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From My VW to Your Video Campaigns, is DIY the Right Choice?

CMMA Blog

From the “maker movement” to how-to videos, we live in a Do It Yourself (DIY) era. Whether it originates from punk rock or anti-consumerism, the movement today leverages technology to connect people with similar interests and empowers them to fix, build, or hack their way through a whole variety of interesting cool projects.

DIY culture has exploded across the U.S., and there is data to back it up:

  1. There have been over 400 Maker Faires organized around the world since 2012.
  2. There are 1975 hackerspaces around the world.
  3. $529 million was pledged to Kickstarter projects in 2014. That’s more than $1,000 a minute.

The infrastructure is there, crowd-based funding is there, and people are showing up to create!

DIY can benefit the individual or group in a variety of ways; including a sense of accomplishment, uncompromised vision, and the democratization of bringing new products to market. These are all very positive results. But for every successful Kickstarter campaign there are multitudes of “Pinterest Fails”. This asks the question: just because you can do something yourself, does it mean you should?

For each project you need to evaluate the risk, the benefits, the urgency, and the cost.

DIY and my 1990 VW Vanagon

I drive an (almost) vintage VW van. It’s old, but the nice thing is that unlike “modern vehicles” you can update and fix things. I’ve replaced the carpet, added an auxiliary battery, and even installed an aftermarket USB charger. But then one day driving up Mt. Constitution on Orcas Island, I blew my engine. The steam billowing out of my exhaust was a strong indication my engine needed to be replaced, and I had to ask myself:

  1. Do I have the right tools and documentation?
  2. Do I have the time it takes to figure it out?
  3. Will it cost more if I do it myself?
  4. And most importantly – what if I screw this up?

Since I drive the van to work every day, I couldn’t really afford to screw up the job, and because I had no idea what I was doing the risk was, shall we say, high that I would do something wrong. Not to mention all the unknown unknowns.

What if I had a friend who was a mechanic, who could help walk me through it? That significantly changes the outlook on my success. I can leverage their knowledge and expertise, while growing my own and at the same time lowering my risk.

What does my VW have to do with your video strategy?

1. Do you have the right tools and documentation to engage your workforce throughout the enterprise?

With Microsoft’s Teams Live Events and Stream delivered by Kollective, comms teams everywhere now have the capability to reach every worker in the enterprise without harming the network. You have the tools, and you are basically able to do unlimited events without paying additional cost.

2. Do you have the time it takes to figure it out?

Scheduling an event is simplicity itself. But what about producing an event? What about measuring the engagement of the audience over time? How can you tell what content is resonating with which segments of the workforce? Do you have the time for everything that wraps around a video event?

3. Will this end up costing more if you do it yourself?

Do you have internal video production teams? Are you outsourcing? How are you preparing for the event? Is there a communication plan?

4. What if you screw this up?

If your C-suite is in front of the entire company, how tolerant are they of total failures? How high is the pressure?

What about that friend who knows what they’re doing?

The good news is that Kollective doesn’t just empower the delivery of content across your network. We also have an experienced team of seasoned professionals, all former customers, who have been through the digital transformation. The Kollective Enterprise Video Strategy (EVS) Team has helped numerous customers in different ways, in each case tailored to the customer’s specific needs. We’ve seen them provide on-site support for a multi-national all hands meeting, they’ve helped several other customers develop meaningful KPIs around measuring employee engagement, and I’ve even seen them help a customer develop a business case for their video strategy. My point is Kollective’s EVS Team will meet you where you are and get you where you want to go.

So. Is DIY worth it? Is it worth it to swap out your old engine yourself? Yes, it is. If you have success, you will save money, and it’s a tremendous sense of accomplishment IF you can mitigate the risk and stay on top of your learning curve by leveraging the expertise of people who’ve done it before. To my fellow DIYers and makers, best of luck out there.

Read the enterprise video buyers guide

Learn what it takes to pull of enterprise live video events successfully, from event strategy, scaling, analytics and more.

Interested in learning more?

Learn about Nick Vella’s most recent trip to support a customer with their first live streaming events in Japan.

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The post From My VW to Your Video Campaigns, is DIY the Right Choice? appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here

No WiFi, No Power, No Problem – Nick’s Notes From The Road

CMMA Blog

NICK’S NOTES FROM THE ROAD

Earlier this year, I was called in to assist a prospect customer to do a live event outside of Toronto. From the initial calls, it was fairly obvious that this life insurance company was new to streaming. Getting started in the streaming universe is a fairly big challenge as there are so many odds and ends to think about, but I’m used to and enjoy supporting newbies.  

