From: tosolini.com | Paolo Tosolini | Wednesday, 14 March 2012
Online video, when created and distributed effectively, offers considerable advantages: it can turn long and boring text communications into something that employees may actually watch, it can help demo a product in an engaging manner, or convey authentic enthusiasm for a particular company cause or initiative. |
| Business Video Production |
Are you sold yet? If you are ready to embrace video as part of your internal communications plans, this toolkit will help you plan your next steps to successfully roll out an internal video adoption program.
As a former New Media Business Manager at Microsoft, I was privileged to launch and manage the company’s ‘employee YouTube' called Academy Mobile, which to date is hosting more than 35,000 videos.
In my experience, there are three fundamental areas you need to address in such an undertaking:
- Choosing a platform
- Setting some business processes
- Creating an adoption strategy
Choosing the right platform
This first step aims at addressing a fundamental question: where are you going to store your videos? There are a variety of enterprise video solutions on the market that are worth evaluating, from open source ones such as Kaltura to proprietary technologies like Ignite and Qumu .
If you are running your intranet on Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 or (even better) 2010, you can use your existing infrastructure to host videos (within certain limits). Or if you are currently a Google Apps for Business user, you can leverage the power of YouTube in a more private and secure fashion.
In evaluating any of these options, keep in mind that enterprise video is more powerful when can also be accessed from mobile devices, shared easily, subscribed to via RSS, commented and rated - all features that you should be able to have out of the box.
Business processes
Business processes are rules that are often unique to each organization, and need to provide answers to questions like:
- Who is allowed to create and publish video on the platform?
- What's the review process for new content?
- How do you measure success with this program?
- How can you properly represent each department in the company?
- How do you recover the production costs for professional videos?
- How do you secure confidential content?
As an example, in Microsoft we assessed the costs, risks and benefits of making Academy Mobile readily available to employees in the sales field who, for the most part, are constantly on the road and prefer a simplified access process via an extranet (using just their employee credentials) vs. the intranet (which requires a secure VPN connection with smartcard authentication).
Every video is being automatically encoded in a standard MP4 format which is pretty much compatible with every popular mobile device. We released a Windows Phone 7 app to support real time access to our archives, and promote RSS subscriptions for users interested in receiving automatic updates by specific channel or subject matter expert.
We embraced a hybrid contribution model, allowing any employee to capture and share their knowledge without any review process (crowdsourcing). We also offered affordable production services to internal teams who were looking to create professional videos at a premium cost.
To accelerate the rhythm of individual contributions, we launched early on two internal programs; the first was called Podcast-in-a-Box; the second, Academy Rewards.
The Podcast-in-a-Box was a centralized loaner program that included a portable camera, an audio recorder and screen capture software, and was available to any employee willing to commit to publish three videos each month. By meeting the minimum contribution threshold, employees could keep indefinitely the equipment even for personal use. Otherwise they would return the gear and pass it to the next person on the waiting list. The program generated more than 2000 videos in less than three years for a cost per video of about $40.
The best analogy to describe the Academy Rewards is to compare it to an air miles program, just for podcasters. Content creators were rewarded points for their efforts in making time to capture, edit and publish their valuable know-how in multimedia format. But they were granted additional points each time somebody watched their videos. In this way, contributors were also incentivized to spread the word and market their content to others. Points were redeemable for high tech gadgets through a third party online vendor. There was no better advertising for Academy Mobile than having happy employees bragging about their new laptops won, thanks to this rewards program.
Adoption strategy
Once you settle on an appropriate platform and you start filling it with fresh videos, it’s time to grow your audience. My advice is to run a pilot program in one of the most advanced departments in your organization, where you can get executive sponsorship that will drive top-bottom messaging of progressive adoption of video communications.
At the same time, you need to cultivate a bottom-up approach implementing creative ways to identify natural talents among your workforce - those who feel comfortable in front of a camera, produce quality videos and are not shy to talk about their work. These people are your best evangelists because they inspire others in following suit. Nurture their passion by making it easy for them to access tools and support, and through your internal communications, advertise their work profusely to sustain their motivation.
Ultimately, you’ll witness a long tail distribution model of video viewership, where content from executives and key internal evangelists will receive the highest amount of downloads, which in turn will inspire and expand your employee contributor base and continually grow the value of your video communications.
Are you planning to make video a first class channel in your corporate internal communications? What strategies are working best for you? Leave a comment or drop me a line if you have any questions.
The original article about Enterprise Video.
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