With an endless stream of content bombarding us every minute of every day, there are few proven ways to capture and hold our time-starved attention like videos. Are you reading this blog post or are you just skimming it?

Videos have evolved well beyond marketing tools posted on your corporate website. When leveraged properly they become a catalyst for engagement, extending conversations with your brand when and where they are most influential. Their integration into both traditional campaigns and emerging marketing continues to grow. Here are a few examples:

* Augmenting an offline campaign like broadcasting with an online video gives your customers a way to interact with your brand and the community.

* By adding a barcode to a print or out-of-home campaign, you can direct consumers to a dedicated video that frames your brand in a more dynamic presentation.

* Mobile campaigns open more opportunities for online videos hosted on your mobile site or delivered through a mobile application.

* Incorporating video text messages into your geo/location SMS campaign allows you to showcase your offer with video.

* A video link verses a simple status update on Facebook gets your post rated higher in the news feed. (Source: DailyBeast)

So if you are going to partner with an agency or video production company, first evaluate their strategic thinking and ability to tell a compelling story. But what is becoming equally important is that they understand how your video integrates into the advertising ecosystem.

-Mike Johnston
Boss Creative

Mike Johnston’s background includes creating nationally recognized advertising for both traditional and digital agencies and is the owner of Boss Creative.  He has been published on emerging technologies, created some of the earliest examples of mobile advertising campaigns and coaches social media marketing strategies. He is graded as a key influencer by social media rating agencies because his techniques build well-targeted communities through strong interaction and a unique voice.

Each quarter, Tektronix, a leading supplier of testing and measurement instruments, hosts a large internal video webcast. The president of the company presents business-critical and timely information to employees located around the globe. The presentation format demands a high-quality live video stream of the presenter synchronized with slides, as well as the ability to show pre-recorded video, manage virtual Q&A with high-security access and deliver post-event reporting. Tektronix partners with Worktank to make all this happen.

Tektronix’s president, Amir Aghdaei, is a dynamic and motivating speaker. Providing a high-quality live video stream of his presentation improves the virtual audience experience and fosters a sense of connection with the entire enterprise.

Tektronix teams gather in regional locations to watch the webcast in groups—and then follow it with their own local meetings. Within a short period of time, everyone is operating with the same information.

Live video webcasting provides the scalability to reach all employees. If they aren’t able to attend the live event, an on-demand recording is available within 24 hours. Worktank’s on-site video crew and webcast producers capture the video, encode and stream it, and manage the user interface. Historically, this level of production would have required a satellite truck and remote encoding. We can now provide a stable, robust solution that is both portable and inexpensive.

With a globally distributed workforce, Tektronix increases the velocity of employee communication while keeping costs in check. This enterprise-sized company has improved employee communication and reduced travel and phone conferencing costs through the thoughtful implementation of quarterly live video webcasting.

With over 15 years of professional strategic marketing and business development experience, Toby provides strong leadership and product experience as the vice president of online event services at Worktank. Toby’s dedication to leveraging rich media technology to make digital communication more effective and engaging supports the growth strategy of the company.

How many times have you heard the phrase “Hi! Who just joined the call?” How many hours have you spent watching a PowerPoint presentation that you could have digested in half the time it took to present? How much of your travel budget have you thrown away on internal company meetings? How much of your budget has been cut since last fiscal year?

I could keep going, but the moral is that when it comes to virtual event management, you need help. Hiring a webcast manager will save you time, money, stress, and avoid the email from company executives questioning your technical competency.

A variety of webcast platforms provide great, cost-effective tools to seamlessly engage a large audience, but you have to know how to use them. For small, collaborative meetings, it is fairly easy to use the resources your company gives you. Microsoft’s new Unified Communications Platform, Lync, is a great tool for small discussions and can even be used for small VOIP-only webcasts. For any meeting over 25 attendees, though, you need an extra pair of eyes and hands to stay organized.

Here are a few questions to help guide you in the right direction:

How many presenters will there be?
Where are the presenters located?
Would you like the audience to be able to ask questions during the call?
Do you want your event to work seamlessly with your social media marketing efforts?
Do you want a branded registration system that will track attendees before, during, and after the live event?
Who is going to moderate the call and communicate all the technical details to the audience before and after you hit “record”?
What will you do with the recording after the event?
Do you plan to issue certifications to those that attended (e.g., CPE credits)?

