Video has for many years been an important communication tool for corporations. But honestly, how exciting are most corporate videos to watch? Too many use the standard formula:

1. An intro with the company logo, picture of the headquarter and elevator music in the background.
2. Panning shots over all the products of the company.
3. A deep, male voice-over that sprinkles corporate bullshit terms.
4. The CEO in a suit and tie stumbling through an awkward sales pitch.
5. Happy customers holding the products and smiling into the camera.

Unfortunately both video production companies and their corporate clients are used to doing this kind of corporate video. But some clients and video producers realize that video can be much more effective by using storytelling and using the power of internet.

Cre8it, a Stockholm-based video production company interviewed me and some of their corporate clients:

The impact of corporate video

Using the web for corporate videos

                 

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There are many ways for a company or organisation
to use online video for communication, marketing and training!

Here are 26 examples organized according to production costs and how complex they are to produce. There is a twist to the green ones, see the end of this post!

Most people associate corporate video with rather boring 20 minute company presentations where the proud CEO is presented along with all the products and the nice offices, accompanied by a rambling voice-over and some elevator music. Or perhaps “talking heads”, tie-clad managers boasting about the company.

But now video has been revolutionized at both ends:

1. The production is much faster and cheaper due to all the new, smaller digital techology.
2. The distribution is now enormously more flexible and cheaper. Instead of mailing out DVDs or arranging screenings all kinds of video can now be streamed on corporate web sites, in video blogs, emailed etc. All at very low costs.

Nobody has the time or patience anymore to watch those 20-minute corporate all-in-one presentations, and they become outdated quickly anyway. So instead, go for short, niche videos, for example:

1. Press release videos. Show how the new product is used by real customers, thus creating better stories for the journalists.

2. Product launches. Do like everybody else and make campaign sites with slick video commercials etc. But the smarter companies also produces more viral videos that are spread via YouTube and other video communities, blogs and media sites. Before the launch, make a video about your product development challenges where you build hype around the problem that your product solves. When you launch it, post a video that does not look like a commercial but shows the product in a documentary way when it is used by real people

3. FAQ-videos and support screen casts. Use the pedagogicial superiority of video to give answers to frequently asked questions and explain how your software work. Put them on your support web site and email them to customers that call in with problems.

4. Staff presentations. Notice how most consultancy firms proudly states that “our staff is our most valuable asset”? Yet they present them with just a name, title and department. Imagine instead 45-second personal video presentations where the staff describe their background and experience, how they work now and what makes them tick! Far better for boosting relations and the corporate brand.

5. Testimonials from happy customers and employees. A real customer describing how his life was improved by product X is a lot more credible than a slick ad with studio shots of beautiful models holding the product. Here is a good example.

6. Instruction videos. Why have not companies noticed the explosion of “How to” video sites with short video tutorials about everything under the sun? Such as Videojug.  Realise that this is a very good way of both decreasing your support costs and building brands. See also my blog post about this.

7. Video blogs and mobile videos. Let your executives speak in person to the whole world, here is why this is good. And encourage your employees to use their mobiles to document things that customers or other employees could benefit from seeing and post it on video blogs. Reports from business trips, development labs, attended conferences etc.

8. UGC campaigns. User Generated Content, where customers upload videos on how they use the products. Creates marketing ambassadors and an image of acompany that listens to its customers. IKEA does it, why not your company?

9. Recruitment videos. How do you entice people to apply for work at your company? Especially the younger generation don’t read endless texts or brochures. Create short, up to date videos where HR shows what it is like to work here, and interview some of the employees. Here’s how Google did it and a good blog post about it.

10. Internal communication. Replace some of the streams of internal email communications with video. For example, the sales manager’s weekly follow-up of the sales reps is more effective if they can hear and see the sales manager.

11. Company policies. Use video to explain all those rules and policies about security, vacation, sick leave, travel etc. Interview those that are responsible and show how they should be used and the benefits. This motivates the employees better than those Word-documents with bulleted rules on the company intranet!

12. Lectures and seminars. Increase the audience for your speeches, conferences etc by live-casting them on your web site and post edited versions afterwards to prolong the value. Also use short videos to promote the event in advance, interviewing the organizer and make people want to go there or follow it on internet.

