Our experience has taught us at Kinura, that presenting online is different to face-to-face. It’s harder to keep people’s attention, and there’s different rules to play by. In this session, we’ll look at the benefits of online presenting, and you’ll get some great advice on how to deliver your message with style. We’ll also be giving some tips on the different technology out there for webinars and streaming.

For those of you who don’t know, Digital Shoreditch Festival is an annual celebration which connects thousands of brands, agencies and creatives from East London and beyond. This year the festival will be taking over Shoreditch Town Hall between Monday 20th and Sunday 26th May, but events will also be happening in and around vibrant Shoreditch, Clerkenwell and Brick Lane.

Last year’s festival saw over 6,000 digital creatives attend the week-long event, with support from 868 companies and studios. You can purchase tickets for the festival here, so make sure you don’t miss out.

Follow @DigiShoreditch for the latest news and join in the conversation at #DS13.

There are a lot of mixed thoughts about EGV in the business world, executives are often put off using it for fear their employees will upload “irresponsible content”. According to a study last year by Qumu, 51% of executives are concerned about this yet 100% of respondents have never actually experienced any inappropriate video being uploaded to the company network.

So, are there any benefits to this strategy? We’ve decided to share some of our research to let you decide whether Employee Generated Video could be beneficial for your company.

But firstly, what exactly is Employee Generated Video?

Essentially, EGV is similar to public User Generated Video, such as Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl contest and Gmail: Behind the Scenes campaign, in which companies invite customers and fans to submit home-made videos that the brand can use for video marketing content. This is not only a great way of marketing a company, but it really engages customers and makes them feel personally connected to the brand.

Such campaigns have likely influenced businesses to engage their employees in similar ways, inviting them to upload video content to the company network for knowledge sharing, company announcements or as part of a company changeover strategy.

For example, in 2006 Pfizer implemented EGV into their global “transformation” strategy. Pfizer selected 10 employees and gave them each a camera and tripod asking them to record video diaries of their experiences as the company changes took effect. This strategy was successful for the company in terms of helping employees adapt to organisation changes while feeling engaged with it.

Use internal video to enhance employee engagement

A key reason to implement EGV is to engage employees and improve internal communications. EGV can be used to relay information to employees, by using how-to videos, online presentations and webinars or even video diaries, but how do you measure if these videos are enhancing employee engagement?

The Edge Picture Company’s whitepaper (available for download here) suggested that measuring success is not the number of videos entered, but “how the wider workforce engages with them.” When IBM implemented EGV into the company, less than 0.1% of the workforce produced their own videos. But within a month of the content launching, employees shared the videos internally nearly 4,800 times and left 3,212 comments.

Although only a hand full of employees may engage with the video making process, it’s important to apply social media, commenting and sharing tools to encourage employee interaction. Interaction and engagement is where you will find the true benefit of internal video.

Sharing knowledge with video in the workplace

Video is a great tool for training and educating, as it creates memorable learning experiences; we remember 50% of what we both hear and see, in comparison to only 10% of what we read. Video can be used as an e-learning tool within the workplace, allowing executives and employees to share their knowledge with colleagues or even hold training sessions on an internal webinar platform.

Research conducted by Paolo Tosolini at RUN Studios showed that organisations are encouraging employees to share knowledge that drives performance. Xerox launched an internal user-generated video platform that encourages everybody to ‘Show, Share, and Lead’ through the power of video, while SAP also have their own ‘internal video platform’.

What if employees upload inappropriate content?

The fear that employees might upload inappropriate content makes it tempting to limit the type of employees creating content to company executives and CEO’s only. However a survey reveals that, at 45.5%, co-workers produce the most interesting corporate content, even though CEO’s produce the highest volume of videos.

So, with co-workers producing such a large percentage of engaging content, it may not be beneficial to discourage the amount of content they can create. It’s also never in your favour to give employees the impression that you don’t trust them.

If you’re really worried that employees might upload content you’re not happy with, then controlling which videos go onto the network is the certainly best way to go. Instead of employees being able to upload content straight to the network, try giving someone the task of managing which content is uploaded. This will filter out any inappropriate videos.

Make sure Employee Generated Video is right for your company

Employee Generated Video sounds easy to execute into company practice, after all your employees are doing all the work, right? Well, that’s not always the case. Executives need to make sure they have the resources within their company to train the employees who may not be familiar with the process, as well as ensuring the employee generated project has a clear purpose.

It’s vital to make sure that you’re taking the right approach when using employee generated content. Pfizer’s video diary programme aimed to “take out the corporate” and focused on videos made by ordinary employees, rather than corporate directors and CEO’s. The videos were real, informal and authentic, employees felt connected to the people in the videos as they could relate to them. This really worked for Pfizer’s programme, so you need to make sure you pick an approach that works for the purpose of your project.

Tickets for the live performance were sold out, yet the webcast achieved over 3,700 viewers from 58 countries over 6 continents. Audiences were tweeting about the performance using the #Quizoola24 hashtag, which gained 1.8 million impressions over the 24-hour period and peaked on Saturday evening, ‘trending’ in the UK.

