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Welcome to the Melcrum Social Media Newsletter.
In How to use social media to engage employees we featured IBM’s new media strategy, a core part of which centers on the possibilities for video podcasting (i.e., videocasting). “There’s a lot of emerging interest in videocasting inside the organization,” says Philippe Borremans, new media lead in Europe for IBM.
He suggests there are three core reasons the company is moving that way:
1. It reflects where the web is going
“Our moves to videocast really reflect what’s happening on the web generally, where more and more of the content you’re seeing these days is video content.”
2. The technology is already there
With many departments and most communicators already having video-recording capability, there’s little extra cost to be outlayed. “And mobile technology is fast moving that way too,” he adds. “I can take a video with my mobile phone that’s good enough for a videocast.”
3. It offers greater creative potential
With a podcast, there’s a linearity to the content – 15 minutes of material means 15 minutes of material. But with the right editing software, there are endless possibilities when it comes to creating communications that are inventive, clear and engaging. “Think about how quickly you can splice images, sounds, moving images, pictures and words in a piece of film to get across your message. You could condense the material from that 15-minute podcast into two minutes of video.”
Stimulating creativity with an employee competition
One of the core goals of the new-media team at IBM has always been to build social media strategy from the ground up and then respond to it with structure and the building of a central hub.
With videocasting, the team is a little ahead of the curve, yet it still wants to “keep the social media social.” So they launched videocasting with an employee competition – inviting staff to flex their creative muscles.
Borremans explains “One of our core strategy topics is innovation. So we invited all IBMers to create a short video clip to showcase how they see IBM innovating, or how they think it might help its clients innovate. They could then upload their clips to a central database, and have all IBMers vote on it for a prize.”
The clips had to be no more than 60 seconds long and, in total, the company saw 512 submissions – ranging from the serious to the interpretive. (For example, one was a simple video about the potential of a paper clip). “It’s one of those nice projects you can do to just have people think about a strategic topic for the company, but at the same time use new technology,” says Borremans.
Best regards,
Alex Manchester
Editor
alex.manchester@melcrum.com
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