13. Talk shows. Think value for your target group. Invite an interesting person for a relaxed chat about a current issue. Do this weekly or bi-weekly for almost no cost and build valuable relations and position yourselves as authorities in your business area.

14. Crisis communication. Prepare before it happens: a disgruntled customer posts a video showing a weakness in your product, such as this Assa Abloy video. But don’t respond like Assa Abloy did, instead fight fire with fire: make your own video response and post it in the same channels, as well as on your web site.

15. Knowledge bank & internal training. Interview your experts on how they solved various problems, post it into an internal knowledge data base on your intranet and make it easy to search. This creates valuable assets out of your organisations skills.

Video = expensive and lots of work?

Many companies have realised that video is an effective form of communication but they still think it is expensive and labour-intensive to produce good videos. Also, they have not realised that you build relations better by producing content regularly, so it is much better to make one short video per week than a long video every 6 months.

Program formats

The way to do this cost-effectively is to create program formats. In the TV business formats are big business. Think “Who wants to be a millionaire?”, “Survivor” etc. It is much easier, cheaper and safer for a local TV station to produce shows according to these formats than trying to come up with their own program ideas. So I help companies do the same thing.

All the green types of video in the matrix are suitable for making program formats. I start with a base template and then analyse the company needs and write an adapted production plan. Then a pilot program is produced with a professional team while I make detailed notes. The result is a template that enables the company to produce multiple programs at a high and even quality level and at a low cost per program. The production can be done inhouse with some employee training,  or the format can be used as excellent documentation for outsourcing to local video producers.

Please send me tips on more types of corporate video and links to good examples!

                 

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Here is a very inspiring example of how video can be used in a very professional way to communicate a message and build public opinion:

This video is spreading around the world and has already been viewed millions of times. Click the image to see it yourself, it is well worth the 20 minutes!

I recommend viewing it for several reasons:

1. It presents the topic in a very engaging way. The presenter, Annie Leonard, is giving a highly passionate, fast-paced overview that is greatly enhanced with simple but very effective animated visuals.
2. The video has smart interactivity, you can mouse over the images above Annie’s head to see links to each of the five categories.
3. The video is perfectly integrated in a web site that effectively quenches all your thirst for more information that the video has caused.
4. It demonstrates how a well produced video creates both understanding and deep feelings in viewers. It is also a good example of how effective it is to use simplistic cartoons to explain complex issues. (For another example of this, check out this explanation of the microblogging tool Twitter.)

This video was first published in December 2007 and it is now being translated into multiple languages. It will have a long life! More info in Wikipedia.

                 

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Here is a very informative and inspiring analysis of the YouTube phenomenon from a very human viewpoint:

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

This video is produced by Michael Wesch, a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University. It is long (55minutes) and unfortunately it does not have any interactive navigation tools. But it is worth seeing if you are interested in social media, Web 2.0, videoblogging and why video is such a powerful form of personal communication. The video contains numerous very interesting examples of the YouTube culture and its social, collaborative and creative successes since the launch in April 2005.

Quotes from the video:
“You are not going to convert passive consumers into active trollers on the internet.”
- Stephen Weiswasser, ABC Television, 1989

“We are moving from place-to-place connectivity to a person-to-person connectivity.”

Some interesting numbers:
The three national US TV networks (ABC, NBC, CBS)  were founded around 1948, 30 years ago.
3 networks * 60 years * 365 day/year * 24 hours per day= they have so far produced up to 1.5 million hours of programming in total during the last 30 years!
But the users of YouTube uploaded more video than that in the last 6 months only!
YouTube uploads are now around 9232 hours every day! This is equivalent to 6.5 hours of video being uploade every minute,  24 hours per day!
around 200 000 3-minute videos per day!

One major difference is of course that a vast majority of the YouTube videos are addressed at less than 100 people.

Michael Wesch is most famous for his video “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.”, as stated on wikipedia:

“Wesch created a short video, “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us.” Released on YouTube on January 31, 2007, it quickly became the most popular video in the blogosphere and was viewed over 6 million times. Wesch has won several awards for his work with video, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award and the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Media Praxis from the Media Ecology Association.”