These questions just scratch the surface. There are many “event management” details you will need to consider before the event date, and they always take up more time than you plan for. Basically, if you have more than one presenter and plan to use audience-interaction tools or registration components, or if you desire a polished on-demand experience, you will benefit greatly from a dedicated event producer. An event producer will support you through the entire pre-event juggling act (invitations, ordering telephony, etc.), jump to the rescue if ANYTHING goes awry during the live event (audio issues, individual technical issues, etc.), and deliver post-event analytics that you never thought were possible (attendance trend over time, on-demand viewers, etc.) so you can easily show your boss the ROI.

We know it’s not easy to ask for help, but from our perspective it’s like asking for directions. Why waste your time wandering aimlessly when Worktank has traveled the same road over 18,000 times? We’ve practically built our own webcasting autobahn.

Do yourself a favor: If you have an important meeting coming up with more than 25 attendees, let Worktank’s streamlined process, webcasting expertise, and friendly staff do the heavy lifting while you focus on your presentation.

To find out more about Worktank’s service offerings and pricing, please visit www.worktankseattle.com or send your event details to eventrequest@worktankseattle.com.

As Webcast Account Manager, Brian develops strong relationships with our webcasting clients, creates efficiencies within our internal processes, and builds innovative reports that fine-tune our business dashboard. His skill lies in creative, analytical thinking that helps our clients reach their goals and realize the greatest return on their investment.

I recently worked with a client to run a cost comparison between a managed webcast solution and her current large-audience teleconferencing solution. The results blew me away. While the extra virtual audience interactivity and on-demand availability made the additional value of a webcast self-evident, the cost savings compared to teleconferencing was enormous.

Let’s break it down. Although our client works in a Fortune 100 company, their standard teleconferencing solutions are limited to 100 attendees. Larger teleconferences require an operator-assist line and thus cost more. For an hour-long teleconference with 250 employees in North America, our client was looking at a telephony cost of over $4,000!

Switching to a managed webcast with the majority of attendees listening over the Internet meant her costs were less than 50% of the cost of the teleconference. A managed webcast solution provides additional interactive features such as polling, annotation, and screen sharing for application demos and slides. And with a webcast producer handling all the logistics, the process is very easy for the presenter—they only have to focus on their messaging and on creating a great slide deck.

Not only is the cost substantially less, a managed webcast solution provides greater functionality, an on-demand recording available for those who missed the live event, and detailed attendee reporting.

The evolution of digital communication has displaced the traditional large teleconferencing method with a webcast solution that offers greater value in nearly every dimension. While it can be intimidating to migrate to new tools and solutions, webcast producers like Worktank handle all the complexities to make events run smoothly. Worktank’s professional producers help clients be successful with webcast programs from the simple to the complex. Our goal is to free the presenters to focus on their content, while we handle all the logistics and support for the event—demand generation, pre-event planning, live event management, post-event reporting and hosting of content.

With over 15 years of professional strategic marketing and business development experience, Toby provides strong leadership and product experience as the vice president of online event services at Worktank. Toby’s dedication to leveraging rich media technology to make digital communication more effective and engaging supports the growth strategy of the company.

AT&T Mobile Marketing Solutions™ offers a powerful suite of mobile messaging, application, barcode, and Internet marketing tools. AT&T Senior Marketing Manager, Evan McDonald commissioned Worktank to create the videos to anchor the site, which just launched in April 2011.

“Worktank is a pleasure to work with. After 20+ video projects with a variety of budgets, I find that Worktank brings together the appropriate mix of strategic insight with the right talent for execution. They are focused and agile, collaborating with you the client to deliver quality deliverables on time and on budget.” —Evan McDonald

The Mobile Marketing Solutions videos demonstrate Worktank’s ability to translate emerging technologies—through tightly focused scripts and storyboards—into clear and compelling marketing videos. Incorporating with familiar strategies marketers expect to find in traditional campaigns like branding, direct response, coupons, and loyalty programs, the videos showcase the benefits of integrating powerful tools like location-based services, on-the-fly optimization, and granular metrics. Check them out!

Several mobile marketing strategies were tested with focus groups and the results were used to hone the scripts. The final videos showcase different ways brands—across a variety of categories—could influence consumer sentiment, choice, and behavior at the moment of decision using barcodes, text, and videotext messaging; mobile applications; and websites optimized for mobile devices.