The first thing I always recommend to any customer, especially a new one, and even more so if an event is offsite from customer offices, is that you NEED a full day to test. To that end, I showed up the day before the event, to begin testing. The first little part that caused me discomfort, was that the testing wasn’t due to start until 3pm, the day before an 8am show. Slight red flag there, for sure. I arrive at 3pm, and the setup has barely begun, and almost all the gear was still packed.  

3PM, The Day Before

After about an hour of sitting around, I inquired on the Wi-Fi and network connections, to ensure they were up and running, and we had plenty of bandwidth. Good thing I did, as it turns out, the customer had purchased a Wi-Fi hotspot from a local wireless carrier. This hotspot was not working at all, nothing, no signal. We spend the next hour or so attempting to get it working. If that wasn’t enough, while troubleshooting the Wi-Fi, the building went dark. The power went out, there was a complete blackout on the entire block. The only thing lighting the entire ballroom was one emergency light. The power outage lasted about another hour.  

6PM, The Night Before

We are now approaching 6pm or so, with no Wi-Fi and nothing setup in respect to audio, cameras, etc. Tech support from the local wireless company is pretty useless. They claim the hotspot is corrupt and that we should use the facility Wi-Fi or go to wireless store and get a new data card for the hotspot. We didn’t trust the spotty and limited facility Wi-Fi, so at 8pm, we decide to go to the wireless store before they close at 9pm. The crew crams into a rented minivan, we get the new card, and then grab a bite to eat. After dinner, I was prepared to return to the venue. We still haven’t tested the new data card, or finished setting up, or tested streaming. I’d rather rest well knowing the new card fixed our connection issues, however, the team was tired and wanted to call it a night.   

Morning Of The Event

I manage to get a little rest and head to the event for a super early call. We get to the ballroom, test the card and nada, nothing… the Wi-Fi still doesn’t work. We get back on with tech support. They can’t figure it out. I encourage the rest of the setup to continue, so at the very least we can record the event and play it back later. We get to about an hour before show time, and the team is still focused on getting the hotspot to work. Being this close to show, I recommend using a hotspot from someone’s phone to stream the event at a much lower bitrate. We shift our focus to that solution, only to find out that their new switcher/encoder does not have Wi-Fi capability.

T-Minus 30 Minutes

With less than 30 minutes before show and the tension in the room building, I keep my cool as in my bag of tricks, I had my Wirecast  encoder with me, as well as a Blackmagic  capture card. We quickly connect one camera directly to my laptop using the Blackmagic capture card, and we use the customer’s iPhone 6 for data. We are able kick out a stream at around 200k. Thankfully, it worked like a charm, and made it through the entire three-hour long webcast.  

You never have too much time and can never be too prepared for a live streaming event. Anything can happen. And next time… I’ll bring a generator. 

Nick Vella

Nick Vella

Event Services Manager

“Nick’s Notes From The Road” is a blog series dedicated to the live event producers, the movers and shakers, the people who just won’t take no WiFi for an answer. In this series we address all things good and bad that might come up during a live event and some tools and tricks for success.

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The post No WiFi, No Power, No Problem – Nick’s Notes From The Road appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Need Streaming? Will Travel – Nick’s Notes From The Road

CMMA Blog

Over the course of my career in streaming events, I have seen a lot. I have done webcasts in some of the smallest offices, on factory floors, as well as some of the biggest convention centers and hotel ballrooms in the world. I have even conducted a live stream outside, on top of a mountain – and let’s just say, lighting was a small issue. I have done live webcasts with a single executive using a webcam and from some of the most elaborate corporate shows that would give the Grammy awards a run for their money.

No matter the size, production quality or location of each event, I enjoy seeing the pieces and people come together to pull off successful live events. For larger events, event teams are often a combination of different groups, so, you can never be certain if everyone is pulling their own weight. Knowing that, I have to pay attention to each detail, trust those I work with and ask questions as they arise.

Most recently, I had the good fortune to be part of an onsite team in a small French city near the base of the Alps, called Grenoble. The customer is a heavy user of our services, and we assist them every year for their showcase event, in which the leadership team participates in a TV-show type webcast that is broadcast company wide. The event itself is probably one of the biggest, and most well-run productions I have ever been a part of.