Performed by all 6 core members of Forced Entertainment, Quizoola! mixes a game-like structure with improvisation to create an atmosphere full of live energy. Alternating pairs of performers sit in a circle wearing smeared clown make-up and ask each other an avalanche of questions.

Sarah and David discuss the benefits of webinars and how companies are using live and on-demand content to reach new audiences. With 95% of video content retained by viewers, compared with just 10% for text, more and more businesses are turning to webinars and video e-learning formats to disseminate knowledge.

Filmed and produced at their new purpose-built studio in London, bombora.tv are releasing this exclusive series of webinars to investigate the rise of video content as part of the marketing and communications mix. The series includes interviews and insights from leading industry figures, including video marketing specialist Steffan Aquarone of Econsultancy in Why Webinars?

Watch The Power of Webinars below, or go to the bombora.tv webinar channel to watch more from this series.

Follow @bomboraTV

Kinura’s reliable, global webcasting services have been nominated under the Streaming Services Provider category. Over the past year we’ve live streamed a variety of original and exciting projects, including; One Young World Summit, Artangel’s Sounds From a Room, Tracey Emin in conversation with Stephen Fry and many more.

Our interactive live stream of the York Mystery Plays has also gained us a nomination for Best Streaming Innovation 2012. Last August, we teamed up with our friends at Pilot theatre to produce this multi-camera live stream of the largest outdoor theatre event in 2012, which was also voted one of the top favourite projects on The Space.

There’s no panel or jury, the awards are based simply on public vote. So you’ve enjoyed any of the work we’ve done over the past year then vote now! Voting is now open and closes Friday 24th May.

So, what does the future look like? Well, with Musion beaming onto stage life-size 3D projections of famous faces such as Will.I.Am and Paloma Faith; as well as crystal swans, cars, mobile phones, and giant martini glasses,  they demonstrated that the opportunities for a technology like this are endless. Apple could demonstrate launch their latest product in a giant holographic form live on stage. Conference organisers could beam a 3D version of their CEO live from his office to multiple conference locations across the globe at one time, meaning an event can be replicated across different locations globally. (Similar to a Mariah Carey performance that was projected to audiences all over the world).

Although this does come at a relatively high cost and probably isn’t suitable for every live event or conference, for those who feel it is relevant and can afford it it’s definitely going to capture and engage their audience better than ever before. It also gives us all something to think about in terms of the way we look at the future of Telepresence and communication.

The interaction between the audience and the keynote speakers seems to be changing too. By giving everyone in the room their own iPad with an Event App built-in, Crystal Interactive gave delegates the opportunity to participate in polls, ask questions, view the PowerPoint slides and much more. Delegates were no longer delegates, they became participants.

This all sounds very expensive I know, but Chris Emitt, owner of Crystal Interactive, demonstrated how easy it could be to simply ask your delegates to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). He asked everyone in the room to stand up and then got them to sit down again if they own an Apple iOS or Android device, or any phone with a browser: no one in the room was left standing.

This demonstrates just how simple it could be to implement app interaction into an event at a low cost. But are event organisers really thinking digitally? After walking around the Confex exhibition hall for a few hours it’s clear to see the place full of exhibitors enticing you with canapés, cocktails and freebies. So, it makes you realise that the digital aspects of event organising are perhaps just a small cog in a larger machine. We did see some pretty cool digital stuff while we were there, such as Vidiho! A company who have developed small, ultra thin LCD screens that can be built into marketing media, such as a business card or event invitation. But beyond that and some companies innovating with digital signage, there wasn’t much tech to be seen.

We get that there is a huge amount of planning that goes into the details of face-to-face events; picking the perfect venue and making sure you’ve organised the best catering could be crucial to making your event memorable and enjoyable. But event organisers mustn’t forget to take a step back from all that and look at the potential of enhancing an event with the latest digital technology.

We know that it’s hard to find the time and budget to make your event hybrid, and all this about projecting 3D holographics might seem a bit far fetched if you’re on a small budget! But adding a splash of digital to your event is worth thinking about.  The opportunities for all these new technologies got us really excited, and hopefully event organisers at Confex were inspired by the digital potential for live events.

In fact 82.8% of respondents said that content was the ultimate reason they sign up to watch a webcasting event, where as 0% opted for length. There are tons of bloggers out there who will tell you your content needs to be precisely say 20 minutes long to keep the attention of your audience (which is a fair point – no one wants to watch a presentation that goes on for hours on end). However, if your content is compelling, inspiring and interesting people will still tune in and engage with it. It’s also interesting that only a mere 3.2% of respondents said that cost was the deciding factor when registering to watch a webcast. It just goes to show if your content is worth it, your audience will pay for it (within reason, of course).

When asking respondents what type of webcasting event they attend most often, the results showed that ‘best practice’ events were the most attended. So, not only should content be interesting, but people need to feel like they’ve got something out of it and that you’ve helped them in some way. After all 24% of respondents said their webcast pet peeve is that the webcast didn’t teach them anything. We’d suggest that you can’t go far wrong with funny and entertaining yet educational content. There is so much bad content out there these days, you need to make sure that yours doesn’t get lost amongst it all.