                 

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Google is in high-speed pursuit now of new functionality for YouTube.  Google has acquired one of my favourites: Omnisio, a US company offering a very smart and nicely designed video service. Omnisio allows you to share compilations of different videos in a simple way, but their most interesting service is a video player with embedded user comments, tagging and a very nice synchronized slide timeline.

See this example, a speech by Paul Graham, entrepreneur and founder of the US incubator Y Combinator, (who backed Omnisio):

I really like the divided video window with the slides to the left and the live video to the right, with the slide timeline at the bottom, it is intuitive that you can navigate by clicking in the time line. This is the best user interface I have seen for speeches!

The Omnisio founders say this about being integrated with YouTube/Google:
“We believe we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what’s possible with online video, and we are really looking forward to taking the video viewing — and creating — experience to the next level.”

YouTube says this about acquiring Omnisio:
“…having this kind of talent at YouTube should help us further explore ways to enhance your YouTube experience.”

Indeed! As I have said before: we are only at the beginning of a marvellous online video development!

Henrik

PS. Google and I seem to have the same nose for interesting internet-based applications

• In the summer of  2005 I tested the brand new YouTube video service and thought that it was going to become a big hit since it was so easy to use. YouTube was acquired by Google in Nov 2006.
• I started using an online word processor app called Writely in august 2005, they were acquired by Google in March 2006 and turned into Google Documents, which I have been using heavily ever since.
• Jaiku is a Finnish microblogging system that I am fond of since meeting the brilliant co-founder, Jyri Engeström at a conference in Stockholm in Nov 2006. Jaiku was acquired by Google in Oct 2007.
• In May 2008 Omnisio launched their app for synching slides with video presentations, I loved it immediately for its beautiful and intuitive interface and smart annotation tools. Well, Google acquired them on July 30, 2008…

                 

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As I have written before in my post Empowering internet video, automatic voice-to-text for online videos is already here. It means that any words spoken in a video is automatically transcribed into text.

The transcribed text can be shown in the video window or be used to search for the part of the video where something of particular interest is said. This is of course very powerful for videos from speeches and seminars etc, but there are many more possibilities such as automatic translation.

I have said for some time that this will become the 2008 killer application for online video.
So I’m not  surprised that Google just started adopting it on YouTube. They start now in a moderate way with US presidential campaign videos:

Try it: search the election videos  here. Your search term is highlighted in yellow lines in the video timeline, point your mouse to the lines to see snippets of the transcript. See also an interview with Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube.

I am convinced that Google and YouTube will go full ahead with voice-to-text services, for several reasons:

Video has many advantages but two major drawbacks:
1. It is hard to search video content. Most videos can only be searched by their titles or meta tags.

2. It is time consuming to watch. A 5 minute video takes 5 minutes to watch, but a text that takes 5 minutes to read normally can first be glanced through in 15 seconds to give you an idea of what it is about and let you decide to read it, all or not.

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Voice-to-text solves both these problems effectively! Search engines can search for anything said in a video and it is easy to create video controls that lets the user jump directly to the interesting parts in the video, for example by clicking on a word in the text transcript or in a word cloud.

Monetization!

Exact information of the media content is a key factor for all kinds of monetization. Voice-to-text enables targeted video ads in a much more effective way. This is undoubtedly a key factor for Google’s interest in this technology. The obvious start is to integrate it with Google’s Adsense and include video commercials in search results. But it will be much easier for all the new online video sites to create valu-adding business models with this technology.

Another giant step for voice-to-text technology will be taken later this year when Adobe reportedly will integrate it into their Flash technology, thereby enabling it to a vast majority of all internet users.

So, 2008 will indeed be a breakthrough year for a more powerful and interactive online video!

                 

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Video is an old medium with many strengths, for example:

1. Video is more personal than texts and stills, it affects us and our feelings much more.
2. Video is very efficient for learning, explaining how things work.

But internet video as it is mainly used today also has several drawbacks:

1. It is linear: 5 minutes of video takes 5 minutes to watch
2. It is hard to search videos, to find keywords about its content
3. You do not get an overview of what the video clip is about before you start watching
4. The controls are usually not very flexible; you cannot play the video at higher speeds, like with a DVD
5. There is no index, you cannot jump directly to the most interesting part of the video

When was the last time you watched a 15-minute clip of someone talking?
For many types of video clips or TV shows etc, these drawbacks are not too important. But for example a long video lecture or interview often feels too time-consuming to watch for the above reasons.