The production team consists of 87 people! The main team is based in North America with a local support team in Europe; including camera operators, producers, directors, lighting, electrical, sound, and more. There were 13 cameras as part of the onsite team, as well as four remote locations across the globe. The production truck that was used as the main hub for the event, is well-known for working high-profile Formula One races, as well as the Korean Winter Olympics. 

Needless to say, the atmosphere was buzzing with activity during the days leading up to the event. They do the show from one of their larger offices, but it is quickly transformed into multiple TV-quality type sets, that would make Good Morning America foam at the mouth. My co-worker and I usually arrive 2 days before the event to test and to make any configuration changes to the Kollective application that the client might want. Our video streaming strategy team works closely with the encoding team, that runs and monitors roughly 14 encoders for the event. With the customer being a global giant, they provide streams with captioning, streams with other languages, as well as backup streams for each of these streams. That’s a lot of streams!

I’ll say it once and I’ll say it again, no matter the size of the production or audience, you can never test enough. After all the rehearsals, and testing, and more testing to test the testing, we are finally set. During the event, my colleagues and I monitored the streams coming off the encoders, the application itself and we kept an eye on Kollective IQ (our enterprise-ready analytics dashboard) to make sure no major issues were happening. We were able to provide real-time insights to the corporate communications managers with the numbers they really cared about – how many people were on! 

The event itself went extremely smoothly and no major issues were reported. The customer reported roughly 13 thousand connections to the stream, with 88 thousand total participants who viewed via watching parties. For an executive team to be able to share their critical updates via broadcast-quality live video to this many globally-dispersed employees is a massive achievement. I can only imagine how they will level up for next year’s event. 

The adrenaline is always pumping for events like this.  If you have a great team, good content, the right technology and you do proper testing (and more testing), you will always be in a better position for success. After this huge event in a faraway, majestic city, with extraordinarily high-end production, I should totally expect my next call to be supporting a live webcast in some three-person conference room in the middle of nowhere. Bring it on, it’s what I live for.

Nick Vella

Nick Vella

Event Services Manager

“Nick’s Notes From The Road” is a blog series dedicated to the live event producers, the movers and shakers, the people who just won’t take no WiFi for an answer. In this series we address all things good and bad that might come up during a live event and some tools and tricks for success.

8 Ways to Boost Trust and Transparency in Your Organization

When employees and customers trust their leaders, a company is better able to weather crises and excels.

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Successful Enterprise Live Video in APAC

A couple months ago I was fortunate enough to be able to travel to Asia to work on a couple customer events. Asia, and Japan in particular, have always been at the top of my bucket list. Kollective has offices in the region, and as our technology is able to deliver…

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The post Need Streaming? Will Travel – Nick’s Notes From The Road appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Customer Feedback, Support and Care Driving Our Business

CMMA Blog

This year’s Kollective EMEA Customer Council brought together over 60 attendees from all over Europe. This annual two-day London event gives our customers, prospects and partners – along with our team – the opportunity to learn, network, share stories, provide feedback and hear about our vision for the future of video delivery, software distribution and what’s next. 

I was told a few years ago that it is unique that we would invite our prospects to a customer event, especially one with a lot of story sharing and late-night networking. It is unique as these customer events are not always pretty. They can become difficult and tenuous and any issues with the product and services are openly aired. Kollective hosts this event and opens it to prospects, encouraging them to spend time, with and without Kollective, talking to our customers about our product, service and support because we have nothing to hide. If our customers have an issue, we want to know about it and fix it.  

As a matter of fact, over half of the features we built into recent product releases are the result of feedback and requests directly from our customers. At the end of Council, Kollective employees leave the room and we host a customer-only feedback session. In this session, we invite customers to come together and discuss what’s going well, areas of improvement and their wish list. After the session, they provide us with notes that our team follows up on. This is just one example of how our strong relationship with our customers helps guide our priorities and defines our technology and approach. Our business revolves around our customers’ feedback and their success. 

One of the biggest concerns that came out of the customer-only session in October was around Kollective’s growth into software delivery and beyond. Customers wanted to know ‘how will we maintain our high level of support during this heavy growth period?’ 

I’m proud to say that we have seven teams around the globe dedicated to supporting and providing service to our customers. Our support teams include event services, support, customer success, enterprise video strategy, customer escalation, customer experience and solutions architects, making up nearly 40% of our headcount. As our business grows, these teams will continue to expand.  

