By Mike Gilham
The use of video for promoting corporations or introducing products, through organisation websites, brings the website to life and has grown during the past 12 months, providing a global message which is available 24 hours a day and easily remembered.
Today, all good websites incorporate video to promote its company and their products, services or solutions in the clearest possible way. Some go further and add a personal touch for viewers by including short clips of employees introducing themselves or as hosts to the main promotional videos.
Event highlight videos are also becoming commonplace for airing not only in websites but also on social via platforms such as YouTube. Driving traffic to websites and growing product awareness is what videos do best.
EVEN MORE IMPORTANT is the use of video over the internet for streaming Live Interactive Events such as conferences and webinars. Putting your event online saves time and money, yet can provide all the interactivity, if not more, than being at an event. Besides real-time Q & A between the online audience and speaker, a good live event or video streaming company should provide a complete package, focussed on the e-delegate experience. This should include registration, live polling, post event surveys, viewer ratings, analytics, pay-per-view options and even CPD certificates generation.
Also, with careful planning, there is no reason for the offline audience to suffer by streaming a live event. By announcing it will be streamed live or on demand a few weeks prior to the event, persons eager to attend for networking will already have booked but the stream will increase the audience size, spreading the message.
To keep the online audience engaged, it is important that they can see not only the speaker but is also their presentation material – be it PowerPoint or another video – ideally in High-Definition. To allow ease of viewing it is important the supplier streams in the cross-compatible ‘HTML5’ to ensure availability on all devices including iPads, Tablets and mobile phones – otherwise the potential audience number is greatly reduced. Ease of use is also key and many organisations look to a microsite or dedicated home for their video content. This can be branded to match the company’s existing site or given a brand of its own.
More organisations are budgeting for an increase in use of video in 2015, the main areas being a series of webinars, streaming annual conferences, use of video within the website to promote the organisation or its products and highlight video for Social Media.
Consider carefully your plans for 2015 when promoting your organisation.
Mike Gilham is a Sales Professional. Having spent a number of years working in Electronics in the U.K., North America and the Far East, on returning to the U.K. Mike moved into video production with First Sight Media, who together have achieved a growth of 300% in the last 4 years.
First Sight Media is a video production company, specialising in web streaming. Today 95% of video shot by First Sight Media is streamed over the internet, either live or on-demand. Webinars, training, product launches and conferences are frequently streamed live with e-delegate participation, whilst more traditional video is placed within websites or on social media. First Sight Media have developed iPresenter which shows synchronised video of the speaker, alongside their presentation material, in High Definition, which is currently being utilised by a growing number of organisations in the U.K. and Europe.
“Image source – Flickr, usage under Creative Commons license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)”