Here’s a snazzy infographic that gives a breakdown of the survey results:

So, if your organisation isn’t getting involved yet, then its about time it did. Not only to keep up with the competition and consumer needs, but also because company executives are watching video more than ever too. 75% of executives told Forbes they watch work-related videos on business websites once a week.

But if you’re not a video whizz, where do you start?

Here at Kinura, we’ve put together some tips that will help get ideas flowing. Whether you’re in B2B or consumer sales, you can use video in so many different ways within your business. Here’s just a few ideas:

Live webinars are great for encouraging your audience to engage in conversation and debate with you. It’s an opportunity for clients, customers and industry experts to meet the real you, this will make them feel more personally connected to your brand. They’re also handy for building SEO and generating traffic to your website. You can enhance this by extending the life of your webinars by making them available on-demand.

There are plenty of examples of companies who are using webinars to add value to their brand. For example The Ken Blanchard Companies, a management training and consultancy firm, offer free-of-charge webinars about management techniques. Their webinars often provide information parallel to that found in their books, a great way to market content.

Hubspot also offer free on-demand webinars, take a look at their webinar Beginners Guide to Video Marketing for even more tips on online video.

If your company host events and conferences then live streaming these events can often enhance your business. Live streaming your event opens doors to new potential clients who maybe haven’t heard of your events previously, or just haven’t been able to attend due to distance.

Live video content also creates a sense of urgency, in comparison to simply filming an event and then making it available on-demand a few days later. This urgency can really help to drive the number of viewers. There are tons of advantages to live streaming your events, more of which we highlighted in our blog here. 

One thing that really struck me was how we keep coming back to really basic ideas in marketing. Something people said in a few different sessions was “Don’t forget you’re talking to individual human beings” and although this sounds somewhat blatantly effing obvious (unless you are marketing to dogs), it really hit home for me. Because even in business-to-business marketing, we have to remember that people are still people. And people like being entertained.

I bang on about this all the time in terms of web video for business. How many ultra-dull presentations I have sat through I can’t tell you, and all because no one bothered to think about the presenting style and the talent involved in their piece of corporate TV. If you watch any TV show you will generally find that there is a presenter who (shock horror) can talk straight to the camera. And that there will be a number of short features, linked together, with a good pace of different shots and a mixture of straight-to-camera talking to the audience, alongside more in-depth interviews and evocative cut aways to set the scene and bring viewers into the action. I do understand that if you’re creating a training piece or a webinar on a tiny budget, and it’s about something fairly dry or perfunctory, then maybe it isn’t possible to make it hugely entertaining. It won’t be Downton Abbey, or even the One Show. But – maybe – just maybe – a hell of a lot of business video could be improved by thinking about talent, training people to present properly, and maybe mixing things up a bit so that the final edit is more lively, entertaining and thought-provoking. After all, we’re all human.

Richard Robinson, Director B2B Markets at Google was talking about the possibilities for using Google Hangouts to drive traffic, in a session about search and social media. I asked him a question about whether he thought publishers should train print journalists in TV presenting but he didn’t seem to think it was essential. He said he never had any formal training in presenting but still gets lots of hits on some videos he’s in on YouTube. And fair point, if you have an important job title and something interesting to say, then maybe you already have talent, and you don’t need to go on any courses. But I do think lots of journalists are having to be more versatile to keep up with the digital mess we’re all in. And those that just keep typing and don’t get in front of a camera, may find that their opportunities are more limited in future.

And I shall just leave you with this great slideshare from Velocity Partners who are warning us about the deluge of content coming our way as marketing folks go mad for it and we all struggle to get our voices heard!

Kinura recently teamed up with Hackney Council and Forward Create to live stream Hackney Live, a pilot programme that showcases local talent through the arts and creative industries. The programme launched on 25 February with a live streamed music show, followed by a live dance show on 26 February.

East London Dance curated Hackney Live’s interactive dance show, hosted by Eastenders’ Ricky Norwood. A new dance piece was produced live in the studio with help from the interactive online audience and Hackney’s own choreographer, Tony Adigun. The live music show was curated by Rising Tide, who produced an original piece of music with well-known artists and producers, including Labrinth. The song was then performed on the live show by emerging young artist Kersha Bailey.

Young people were able to watch the online shows at several free live screening events set up as part of the Discover Young Hackney festival, such as the Hackney Empire café as well as the Concord and Forest Road youth centres.

The Institute of International Visual Arts (INIVA) have also produced some inspirational video content for Hackney Live, in a series called ‘In The Artist’s Space‘. This gives viewers an insight into how artists work in their space and what pathways are open for a career in contemporary arts.

If you missed the live shows then head to Hackney Live to watch them on-demand.

Join in the debate about this project using #HackneyLive and follow @HackneyLive for more information on future projects.

Dance show with Ricky Norwood

Music show with The Last Skeptik