Dave McCollom, education evangelist at local screen capture and screen recording software company TechSmith (read “TechSmith: A Piece of Silicon Valley in Okemos” for more information on the company), graduated from MSU in 2003 with a degree in general business management. Today, he travels around the world promoting TechSmith products and ensuring that users have a positive experience with them—all from his home base at TechSmith’s headquarters in Okemos, Michigan (just down the street from campus, off of Jolly Road).

Dave McCollom

Dave McCollom

McCollom loves his job. He led me on a tour of the TechSmith offices, pointing out the highlights with pride and introducing me to almost every co-worker that we passed. He was relaxed, as comfortable giving me this tour as a friend is when you visit their house for the first time—he even paid close attention to my reactions to every room and interaction, that element of expectancy that comes with sharing something that is a big part of who your daily life with an outsider.

True to his word in the interview that follows, Dave wore jeans, and the travel calendar in his office was loaded with upcoming trips. But I’ll let him tell his own story.

CSN: First of all, tell us a little bit about your job as the Education Evangelist at TechSmith. What are your responsibilities? What is a typical day like for you?
DM: The primary responsibility of an Evangelist at TechSmith is to help our users be successful and assure that their experience with TechSmith is a great one. We provide a public face for the company and a voice for the customer within the company. This involves a little bit of training and making videos for our users, tech support, connecting people to others within the company, lots of email, instant messages, phone calls, traveling to conferences/trade shows, and handwritten thank you notes. Our guiding philosophy is that the best marketing we can do is to make our customers so happy that they promote our products because they want to share that positive experience with their co-workers, friends, family, etc. This leads to a lot of two-way conversations and those conversations are how we’re able to improve our products and customer experiences.

The best and most challenging part of my job is that there is no typical day. Right now we spend a great deal of our time engaging customers in Twitter and other social media. Two years ago a lot of this stuff didn’t exist, and in another year (or month) the tools will be completely different, so we always need to be paying attention to social media trends and finding places where our users are (both online and in person). That leads to another reason that our days vary so much: we spend a lot of time on the road—about 15 weeks and 50,000 miles for me this year [as of mid October 2009]. We credit a great deal of our success to the fact that we do get out of the office and meet our users in person so frequently. Not just the evangelists, but many others from the company as well, including sales, marketing, training, product management, and software developers.

CSN: What was your dream career in college?
DM: When I first started at MSU, I was a finance major and had aspirations of being a personal financial advisor. The relationship aspect appealed to me, but in the end the aggressive sales approach that goes along with it conflicted with my personality. I learned this very quickly in my first job interview for an entry-level finance position.

CSN: How did you get to where you are today?
DM: Along with my business education at MSU, the first major step for getting to where I am today was starting a student job as an IT support specialist for the Vice President of Student Affairs and Services office at MSU. I had always had a personal interest in technology, but this job is what really immersed me into it and had me thinking that the ideal career for me was somewhere between business and technology. I was fortunate to have a great boss (Cheryl Gierman) who emphasized the relationship side of IT support. After I graduated, I worked for full time at MSU in the same department as a network/IT administrator (for 3 years). In that role, I started using TechSmith products (Camtasia Studio and Snagit) to create tutorials and documentation for my users. That is when I started to learn more about TechSmith and have an interest in working there. I eventually applied for an IT Support position at TechSmith and started working here in April 2006. I learned about an internal opening for a new evangelist position that was dedicated to K–12 and higher education and thought that my educational technology background would make me a perfect fit. I was hired into this position exactly 365 days after I started at TechSmith.

CSN: What is the work environment like at TechSmith?
DM: TechSmith is a very fun and relaxed place to work. We dress casually (I wear jeans 99% of the time) and have free pop, espresso, and other beverages available. Every Friday we all gather in our main conference for a free lunch that the company provides (catered by local restaurants and caterers—we try to support other Michigan businesses as much as possible). We have fun, but we also work very hard and feel very personally invested in the success of the company.

CSN: Do you have any other comments or advice for MSU students?
DM: There all kinds of great student jobs/internships at MSU and local companies that can really help you learn relevant job skills while making decent money. Try very hard to find one of these before your resort to retail, food service, etc.