Enterprises Finding Many Uses for Video

Ann All spoke with Seth Kenvin, founder and CEO of Market7, provider of a cloud-based online video collaboration tool. You can sign up to try a free version of the service.

All: I know companies are using video for advertising. What are some other popular functions?
Kenvin: Video is, at its base, a method of communication like writing or photography. It has become much more useful for organizations of any scale and at multiple budget levels because the equipment is much cheaper, the tools to work with it are more accessible, and the means of distribution are more ubiquitous. Whereas the traditional domain had been TV displays, now you have the Internet and mobile devices. Getting video made and distributed is so much more flexible and economical, people are using it for multiple kinds of communication, not just advertising and marketing. There’s customer support, demonstrating physical products; internal communications, with executive outreaches a popular use, especially for large and distributed companies; training employees, where you can capture a curriculum to video instead of trying to assemble employees at central locations. Those are some examples of corporate activities.

All: Has the ubiquity of YouTube helped folks become more aware of video's possibilities?
Kenvin: Video is becoming an expectation, and YouTube has absolutely been a poster child. It’s gotten people more interested in consuming rich media in just about any setting. Probably half of retail and restaurant locations now have some type of non-television video display now.

All: Are more companies inclined to do their own video now vs. hiring someone else, or are they still put off by that idea?
Kenvin:You have the opposite perception too. I think there are people who mistakenly cling to both ends of that spectrum. There are people who think of video as exotic and expensive and the domain of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. And then there are people on the other end, who figure they’ve got a Flip camera and iMovies, so they think they’ll never have to hire a professional video producer again. The truth is, the full spectrum is necessary for most organizations. Self-service video is dynamic and rich, and it’s often of sufficient quality. But most serious organizations will probably need to do a certain amount of high-end production because there are certain things you want to convey about your brand and your presence that should be presented more professionally.

Video is just another medium. If you think about writing, organizations have plenty of internally generated documents, some of which make it out into the broader world, and then there are things that are commissioned from professionals. Likewise, presentation content or Web site development. I remember people putting up their own Web sites in the early days of the Internet. Somebody would get Pagemaker and throw a couple of fairly crude pages up there. The novelty of a Web presence was a message in itself. But these days, no serious organization isn’t going to devote the appropriate amount of budget and resources to its Web site. Video production by organizations should be across that spectrum, from internally generated content to professionally produced content.

All: Can you offer some specific examples of how companies are using video?
Kenvin: I can touch on one or two of our clients. One of our customers is a company called Solar City, which does sales and outfitting of solar systems for people’s homes. Especially with the stimulus package, they came up with a methodology for customers that described how tax rebates worked, et cetera. It was fairly complex to communicate, so instead of forcing people to wade through a big document of fairly technical jargon, they developed a video program to more richly and methodically convey it. During the video, they periodically pause and list bullet points of key information.

Another customer of ours is Google. They frequently use video when they put out new products, for both training and promotion. Obviously they’re a massive, global company, so they roll out products to lots of different markets. They work internally with a local product team and other folks that need to weigh in on corporate communications, and then they need to do dubbing for multiple languages. They use our software to share it with the local teams in all the different countries

All: What are some key differences in how video is produced vs. how other corporate communications are produced?

Kenvin: It is a different medium in a number of ways, certainly different from written content and even from the kind of still visual content we’ve seen in brochures and on the Web. The content tends to be very large in terms of storage requirements. Sharing it during the production process and collecting feedback can’t be done by, say, attaching it to an e-mail. So while I look at a video, I can’t embed comments in brackets like I can on a document. Video doesn’t support that. Because of the visual complexity, you have to be very detailed to describe when and where you want suggested changes to occur.

Video has to accommodate the existing organizational norms for collaborating on content development projects. So we tried to extend those kinds of processes to video. Much as “track changes” mode can be used within a document, our software supports the embedding of comments. Your comment shows up in the timeline exactly where you saw it. You can even highlight a portion of the screen or draw on the screen. And people can respond to your comments.

All: So collaboration is a challenge, one your product is designed to address. Are there other challenges?

Kenvin: One thing to think about with video, whether it’s internally produced or not, is staging. It’s a little more dramatic and less of a continuum. If you’re writing something, you can generally revise it hours before it’s due to make it more coherent and compelling. Video is more of a continuous process, but also more staged. You have to conceptualize what you are going to do, then shoot it, and then edit it. If you blow it at any of those stages, there’s only so much you can do in subsequent stages to salvage it. The most brilliant editor, if they are provided with flawed content, can only do so much to save it. Video is necessarily a little more procedural than other forms of communication.

All: I still see a lot of videos where it looks like people have simply taken an existing presentation and filmed it, rather than trying to make it more video friendly.
Kenvin: Yes. It's amazing to me how many people who because they captured 20 minutes, think they should show 20 minutes. Even if you can talk people into limiting their video to 4 minutes, you tend to get feature creep. We have a script-writing module where.you determine on a scene basis or for an entire video how long you want it to be, then as you are writing, the software is assessing how much time it would take to speak it. It can be customized too, so if you are addressing a foreign audience, you might speak more slowly.