That may seem like overkill but delivering engaging video securely and at scale across the enterprise – from the security implications, to reaching remote locations, to each network being unique and everything in between – is a massive challenge. Our teams are dedicated to supporting our customers – helping them to build engagement via video and navigating the issues which often come with delivering these events.  

But we believe there is more to be done with our technology than delivering video. On an almost daily basis, news of another large company suffering a cyber-attack will hit the headlines. We’ve seen such data security breaches devastate even the largest and most well-known companies, resulting in not just a loss of company data, but also a loss of customer trust. 

In many cases, these attacks are the result of software updates not being installed in a timely manner . With the same 9MB client our customers use to scale the delivery of video, our peer-to-peer software-defined technology now helps IT teams keep their networks secure. Rather than having a server distribute the same piece of content to a few machines at a time, our bit-agnostic ECDN can help keep pace with major operating system updates and critical patches, protecting your business without impacting critical applications. 

Looking towards the future, we will continue to support new use cases providing universal edge delivery. And, as we continue to invest in our technology, we will also maintain our customer-first approach, delivering the very best experience possible for our customers. 

8 Ways to Boost Trust and Transparency in Your Organization

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The post Customer Feedback, Support and Care Driving Our Business appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here

5 Ways Your Enterprise Company Could Benefit from Video All-Hands Meetings

CMMA Blog

Town hall meetings. Round-ups. All-hands meetings. Whatever your company calls it, most businesses have some iteration of the all-hands meeting, which exists to keep employees at all levels in the loop on current initiatives, progress, growth and company news. These meetings might take place weekly, monthly or quarterly, but whatever their frequency, it’s important that all employees are present in one way or another to hear what your organization’s leaders have to say.

If your organization has remote offices, for example, this is especially important as your business likely has many employees who are off-site but still need to be engaged at every level.

For this reason, many organizations are choosing to offer their all-hands meetings via video. Here are six ways your enterprise-level company could benefit from video all-hands meetings.

Visual relevancy makes an impact

It’s fairly common knowledge that people retain information better when they receive it in a visual medium, such as a photo, infographic or video. Due to decreasing attention spans, people remember just 10 percent of what they hear after three days have passed, but that jumps to 65 percent retention if the information is paired with a relevant visual.

In this age of video everywhere, it’s no longer acceptable to just send office updates through an email and hope that it’s opened. For your organization, that may look like a slideshow presentation to accompany your video, or something else visually illustrative that reflects the culture of your organization and captures your team’s attention.

Trust grows using video

A study by the University of Michigan about the most effective forms of communication for trust-building placed video calling second (first place was in-person contact) over audio calls, email and text communication. Considering in-person contact isn’t always an option, trust-building communication tactics like video all-hands meetings can work to grow internal positive sentiment and employee satisfaction.

After all, a Kimble Application study found that 31 percent of employees said that they sought more transparency from upper management regarding the health of the business.

Additionally, the same study found that 75 percent of American workers care deeply about their company’s well-being, but only 23 percent say that they have full insight into how their organizations are actually doing. That’s a big knowledge gap to bridge, but the clear solution is fostering a deeper sense of trust at all levels.

Hear diverse voices

Moving your all-hands meetings to a video platform allows team members who work on different projects and in different offices to contribute alongside in-office employees. Additionally, if your in-person all-hands meetings are generally run only by C-level executives, consider bringing in other team leaders and employees to speak – this can encourage a sense of teamwork and recognition that points to high levels of employee satisfaction.

To this point, a Reward Gateway study found that 70 percent of employees say that motivation and morale would improve “massively” with more regular recognition from senior leadership.

Convey flexibility in energy with a location change

If you’ve facilitated or attended an all-hands meeting in the past, it has probably taken place in your largest conference room or even a theater. However, consider changing this up – a switch in location can communicate flexibility and energy.

For example, if your executives are traveling in another country or another city, consider broadcasting from there to showcase a different environment and/or team members. You might even want to go live from an event , trade show or another exciting off-site location.

Recording features offer repurposing potential

Speaking of archiving, it’s a judgment call to decide if you want to give people the option to watch an all-hands meeting video after it has run live. For some employers, requiring mandatory viewing at a certain time has proven more effective, while others want to give employees who might be absent, in a different time zone, in a meeting or on vacation the opportunity to view it after it airs live.

Employers who prefer the former say that making it available after the live event reduces the amount of engagement and discourages people from attending, while proponents of the latter argue that flexibility is the point of taking the meetings to video in the first place.

