly apply to them.

In this video, you’ll see examples of each, and I’ll show you how to set it up. WATCH IT:

Camtasia Studio 8.4 and Camtasia Mac 2.8 have taken their first steps to playing nicely with each other.

Since TechSmith introduced Camtasia for Macintosh a few years ago, tons of multi-platform folks like myself have wondered about the interchangeability between recordings and projects on Windows vs. Mac. Unfortunately, at that time, Camtasia Mac was not a simple port of Camtasia Studio. It was an entirely new product, built from the ground up for a Mac audience, with a Mac-like aesthetic and functionality.

As time went on, the two began to mimic each other more and more, with Camtasia Mac adopting the more successful features of its Windows predecessor, and vice versa.

With the introduction of Camtasia Studio 8.4 and Camtasia Mac 2.8 a couple of days ago, the two products have taken their first major step toward cross-platform compatibility. There’s a new recording format that can be read on both screencasting tools, and this new 16-minute video gives you the skinny.

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How a Run for Ice Cream Taught Me a Profound Lesson in the Science of Compliance

At some point every December I get a serious hankering for ice cream. Unfortunately, all the good ice cream shops are seasonal here. Open in spring & summer only. That means I have to suffer the crappy store-bought stuff until my beloved Heladería Ibense opens its doors again in March. At this very moment, I’m jonesing for some Chocolate Bonbón.

One summer, not long after moving here, I made way downtown to get my fix. And not just mine. I carried a handwritten list of the favorite flavors of everyone in my family. I was probably going to blow 30€ on creamy handmade ice cream that day.

On my way in, practically blocking the door, was a beggar woman asking for spare change. Encountering those who beg for money is no rare occurrence here in Huelva. A large Gypsy population, accompanied by a sizable number of Senegalese and other Africans who successfully make the dangerous raft trip across the Straights of Gibraltar, flood the streets hawking pirated DVDs and ashtrays fashioned out of aluminum cans. I get approached for cash all the time.

I blew right past her in my rush to grab one of those take-a-number slips from the dispenser. When the temperatures go triple-digits in the hot Spanish sun, the crowds can be unbelievable. At any rate, they finally gotten around to my turn when I saw the woman out of the corner of my eye. She was sitting now, sweating under the glare of the Andalusian sun and rubbing her aching calves.

I felt like a schmuck. Here I was dropping significant dinero on a fleeting luxury, when here’s someone who could probably get a week’s worth of meals out of that same money. I completed my purchase, and on my way out, handed the lady a few coins.

I was recounting the tale to a marketer friend of mine some time later, and what he told me afterward would completely rock my world.

He said, “Daniel, why do you think the woman was standing there specifically?”

“Hmm… I dunno. I remember thinking it strange that she would be standing in a shade-free spot at 3pm on a hot July afternoon.”

He clarified, “I can tell you right now. It’s because she discovered, whether through explicit experimentation or by accident, that she made more money there. It’s profitable on that spot precisely because of schlubs like you who walk by to enjoy a small luxury, and then feel guilty about it. It’s a COMPLIANCE TACTIC.”

EDIT: For what it’s worth, I completely disagree with my friend that giving to the less fortunate makes one a naive schlub. A few comments (both private and publicly posted below) expressed concern that recognizing compliance tactics and not allowing yourself to be taken advantage of could be used to justify a lack of charity. That’s not my aim.

He later introduced me to an amazing book on the topic by a guy named Robert Cialdini. It’s called

Influence: Science and Practice

In it, Cialdini talks about the subtle (and often, not-so-subtle) manipulations that can trip the psychological triggers in nearly all of us.

As fan of social psychology, and as a lifelong patsy, it was fascinating to read about all the techniques that part fools like me from their money. To this day, it remains one of the top 5 marketing books I’ve ever read, as it IS possible to leverage a number of these techniques in an ethical, “white hat” way, if your aim to sell via screencast (or via any other means, for that matter. But regardless of whether you sell things for a living or not, it’s all compelling stuff, way more interesting than a book on the science of persuasion has any right to be.

And trust me, as soon as you become able to recognize the compliance techniques, you’ll see them everywhere. And once you start spotting them out in the wild, you’ll find that they very quickly lose their power. Hucksters and snake oil salesmen, beware.