I’m rarely impressed by other people’s promotions, but this one I have to share.

When introducing your company, products or services you must rapidly communicate what it is, what makes it different, and why the prospect should be interested. The more abstract the product or service, the more difficult this becomes.

When I came upon an online intro by NearSoft, I found a case study in how to do web promotions right.

NearSoft is a near-by outsourcing software development house … in Mexico (not a country one normally has on a short list of offshore opportunities). Their value propositions are that (a) they are closer than India – same time zone as Phoenix – and (b) they eliminate many of the common offshore headaches (such as the cost of flying to India to manage project details).

The folks at NearSoft knew they had to communicate their unique value propositions in a short amount of time and make the message stick. They also knew that buzz marketing was the most effective means of spreading the word that outsourcing to Mexico was possible and sane.

So they made a video.

My initial reaction was “Well who in the Sam Hell hasn’t made a video?” Getting your video noticed in the flood of online content has been classified by the American Psychiatric Association as a form of auto-masochism. Yet another self-serving promo video, from a Mexican software house none-the-less, sounded like a model for failure.

Here is what NearSoft did right. Use it as a “how to” model for promotions in general and web intros in particular.

Guarantee of brevity: They flatly state the intro lasts a mere 53 seconds. Anyone will invest under a minute is they know the time limit is real (which it wasn’t, but that doesn’t matter).

Selling the benefits: The speaker reads the benefits and the video animations drive home the points. This technique takes advantage of a subtle quirk of the human brain whereby it can absorb more information per unit of time if the information comes from multiple sensory input and it tightly related (this is the way we learn languages, by matching visual input with spoken words). I cannot tell you exactly what the speaker said, but after one viewing I got the idea that NearSoft was a $500 plane trip within one time zone, and that this saves me time, money and headaches.

Humor: Being funny makes even a software outsourcing company, in a relatively unknown town in Mexico, seem approachable. Humor can be tricky, so NearSoft uses visuals that are universally understood (or understandable) and tight synchronization with the spoken word (in fact, an early slide admits that the video is actually 85 seconds long while making the promise that it is 53 seconds). They juxtapose the announcer listing serious off-shoring issues (such as the “excessive rework”) with unrelated images (Michael Jackson’s nose).

The net effect (pun intended) is that the video successfully gets you to visit, listen, communicate why NearSoft is important, and give you a reason to spread the word (like I am doing now) even if you do not need their services. And they did it for very little money. All in all, great promotional effort.

Silicon Valley could learn a lesson or two from Hermosillo.

http://www.nearsoft.com/nearsoft-quick-intro.php