There are no two ways about it: video content requires budget, and a lot of it.

First of all, there are the costs associated with creating the content. This can include everything from event production of a CEO town hall to populating an on-demand training video library, with all the staff time, scripting, recording, and editing that entails. Next, you have to factor in the cost of serving up your content, such as the need for extra hardware or a software ECDN solution like Kollective to alleviate demand on your network. Finally, someone needs to spend time managing the content and responding to any network performance issues.

However, just because something requires a big budget doesn’t make it a poor purchase. When compared to producing a large, in-person town hall event or conducting live, on-going training, video is far more cost-effective and scalable.

But as a large line item on the comm’s team budget, video will always require protection from cuts and rationalization for growth. That’s why it’s essential your team measures the ROI of your video efforts if you hope to prove that video is worth the time and money your team is investing.

While this sounds obvious, it’s far from common practice: according to ITSMA , 74% of organizations were unable to measure or report how their marketing efforts impacted their business. When it comes to video, that means the vast majority of comms teams are producing live CEO video presentations to employees worldwide or creating massive training libraries without any insight into who, if anyone, is actually watching.

That’s where analytics come in. A robust analytics platform like Kollective IQ can help you measure the performance of your live video events and on-demand content in real time. By analyzing specific video content and your longer-term trends, you’ll be able to build your case for continued video investment while making the adjustments necessary to improve performance.

You can do a number of things with video metrics. First, and most importantly, you can determine the performance of your videos. Metrics like unique event views and average view duration can show how many people watched your content and for how long. With those numbers alone, you can then determine your overall content engagement. Compare your video costs against what it would take to achieve similar engagement without video to then prove ROI to your leadership team.

But video ROI is just the beginning. There’s a larger network ROI case you can make. Your video performance can act as a proxy for your network performance; if a video is buffering, that means there is a bottleneck in your network that is impacting the flow of your other critical business data. Use your analytics to measure network performance and tie improvements in data flow to business metrics like productivity.

To prove the ROI of your video strategy, keep in mind the following:

• Analytics need data: If you’re not collecting data, you have nothing to measure. But surface-level, basic metrics don’t always tell the whole story. Your analytics should be able to drill down deep into the performance of each asset to provide the data required to unlock insights.
• Invest in insights: To improve ROI, you have to not only measure the data but use it to take action. To use it, though, you have to understand it. Dashboards can make it easier to collect your data together in a way that makes it simple to analyze successes and identity issues so you can make informed strategic decisions into your content and network.
• Proving ROI isn’t a one-time event: Analytics should be an ongoing practice. You should be looking at the performance of your content over time to make sure you’re seeing improvement or catching minor issues before they turn into something major.
• Don’t forget to prove it: Make sure you share your video performance with your leaders. They likely don’t speak video, so don’t just give them raw metrics. Integrate your video performance data into your business analytics to show how video is driving business performance, and then use data visualization to make it easy for leaders to see the success for themselves.

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It’s hard to overstate the part that culture plays when conducting business overseas. Whatever the organization, wherever in the world it operates, effective communication is essential to success. English remains the de facto language of global business, but there are a variety of cultural nuances and business customs that can complicate our efforts to communicate with our international partners and clients. 

I recently spent some time in Japan meeting with our partner NTT, to discuss our ongoing growth in the region. To arrive on time for my meeting, I needed to be five minutes early. Before a meeting begins, it’s customary to complete the exchange of business cards (or “meishi koukan”). An exchange that acts as a formal self-introduction. Cards are given and received using both hands and are to be displayed on the table for the duration of the meeting. 

In North America, swapping business cards is not nearly as formal and many professionals don’t even carry them any longer. If the exchange of cards does happen before, during or at the end of a meeting, they quickly find themselves placed into breast-pockets or cardholders. To the Japanese, this demonstrates poor etiquette and could result in a big impact on decision-making. What is considered polite conduct in one country, may not be considered so in another. I’ve been to Japan a number of times for business and I’m grateful to have received proper guidance along the way.  

With so many exchanges taking place via email, chat and phone, many professionals tend to undervalue the importance of face time. I am a firm believer of quality face time with customers, partners, prospects and employees. Nothing quite compares to being with the person(s) with which you are meeting. While I’m often on the road, many enterprises have been cutting back on corporate travel for years.  

There are many reasons for this, though chief among them are cost-cutting exercises (international travel expenses hurt rather than help the bottom line). Complicated visa processes, higher airfares and greener tendencies have also contributed to this shift. While this makes sense when looking to minimize expenses and maximize profits, it’s to the detriment of our relationships in which the cultural preference is for face-to-face interactions. 

What is most notable when sitting and speaking with someone, is just how many communication cues are lost, or simply unavailable, when doing business by email or phone. Body language, hand gestures and facial expressions are just some of the important indicators that let us know how a conversation is progressing, or where it may be stalling.   

Videoconferencing technology brings all of those visual cues back into play. Done properly, it allows conversations to flow more naturally, and is especially important in cross-cultural communication, where there’s greater potential for actions and answers to get “lost in translation”.  

As a method of communication, video puts us in a brilliant position to change the way companies build and maintain their international relationships. By providing potential opportunities to connect and collaborate with partners and clients from across the globe, in a way they favor, companies can deepen their working relationships, defy the impact of distance and break down cultural barriers.  

By closing this divide, today’s businesses can benefit from greater collaboration and more genuine conversations. This not only ensures more productive meetings, but also provides the opportunity for more meaningful business relationships, regardless of whether you’re working from San Francisco or Tokyo, Japan.

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Last week, 30,000 people descended upon Orlando, Florida to take part in the annual event that outlines Microsoft’s vision for the future. True to form Satya Nadella kicked off the event with an inspirational message of customer commitment, open data sharing and a commitment to give back to humanity. The keynotes, sessions, Expo time and meetings kept our team very busy. For those of you that weren’t able to attend, we compiled our four takeaways:

1. Surplus created by tech intensity should be shared

2. Customer centric bundling of Microsoft products

3. The partner ecosystem and enterprise infiltration are strong

4. Data is the tie that binds

In Satya’s keynote, he illustrated how tech intensity (the access to technology and the extensive use of technology for improvement) will create a surplus that needs to be distributed equitably across society. He introduced an initiative called AI for Humanitarian Action . This commitment to social improvement clearly communicates Satya’s personal values, but also the power of Microsoft as a social change agent.

As I watched the unveiling of Microsoft 365 , I was excited to see more bundling of products and the responsible product teams into groups that form whole solutions at Microsoft. The days of product selling have gone by the way side and the focus has shifted to building solutions that solve customer problems. This is a huge win for customers and partners of Microsoft.

Those partners and customers form a very solid foundation of strength for Microsoft. The mere fact that there were 30,000 people in Orlando for the last week of a calendar quarter speaks volumes of Microsoft’s influence within their customer and partner base. There were thousands of booths on the expo floor, and hundreds of sessions for attendees to choose from. It was my first Ignite, but many of people I spoke with, that had been in previous years, felt that this year was the biggest and best yet.

As the tech intensity infiltrates the world, the amount of data that is generated will continue to increase and need to be accessed with ease. Adobe, SAP and Microsoft understand the importance of sharing that data and have formed an Open Data Initiative that will help share more data with their customers. This is a perfect fit for companies like ours, because we are in the business of moving data across the enterprise (behind the firewall) with ease and we’re proud to do that with Microsoft.

Learn how Kollective scales the modern workplace through our integrations with Microsoft.

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