"Stickiness" Is Back
Companies have long been concerned about how to use the web to reach customers with important messages. They’re quickly discovering that the same rules apply to their own employees.
by Gregory L. Casale, President & CEO, StarBak Communications, Inc.
I was speaking with a customer of ours recently—an executive at a large financial services firm that had recently deployed an enterprise video communications system from StarBak. Their goal was to be able to reach employees with important quarterly broadcasts from their CEO. In the past, the CEO would spend much of his time in the last month of the quarter visiting the half a dozen or so company sites located across the eastern United States. As is typical at many Fortune 1000 companies, upon his visit, the employees at the site would be gathered into an auditorium for a formal address, scheduled months in advance, in order to hear important company news and information.
This particular executive was explaining that since they began streaming these presentations live, they had saved weeks of travel time for their grateful CEO, while being able to simultaneously deliver his address to all of the employees across the company. The savings in both time and money, particularly for the CEO and his staff, were significant. This is exactly the kind of ROI that those in our business seek to provide for our customers.
At this point, though, I felt compelled to interrupt my customer, and inquire if he knew that the same system that was purchased for live streaming broadcasts could also be used to provide on-demand programs to employees via the integrated video portal, allowing them to view the broadcast at a time and place that was most convenient for them. He replied that they had tried that once in the past, but found the “turnout” to be poor. In short, if left to the viewer, they often chose not to view the intended program.
As I’ve written about in the past, there is a growing need for companies to consider the viewing habits of their employees when determining which method of corporate communications (written, audio, video, web etc.) is going to be most effective in a given situation. The problem is more acute today than ever before, as employees deal with information overload in both their personal and professional lives. We have become adept at quickly distilling information down to the key nuggets that we require to get our job done (or drive to work, or research a car loan, etc.). In the case of my customer, my sense is that the problem they encountered with poor turnout for the on-demand programs is not related to the method of delivery, but of the content. Perhaps viewers were not tuning in, and turning on, because the content was not compelling, or not deemed important, or not presented in an interesting way. In short, the content lacked “stickiness.”
We remember, during the Internet bubble times of the late 90s, hearing of the term “stickiness” to describe the ability of business-to-consumer websites to draw viewers (or “eyeballs”) and hold their attention long enough for the desired message to be delivered. In my conversations with executives and decision-makers at Fortune 1000 companies over the last several months, one of the recurring themes I hear is the desire, and urgency, that management feels to be able to consistently deliver information to employees that is heard, retained, shared and acted upon. In short, they are seeking “stickiness” in their corporate communications.
Because video communications has been proven to provide higher retention rates and greater comprehension than other forms of communication, it is logical that video communications is a starting point for that quest. Further, it is now indisputable that consumers (who, as we know, are our employees when they’re not at work) have an insatiable appetite for the creation and sharing of video, as evidenced by the meteoric rise of sites like YouTube.com, serving 100 million videos daily.
What then is the intersection point of video communications and this concept of “stickiness” when applied to the corporate, rather than consumer, environment? I believe the answer can be found in the growing interest and adoption of corporate video portals—extensions of the existing internal company website that represent the go-to destination for employees to receive a continuous stream of information. A corporate video portal provides storage and organization of all the company’s video assets, from archived material, to training content, to executive broadcasts, news and company information. Video can be easily created, shared, distributed and managed right from a simple browser-based interface, rather than by interacting with the myriad equipment traditionally required to accomplish these tasks.
By deploying a video portal as an integral part of the corporate communications strategy, company’s can begin to achieve the “stickiness” of their messaging to an extent only contemplated just five years ago. In our private lives, we have many choices in how we organize consumption of video content, from 24/7 access to video news feeds, to on-demand programming that is archived and viewed when it’s convenient for us, to libraries of content we’ve created ourselves. It’s only natural that employees expect that same flexibility at work, and will often reject messaging that is not packaged in an appealing way, or does not put them in control of how it is consumed.
Like the example of the StarBak customer, we may find that if we don’t plan for how we can deliver messages with stickiness, in a way that considers the viewing habits of the audience first, we are likely to find that when we do have an important message to deliver, no one is listening. Developing a corporate video portal, while phasing out traditional live video broadcasts where possible, is one way that companies are addressing this problem, and finding success.
For more information on StarBak, go to their homepage.
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