Leverage the Power of Video with Sonic Foundry and Mediasite
Effective and digestible communication is incredibly important to every company, regardless of size or industry. It is crucial for planning, company operations, building competencies, and creating a highly-skilled, motivated and committed workforce. When it comes to strengthening communications, most companies often turn to traditional voice and email channels. While these methods are helpful, in today’s increasingly competitive business environment, relying on these tools alone is no longer enough. It’s also essential for companies to consider other forms of communication that not only help bring teams together, but also does so in an engaging, interactive, and efficient manner. But which solution possess all of these attributes?
Rob Lipps, the Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Sonic Foundry, a leading global leader for video capture, management, and webcasting solutions, believes that video may just be the tool enterprises need. In this article, Lipps shares with VoipReview.org some insights on why video solutions are an important part of a business’ overall communications strategy and explains how Sonic Foundry is transforming corporate communications with their innovative Mediasite video platform.
Video in the Enterprise: Why is it Important?
In a survey by Ragan Communications, the leading resource and publisher of information about corporate communications, 71 percent of survey participants revealed that they use video to communicate with employees. Meanwhile, 44 percent of those that don’t utilize video said that they plan to use the medium this year. The explanation is quite simple: video is an interactive and engaging experience and has the ability to deliver information much quicker than what could otherwise need several paragraphs in written form.
But what makes a good video solution? Lipps believes that a successful video platform needs to deliver two things: the video creation process and the video monitoring process. "The measure of success will be the video and about the workflow, not the bells and whistles and features in a platform," shared Lipps. "You can’t have complete lifecycle management if you don’t include the creation side. I strongly believe that a platform needs to include integration points to provide you with a strategy that works."
Businesses that leverage a good video solution can achieve real results, such as:
- Increased employee satisfaction and retention - Video offers an excellent solution for businesses employing a mobile, distributed workforce. It helps companies keep their teams updated as well as enable them to foster collaboration despite the distance, helping to boost morale.
- Lower operational costs - With video, companies can significantly slash their travel budgets. Work can get done more efficiently and effectively.
- Highly-skilled workforce - Video also offers a modern solution to train employees more efficiently. And with the right video solution, employees can also access and review training videos and related materials in their own time.
- Peace of mind - Organizations also get peace of mind knowing that all vital company knowledge and information are preserved and archived through video.
Ways Enterprises Can Use Video to Their Advantage
From team collaboration, training, education and company messages, there are plenty of ways businesses can use video. You can even use video to broadcast and understand the impact of video at a conference. "When you do a conference at hotel or event space with breakout sessions, you can use and learn a lot from the viewing behavior of the audience as to how relevant topics are, how engaging the speakers are, and more in order to plan ahead for the future or even next year’s event/conference," revealed Lipps. Below are some additional examples of how enterprises can utilize video in their business or relevant industry:
- Communications - One of the most common applications for video in the workplace is high-quality, real-time video interaction. These include town hall meetings, company announcements, and even press conferences.
- Sales and Marketing - Video can also support a business’ sales and marketing endeavors. Whether it’s a sales training, webinar, or product launch, the right video solution can help businesses ensure they get the message across, clearly and concisely.
- Customer Support - For companies offering technical products or services, video can also be a great way to deliver critical information for customers, such as through video FAQs, product demos, and troubleshooting tutorials.
- Learning and Development - Companies can effectively use video for formal training or even day-to-day information sharing, helping to preserve key company information and ensuring teams are equipped with the right knowledge.
Unleashing the Power of Video with Sonic Foundry
Sonic Foundry, a leader in Aragon Research’s Globe for Video Content Management and Frost & Sullivan’s lecture capture leader for seven consecutive years (in addition to a leader in Forrester’s Enterprise Video Platforms and Webcasting Wave), believes that utilizing video is one of the best ways to transform communications in a business or educational institution. And Mediasite, Sonic Foundry’s innovative video platform, aims to be the tool that can help these enterprises achieve meaningful results through video.