Because of Worktank’s long-standing relationship with AT&T, we’ve established a smooth and efficient rhythm for creating AT&T videos. Our video production team has intimate experience with AT&T’s current brand guidelines. We’ve successfully navigated legal and brand processes. And, we’ve worked with a number of AT&T partners including Apple, TrueContext, HTC, and Pantech.

Recently, I came across these video customer stories from Adobe. Adobe does a fantastic job of showing their customers using and providing testimony about the effectiveness of their filmmaking product suite. Wow–seeing is believing!

At Worktank, we have created high-quality customer evidence videos similar to Adobe’s for clients such as Microsoft. They have proven to be invaluable sales tools. As a buyer, you get the opportunity to look into a person’s eyes and feel their conviction for the company’s products or services.

While every company can benefit from customer evidence videos, high-production quality is not in everyone’s budget. We produced professional videos at a very reasonable price. Here’s a few highlights about how we did it:

Quality: We established a quality level that fit with our brand and budget. We didn’t want to be as casual as a Flip camera or go over the top by rallying our entire video crew. We were selective with the camera we used and lighting was very important.

Location: Our customer’s time is precious, and we didn’t want to ask them to go far. That left us with trying to make a conference room look good. We needed to be in and out quickly, so we scouted the locations in advance to establish our setup.

Content: Our team strategized about which customers could speak best to our key messaging pillars: technology expertise, proven results, and true service. We prepared a list of questions and sent them in advance.

Result: We were blown away with what our customers had to say about us. Since I can’t take them along with me on sales calls, at least I have them on video!

Check it out:

I’d highly recommend considering customer evidence video for your business.  If you need help producing your videos, our experienced video team is ready to engage at any level. Let’s chat about the possibilities.

-Corey Pilkington

corey@worktankseattle.com

Corey Pilkington, Worktank’s director of sales & marketing, is a skilled marketing strategist with over 13 years of experience building relationships between brands and their customers. She began her career with NBC, FOX, and WB developing promotional opportunities for advertisers to deepen their connections with customers and drive sales. Corey believes that profitability is a product of a meaningful relationship with your customers that is built on integrity, transparency, and authenticity.

Creating an engaging presentation is the key to getting the most out of your webcast. I want to give you insight into keeping your audience with you and excited about your presentation. I’ve had the pleasure of running hundreds of webcasts over the last several years and believe that by following a few simple rules you can deliver a fantastic webcast every time.

The first step is identifying a topic that not only do people want to hear about, but that you want to talk about. If you think your topic is boring, how do you think that will come across to your audience?  By choosing a topic that you want to talk about, it will be easier to not only deliver the presentation, but to keep your audience with you.

Now that you know what you’re going to talk about you need to put together your presentation. Simple right? Throw up some slides with some bullet points and, bam, you’re done.  I wish it were that easy; really I do, because it would make things so much simpler. Look at it this way: you’re not only creating slides to engage your “today” audience, but your “tomorrow” audience as well. Really look at each slide as a two part process:

1)      When I see these slides, are they visually engaging?

2)      When I talk about these slides, do my talking points engage with the audience?

By engaging the audience both visually and orally you will not only keep the audience you have, but you will build a reputation as a great presenter for your audience of the future.

Now let’s bring your audience in your presentation. By incorporating interactive elements into the presentation, your audience becomes part of the presentation and not just passive viewers. You can use polling slides, web slides and white boards in your presentation. Bring in a webcam to help your audience connect with you. All of these elements will engage your audience and keep their focus!

At the end of the day, your presentation is a way for you to get across key information to your audience. The more engaging you keep your presentation, the better your audience will receive your information. By finding a topic that you want to speak to, creating slides that visually engage as well as complement your speech, and bringing in interactive components to your presentation, you have a formula that will not only keep your audience engaged, but you too!

As a Worktank webcast producer, Chris brings ingenuity, guidance and a professional hand to each event he produces. Coming from a variety of media backgrounds, Chris focuses on making your presentation look and sound good.

Worktank has managed more than 60 webcasts since 2009 for the AT&T Developer Program community, which provides mobile application developers access to technical and marketing resources for the development and launch of their mobile applications. The community site is a location for developers to learn, develop, and receive technical support. A core method of communicating with the developer network is through routine webcasts. Available only to members who have signed up for the community, the webcasts offer a chance for the virtual audience to hear timely, relevant information and ask questions of key expert presenters. More interactive and up-to-date than whitepapers, webcasts are used by the AT&T Developer Program to communicate business-critical information to a highly targeted audience.

