10 things you need to know to effectively produce and broadcast video in the enterprise
When discussing video in the enterprise the typical focus is on how video collaboration capabilities enable your people to connect visually to a single-shot of a talking head. But a trend that we started to see at Accenture is that the same tools that facilitated this kind of communication were taking on a different purpose: full production broadcasting. At Accenture, a company with over 375,000 employees in over 120 countries, the ways that we use video have been evolving at a rapid clip – not only to keep pace with our growth, but to also create a better connection and overall experience for our people.
Several years ago our leaders wanted to more easily connect a growing global audience with messages about strategies, organization changes and other important topics. Improvements in and availability of video collaboration tools and systems brought about the opportunity to explore these capabilities for webcasting endpoints. What started as a very manual way of taking footage of those leaders sitting in video conference rooms and sending it to a webcast portal that our people could watch live or on demand, quickly progressed to a more sophisticated platform turning multiple feeds into fully produced broadcasts – creating more of a TV show experience for our audiences. Our global organization quickly became one serviced by a 24/7 broadcast operation requiring full control rooms around the world where teams of technical directors, producers, sound engineers, and many others, could run a growing set of concurrent broadcasts. Today, we produce upwards of 200 broadcasts each month - a number that is growing, both in number and in complexity!
The demand for more TV-like and consumer-esque broadcasts as opposed to the "talking head" in a video conference room has reached a fevered pitch. Our leaders recognize a significant change in the viewing and engagement behaviors of their people and are employing new techniques to connect with them. In an organization where a majority are millennials and digital natives, we are seeing some great trends towards dynamic, fast-paced, fun-filled and even interactive programming that is resonating with our people
Throughout our video broadcast journey, I have boiled down my learnings to 10 things that make the use of video in an enterprise really work...
- Have clear vision and leadership: Investment in both the technology, gear and talent in an organization that isn't inherently a TV studio may seem counter-intuitive, but the trend and demand in this area is quite clear. Vision beyond an immediate ROI is critical.
- Know your audience: Understanding your viewing audience can make your efforts resonate sooner and more effectively. Try things, experimentation, interactivity, analytics, ask people, etc. Start finding ways to assess the effectiveness of your productions. Consider things beyond just 'views' like 'comments' and 'likes and 'shares' (which I think is the best signal of effective content).
- Create snackable content: Tuning in for a 60 or 90 minutes only works in a few cases - for the vast majority of topics you can make that more consumable and for your audience – who more than likely has a much shorter attention span that you think! Also, think differently about your content. Don't allow yourself or your team to say the word "boring" when referring to subject matter. Find the common thread, the human element, the best possible way to sell your message and be obvious about why the viewer should care.
- Stream and then replay: Think ahead about the way you will organize your replays into a YouTube-like video portal - effective tagging of the content allows for easier searching. Just like in consumer TV there is a growing trend for people playing VOD
- Cross-pollinate skills: A healthy mix of TV production, core IT/Infrastructure and application development, communications and creative is key. Don't expect this to happen harmoniously overnight - - each discipline has its own language and it takes time for them to speak and understand each other.
- Find your hidden talent: Not surprisingly when you start to create TV shows and video productions you will have all kinds of hidden talent emerge - hobbyists, amateur documentarians, on-air talent, makeup artists, graphic designers, etc. Be a place where you allow people to express themselves - encourage it, experiment.
- Automate to focus on production quality: As you start to get this capability going, look for ways to take largely administrative and repetitive parts of the production process out of your people's hands so they can focus on the creative production process. This will allow you to do more concurrent broadcasts in a much more repetitive and industrialized way.
- Track savings from the start: Track the cost savings from internally producing your video content, both live and recorded compared to hiring outside agencies. You will be surprised how fast these savings start to add up.
- Use the cloud: We had to start from scratch and custom build most of these platforms ourselves, but now there are fantastic SaaS/PaaS options to jump start your efforts...from webcasting, streaming platforms, video portals, collaborative editing platforms, etc.
- Start now! As I mentioned, the demand for video broadcast and productions in our organization has skyrocketed and I am sure you have seen the same. Get ahead of the demand by starting something now.
Hopefully this gives you some basics to consider when starting or expanding your video capabilities inside of your organization. These are my learnings... how have your organizations video-related efforts changed in recent months or years??