Happily, there are solutions available today that begs to be used more:

1. Indexing: inside the video frame and outside
2. In-video comments
3. In-video tags
4. Automatic voice-to-text

So here are some examples of ways to improve internet video:

Viddler is a video service that offers both tags and user comments in the video player. Point to the white dots to see the comments and the black dots to see the tags. The tags are also automatically gathered in a separate tag cloud, so that you can search inside all the videos that contain a certain tag, very smart!

MIT’s lecture browser is a web interface to video recordings of lectures that have been indexed using automatic speech recognition technology. You can search for topics and play the video starting at the relevant point and see the synchronized transcript. As you can see, the transcript is not perfect yet, but it is certainly good enough to get an overall impression of what the lecture is about and search for the most interesting part of it.

These are just two examples of new, smart functions that empowers internet video. There are many more already, the future of internet video has just begun, so stay tuned!

                 

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Diploma is very successful elearning platform that I created in 2005  (and later updated) for Boehringer-Ingelheim, a large pharmaceutical company. It is based on a constructivistic learning model where medical doctors are trained using wireless PDAs to control video patient scenarios.It is all done in an intense group session with interactivity in three directions:

1. Between the participants when they are discussing the patient scenario
2. Between the participant and the video patient, since they can ask questions, take tests and decide on diagnosis and treatments and see how the patient reacts.
3. Between the participants and the lecturer that moderates the event.

So this is a new way of learning, far from the traditional lecturing using slides and one-way communication from the speaker to the audience.

So how do you market this? How can you reach out to and explain this new concept to all the Swedish medical doctors and inspire them to sign up for the training?

Well, Boehringer-Ingelheim used to do it the traditional way; writing about it on their web site, handing out leaflets with text and photos during sales calls and seminars.

But they have a story to tell about this new learning system and video is a very effective tool for telling stories. So I persuaded them to let me produce a 2-minute video enacting a Diploma learning session. The result can be seen here: http://diploma.se/

(click the image to go to the web site. It is in Swedish, but there is no dialogue in the video.
Or click here to download the bigger version. ).

This is a low- budget production, simply because we felt that we did not need professional actors and a large crew for this. The point is to tell the story so that the target group, in this case medical doctors, are inspired. The feedback has been very positive already.

Now this video needs to be spread. Their sales reps are using large-format versions in their laptops during sales calls, video banner ads promoting the video are in production for medical web sites and the video will also appear on a number of other web sites in order to make it viral.

                 

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Beautiful Iceland

We are used to tiny, fuzzy and jerky internet videos, due to technical limitations. But the technology is developing fast and new standards are now appearing that will make our video experiences richer on the internet.

So sit back, put on your best headphones and rest your eyes on this clip from Iceland, a music video with Sigur Ros, one of my favourite bands (very cool late-night music). Double-click the video to go fullscreen.

This video is compressed to use only 500 kbit/s using a new standard called H.264 (why do the engineers always come up with these awkward names?). It means that you can see this video on any computer even with a low-end broadband connection. The guy that encoded this video has tweaked it to its limits, but soon we will see this kind of quality everywhere. Compare it with this version of the same video, running at 1.3 Mbit/s, still possible to run on most broadband connections.
(Thanks Peter at Disruptive for the tip about the blog Flashcomguru.)

Another exciting technology that enables full-screen video at excellent quality comes from Move Networks. It uses dynamic bandwidth, meaning that it runs on any connection speed, the higher you have the better the quality gets. The national Swedish television SVT are the first to use this in Sweden, check it out by watching an episode of their drama series Andra Avenyn (click on “Se Andra Avenyn i högupplöst Play”).
It looks very good and also illustrates that picture quality is one thing and movie experience quality is something entirely different…

So now internet videos can be played in all sizes. From tiny thumbnails to full screen, almost HD-quality with superior stereo audio as well. This opens up for even more new ways of using video for communication, education, inspiration and information, also for corporate use.

                 

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Videobloggaren Björn Falkevik på Lidne Inc. intervjuar Henrik Ahlén om styrkan med video som kommunikationsbärare och fördelarna med att använda video i företagssammanhang.

                 

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