Belonging to the developer community requires establishing a membership. Worktank added registration and security screening to the webcast program so that AT&T is able to prevent non-members from attending webcasts or limit the viewership to a select group of members. Providing access to live and on-demand webcasts is an important tool, which enables AT&T to attract members to join the developer community. Not only is webcasting used to drive the developer audience, but retention is improved.

A typical AT&T Developer Program webinar includes audio and slides, interactive features, on-demand file conversions, registration, and security. Worktank has also managed live-video webcasts from a moving train during a developers conference. Whether it’s the conventional or technologically progressive, Worktank’s webcast program helps AT&T with value-added digital communications.

With over 15 years of professional strategic marketing and business development experience, Toby provides strong leadership and product experience as the vice president of online event services at Worktank. Toby’s dedication to leveraging rich media technology to make digital communication more effective and engaging supports the growth strategy of the company.

We hope you enjoy the experience and the site is easy to use.  Our objective is to help you discover how to utilize webcasts and video to connect with dozens, hundreds and even thousands of people at once with a flawless experience. All of our offerings – webcasts, video, packages & programs – can be found on the What We Offer page. Visit our Packages page to learn about prepackaged, ready-to-go webcast and video solutions. In Our Work, learn how our current customers have created tools and programs that reduce costs, improve communications, and drive more sales.  And it looks like you have found our Blog!  Have a look and see what helpful information you can find to optimize your digital communications strategy.

Last, but not least, don’t forget to check our staff out!  The majority of our work is completely virtual – as a result, we wanted to give all of you the ability to put a face to our name and get to know us a little bit better.  Go ahead and play around on the About page and meet our team.

As a project manager, Jillian works to keep all internal projects moving forward on schedule and on budget. Beyond her love for everything advertising and digital marketing, she is on the communications board of Ad 2 Seattle and a member of NWIAG.

Customer service is more than a smile and remembering to say “please” and “thank you”—great service is authentic and honest, and it triggers an emotional response. A colleague once told me that “service isn’t something we do, but something we are.” I believe that this TRUST in hardworking, authentic PEOPLE is a vital element of every business relationship.

Just try to imagine your typical business exchanges without the personal element. Think about your automated banking system and the #1–#9 prompts. We mash the #0 key trying to get to an operator and would rather wait five minutes to talk to someone than go through the “annoying” automated system.  Although Kenny G’s music is lovely, it is clear that we NEED personal interaction.

This is spotlighted in the restaurant industry. One of my favorite lunch spots is a family-owned restaurant called “Deli Espresso” in Lower Queen Anne, Seattle. It has one of the worst business names in the city, average food, and average prices, but it has a line out the door every day during lunch. Within minutes, you begin to see why: The friendly, hardworking family behind the counter is moving at light speed. You order when you are third in line and have a quick conversation when you get up to the register as the cashier flawlessly memorizes seven separate orders at the same time. The feeling you have while waiting in line goes far beyond any sales and marketing efforts: You KNOW that you will be taken care of.

So how do you find the right people or companies to conduct business with? The answers are out there; you just have to know where to look. Want to learn more about a company’s culture? Read some of their employees’ blogs, follow their employees on Twitter, and reach out to them. Want to see a movie? Check out public reviews on rottentomatoes.com or your “Flixster” mobile device app. Want to go out to eat or find the best nightlife? Check out Yelp! If you are like me, you search out great service and reward it with your loyalty. It works in the restaurant industry, and it will always work in big business, too. I think we are so focused on cutting back, that we accidentally cut out the key building blocks of success. Authentic human interaction will always and should always play a role in effective business relationships. So I urge you to go out of your way to keep exceptional people on staff and seek out businesses with exceptional people. It will pay incalculable dividends.

[And if you need to run a webcast, shoot me an email.]

Brian Leamon

www.twitter.com/brleam

brianl@worktankseattle.com

c: 206-658-2587

As Webcast Account Manager, Brian develops strong relationships with our webcasting clients, creates efficiencies within our internal processes, and builds innovative reports that fine-tune our business dashboard. His skill lies in creative, analytical thinking that helps our clients reach their goals and realize the greatest return on their investment.