Acquired by Sonic Foundry in 2002, Mediasite has evolved to become one of today’s leading platforms for video capture, management, and delivery. Mediasite by Sonic Foundry allows enterprises in the education, health, and government industries bring communications, training, webcasts, and other events to life. “Sonic Foundry is more well known for helping people create high-quality video and even use some of the search technology," said Lipps.
According to Lipps, the Mediasite solution is made up of two big components. “First, the tools to create content for different form factors (hardware, software, integrations with UC cloud based or on-premises) a whole suite of tech aimed at helping people create video," said Lipps. "And second is the platform itself. The Mediasite platform (besides managing) does a few important things: analyzes video to make it more searchable and creates interactivity within a viewer.”
The data that Mediasite gathers can then can be used for analytic purposes, thus helping companies ascertain why viewers or visitors act the way they do. "To this day we are a data-driven company, and realize data through creating and consumption of video," noted Lipps.
Enterprises can take use Mediasite over the course of three steps: capture, transform and manage, and share and watch.
- Capture - Subscribers can capture videos in four ways: via personal and mobile capture (ideal for screencasts, lectures, and demos), automated room capture (schedule-based capture for instructors and speakers), Unified Communication capture (via Mediasite Join, a tool for recording video and web conferences), and events and live streaming (for capturing and broadcasting quality videos).
- Transform and Manage - Once a video has been captured, video assets can be easily uploaded, encoded, organized, and edited. “One of the things we’ve done is, instead of an admin portal for IT manager or market manager, there is a lite version of the portal for every user that creates video, which empowers them with their own admin interface to secure, edit, and deliver their own video," mentioned Lipps. "And thus, a user is no longer just a creator but is now a content curator, too. You manage it yourself.” Videos can also be as searchable as text. Additionally, Mediasite offers the ability to see exactly who is watching, helping companies better understand engagement and measure impact. Lipps said, “Businesses can learn every time a visitor or viewer clicks, if they navigate from one part of the video to another, or if they search for terms, click somewhere, bookmark a page, etc. We can know what you did through the analytics and data.”
- Share and Watch - Videos can be stored in any channel: from Mediasite Showcase and content management systems to Youtube and other website.
Also, Mediasite offers different deployment options: it can be hosted either on-premises or in the cloud, giving businesses greater flexibility and control over what works best for their organization. "One of the hottest parts of today’s communication market is the cloud, but there's a big segment of the market that simply can’t do cloud," said Lipps. "Those are industries include military, defense contracts, and even some health industries, too." Most of today's businesses are seeing the benefits of the cloud and its high growth potential, but also see the value in siding with on-premise, hybrid, or cloud deployments.
Final Thoughts
With a plethora of communication tools at their disposal, businesses nowadays cannot afford to stick to inefficient outdated solutions. Video solutions, such as Mediasite by Sonic Foundry, helps businesses to not just communicate effectively but to also ensure that each interaction is meaningful. “Video has empowered people to not just be consumers but to be involved in actually disseminating video. Video has enabled everyone to be their own studio, and device companies have helped with that,” said Lipps. “Video conferencing and web conferencing together with streaming has opened up a new world as content sources.”
Learn more about Sonic Foundry and how the company is transforming communications for organizations by visiting Sonic Foundry’s website.
About Sonic Foundry
Founded in 1991, Sonic Foundry initially started as a audio and video editing software company before acquiring Mediasite in 2002. Since then, the company is focused on delivering a video platform that allows users to create, distribute, and monitor video through their Mediasite Video Platform, hosted either on-premise on in the cloud. Their company mission is to amplify the world’s knowledge by empowering organizations to place video at the heart of every class, training, communication and event. They have been recognized as an industry leader by Forrester, Aragon Research, and Gartner, and service a number of enterprise companies and top-ranked business schools.