Ultimately, it’s up to your organization to determine what feels right. However, there are other benefits to recording the all-hands meeting – you can isolate certain portions and repurpose them on social media, as part of your marketing materials or even upload a video to YouTube . Maybe your upper leadership said something inspirational – this is ideal YouTube content that can be paired with an SEO-heavy caption to boost views. Or, perhaps your team is announcing new products or developments – recording the meeting and editing it down into more digestible segments will allow you to share the news in an authentic voice that conveys excitement and can build trust with employees, shareholders, and even prospects.

There are many benefits to enterprise-level companies transitioning their all-hands meetings to video. Aside from helping employees retain more information, there’s substantial proof that a transparent and accessible all-hands meeting can foster productive feelings of employee satisfaction that will reduce turnover. Finally, there’s the opportunity for taking the content of the meeting beyond the computer and repurposing it in a variety of ways. However you decide to do it, get ready for happier, in-tune employees.

Amy Lecza

Amy Lecza

Content Marketing Manager, G2 Crowd

Amy Lecza is a content marketing manager for G2 Crowd, a B2B software review platform that brings transparency to B2B buying. She’s passionate about learning, editing, and copywriting, and she’s been known to carry around a red pen for copy editing emergencies.

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8 Ways to Boost Trust and Transparency in Your Organization

When employees and customers trust their leaders, a company is better able to weather crises and excels.

Related Blog Posts

The post 5 Ways Your Enterprise Company Could Benefit from Video All-Hands Meetings appeared first on Kollective Technology .

To view our Partner blog, click here

5 Critical KPI’s For Measuring Live Video Success

CMMA Blog

When it comes to judging the performance of a live corporate video event such as a CEO town hall, success can be a subjective thing.

If you’re the CEO, a successful event might be one where you felt like you delivered the message you wanted to convey in a way that felt authentic yet polished. For the IT team, a successful event is one that went off without any technical glitches or crashes mid-presentation. And for the comms team, success might not be able to be judged until they see changes in employee sentiment or behavior.

It’s obviously important that all stakeholders feel good about how an event was handled as a performance and a task. But after the camera is off and high-fives are exchanged, there’s a wealth of hard data every team should be collecting to measure and prove their event’s success.

With an analytics platform like Kollective IQ, you can look at a number of key performance indicators to understand how your event performed, how you can improve future events, and the return your company is receiving on its live video investment. While Kollective IQ lets users dig into the unique metrics that matter most to each specific organization, these are the five most important KPIs that every comms and IT team should be monitoring:

1. UNIQUE EVENT VIEWS
This key metric is the entire reason you’re doing video in the first place. By measuring the number of people who watch your event, you can then compare it to your total invited audience, whether that’s your entire workforce or a specific department, to help you understand the effectiveness of your event promotion efforts. You can compare total views of other events to the same audience for an apples-to-apples comparison, or create a ratio of invited-to-views to judge engagement across different audiences.

2. AVERAGE VIEW DURATION
While unique views are important, an equally important metric is view duration. After all, it does you no good if you had 10,000 employees log in to watch a 60 minute CEO presentation if they all switch off after the first five minutes. By comparing the view duration with the total time of the event, you can understand how engaged your audience was with the content. In Kollective IQ, you can also easily see on a timeline when your audience dropped in or out of the event to help you structure future events more effectively.

3. DEVICES
Don’t just assume everyone is watching content on their desktop. Mobile employees watching your event on their phone are going to struggle to read packed Powerpoint presentations. By looking at the types of devices being used to watch the event, you can optimize future content to take advantage of the preferred format.

4. BUFFERING TIME
A buffering video not only impacts view-ability and employee engagement. It can mean there are serious bottlenecks in your network that may be affecting business application performance. Analyzing and benchmarking views by buffering time can help you score the quality of the event stream, along with helping to raise any red flags to address before the next event.

5. PEERING EFFICIENCY
Live video is a resource hog that can tie up your network, impacting both video performance and overall business application performance. Kollective’s peering technology automatically creates and self-optimizes a peer-to-peer network architecture that significantly reduces the number of files traveling North/South on your network. By analyzing peering efficiency, you can see the number of gigabytes that were saved from having to travel over your network. This helps not only prove the ROI of your Kollective investment, but a lower-than-average peering efficiency can also help you determine if any network issues need to be addressed.

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