We set out to build Community Clips as an experiment, or “proof of concept,” around communities and help.  Months ago, we were talking with some teams at Microsoft that run help and support sites, about making these sites even more useful for customers. We started thinking…what if, instead of just providing help for people, we actually encouraged them to help each other? Let’s face it: any person who doesn’t work for Microsoft, who tells you that he really struggled with something until he figured out a particular tip or trick, earns a lot more street credibility than we do. People know what issues they struggle with, and maybe they’ll be likely to share their successes with their peers.

But we had a lot of questions. Sure, sites like YouTube and Soapbox have huge communities of users, who actively view, rate, upload, and discuss videos, but the videos are about all sorts of subject matter.  If we were to narrow the focus to help and how-to videos, would we get a similarly active (though smaller) community, or would the traffic patterns be dramatically different? Are people willing to share their knowledge of Microsoft products, specifically Office? There might be a lot of people who want to view videos, but what would motivate people to create videos? We can use all sorts of market research and formulas to predict the answers to these questions, but in Office Labs we took a different approach. We built it. We want to see for ourselves what would happen!

Working at Microsoft, it’s really easy to become an expert on Office.  Whenever we don’t know how to do a particular task, we poke our head out of our office and shout down the hall something like, “Anyone know how to summarize a pivot table by sum instead of count?” Someone is bound to know the answer. We walk over to that person’s office, watch over their shoulder, and successfully – and proudly – pull it off.  Well, most people aren’t so lucky to have an immediate network of experts who are happy to share their proficiency. Office Online has loads of help content, Microsoft Help and Support has loads of KB articles, and MVPs do a great job of spreading the world and solving real users’ questions. But the reality is, most people just don’t know about these opportunities, or don’t utilize them! That’s why we created Community Clips. Let’s create a place where people can meet each other, share tips and tricks, and connect over a desire to become better Office users.

There are 3 people working on Community Clips – me (a program manager) and two developers.  Since Community Clips is a proof-of-concept, you’ll see a lot of iteration in the next few weeks and maybe even months. We’re going to pay close attention to what motivates people to do the things they do, and then we’ll start introducing new features and will measure their impact. We really want to hear from you. What do you think of the project so far? What else do you want to see? What do you want to see done differently? A lot of the iteration we do will be based on the feedback you give us. So please, check out Community Clips, and let us know what you think!  

And don’t forget: ANYONE can create a video! Don’t be bashful! You don’t have to be an expert (but if you are, that’s great too)! To create a video, just download our lightweight recorder to get started.