Embracing Video
The world is obsessed with Video. We binge TV shows, we watch whole movies from our smartphones and tablets, we send gifs back and forth to friends and family, we live stream on social platforms… people just can’t get enough. It’s clear that people have happily welcomed Video into their lives but how has the business world embraced Video?
Marketers have found that video content is significantly more effective at engaging audiences and customers. HubSpot shares that 71% of people watch more video than they did a year ago. Recognizing how your audience likes to communicate is the most important thing you can do as a business, taking your cues from your audience and fans will show you the way. Conversion XL says that Video increases organic search traffic on a website by 157% and 73% of B2B marketers say video positively impacts their ROI, reports Tubular Insights.
When it comes to external communication marketers are working hard to create more and more video content to keep up with campaign demands and KPIs. But internal communications have embraced video communication as well. For many companies, utilizing video to help different departments and employees communicate has made a huge impact in expanding shared knowledge and training databases, among other benefits.
Oracle Corporation gives us a very successful example of the internal impact of Video. Oracle is a multinational computer technology corporation. The company sells database software and technology, cloud engineered systems, and enterprise software products. Oracle has implemented a robust proprietary internal communication platform. We had a chance to sit down with Oracle’s Senior Director of media technology, David Boyll, last month to learn more about their internal enterprise video solutions.
In 2012, Oracle developed their own internal video tool for enabling employees’ communication and collaboration via a self-service video platform. They called it OTube. The tool has grown to what it is today. 8 years later the platform is used for a wide variety of things. David shared use cases like internal sales training, international communication, executive communications, and how-to videos. The internal IT teams and applications teams have made great use of the platform to augment their help documentation for onboarding new employees. David gave us some examples; how to use internal resources, like iPhone set up or new platform functionality.
David ultimately hopes for broader programmatic adoption and for consistent adoption beyond sales teams. He shared that, as an external marketer, he sees the massive potential user-generated content has in being key to supporting external relationships.
“There is a credibility that comes from engineers talking about engineering and developers talking about developing that traditional marketing content lacks. This kind of content would be critical to the sales cycle.”
David shared his surprise and delight in how the platform has grown. He’s seen new developments in video player technology over the years, “interactive video could serve as a self-contained training medium. You connect analytics and it becomes a rich tool for internal training and communication.”
It is remarkable how they are still finding new use cases for video in the enterprise sector. While the platform was originally just for UGC, the use cases are multiplying day-by-day, David reported.
“With a low barrier of entry and low-cost, uses are limitless. And then you add mobile capability and the possibilities are endless.”
We asked David about the future of OTube and he shared with us his hopes for more usability and efficiency. Next capabilities will involve utilizing AI to mine and surface the content contained within the videos which wouldn’t be accessible unless you watched it. He looks forward to key upgrades like transcripted information, visual descriptive metadata, keywords, and tags, “[these] will enable deeper discovery capabilities and make existing content more valuable.”
At Mobs we see the synergy between AI and video. With things like David mentioned, metadata and asset tagging, Mobs is taking video capabilities one step further within our own platform. That’s essentially how our smart engine works to provide customized video, allowing users to create videos in real-time. Our conversation with David brought huge validation to what we are doing at Mobs and we enjoyed hearing how Enterprise is utilizing smart video as a solution.
