Streamlining Video Across the Enterprise

Leading organizations are embracing video and becoming smarter about creating, using, and measuring video across the entire enterprise. Whether live streaming town halls, training sales teams, onboarding new employees, or providing customer support; video enables you to remove barriers and helps teams to connect effectively. Why? Because video is one of the most compelling forms of communication the world has ever known.

Companies across all industries recognize this and are tapping video to drive business results-- across both sides of their firewall. Whether it’s for a more traditional external marketing and sales use case or internal communications and employee knowledge sharing, video is fast, effective, and easy to measure. To best streamline the video publishing workflow across various business functions, organizations are seeking an online video platform (OVP) that handles multiple use cases and connects seamlessly into their technology stack. With the emergence of simple cloud solutions, organizations are being asked to deliver “borderless” video solutions-- online services that serve both external and internal needs. Additionally, these cloud services must cater to a globally decentralized workforce and external audience, all while juggling security and scale.

In response to this crucial and growing industry demand, we released Brightcove Communications Studio. This combination of innovative functionality and key partnerships extends Brightcove’s existing platform to help these groups deliver the benefits of online video to internal audiences. The solution combines mission critical security features such as admin and viewer SSO, network optimization features, internal viewer tracking & analytics, and eCDN capabilities all to our existing feature-rich core platform. Now, corporate communication, HR, training and partner enablement groups can supplement their existing external video initiatives with secure internal video experiences to drive employee alignment, engagement, and education.

While incredibly powerful, it’s important to keep in mind that the underlying technology platform is only one component of a video strategy. Since video is no longer being created by a handful of people on one or two teams, production capabilities and expectations are extending to the entire employee population. After buying into a single video solution, enterprises must produce consistent, brand appropriate, engaging video.

To scale enterprise video efficiently, organizations must:

• Expand existing workflows to accommodate video production and publishing
• Establish corporate policy for content contributors and web publishers
• Develop flexible tech stacks that support both workflows and policies  

Workflow management and process, role-based responsibility, and brand governance are important components of your video strategy that get everyone on the same page and ensure consistency and quality. Below we outline key considerations for an enterprise video strategy.

Why Enterprise-Wide Workflow and Processes Are Crucial

Enterprise technology needs to support the differences between each of your group’s goals, but it can be hard to know how to support video initiatives when each enterprise function has different video objectives and workflows.

Marketing is focused on brand awareness and lead generation. Customer Support wants to use video to reduce call-center calls. Product is concerned with conveying product value to drive adoption. Sales knows video will accelerate and support deal close. HR wants to securely screen candidates and effectively onboard new employees. Lastly, the CEO wants to live steam important messages to a global workforce. A comprehensive enterprise strategy for video can support all of these goals.

The key is to centralize on an enterprise video solution that allows the technical workflow and KPIs to vary as required by each function. In order to enable cross-functional video workflows, you need to have the organizational processes in place for creating the video content, approving the content, publishing, and promotion.

How to Centralize Video Production Workflow

Start with the following guidelines when developing workflow processes:

• Create a centralized internal access point where video production guidelines and branded templates are stored.
• Document workflows for content and brand reviews. Decide how your OVP will connectors into your existing workflow technologies.
• Upload metadata to all video assets. Configure your hosting mechanism and add the correct connections so adding metadata is simplified process. Metadata is essential to findability of videos across the organization, so have subject matter experts add keyword terms.
• Add administration levels to control access to your video content. Some restrictions reduce errors, but appropriate OVP administer controls ensure that team members aren’t distracted by content that isn’t relevant them. Leveraging a single enterprise video solution ensures everyone utilizing the asset has the correct version and end-of-life dates- protecting the brand from out-of-date content and ensuring that everyone is on the same page.

What Corporate Video Policies Do for Brand Consistency

While each department or function may have its own objectives for video, brand governance is important to maintain consistent messaging, brand, and quality. A successful enterprise video policy not only addresses Marketing and Sales, but also extends to corporate communication, HR, training, and partner enablement groups. Standards set a solid foundation for video across your enterprise. With these in place, your company can supplement existing external video initiatives with secure internal video experiences to drive employee alignment, engagement, and education.

Critical Questions for Developing a Video Governance Plan:

• Which viewers and personas should your video makers target? Consider both external and internal audiences.
• How will each video represent the brand’s voice and tone? Outline these variables as well as look and feel.
• Which keywords should be used? A metadata strategy ensures your videos are used throughout the company effectively. 
• Are there messages and topic should be avoided? Outline these with specificity and reference your company code of conduct where applicable.

A video content approval process for each department will help address organizational and function-specific policies. This will also help minimize production and publishing bottlenecks, and again, centralize the assets themselves.

Streamlining Your OVP with Your Tech Stack

Ultimately, your platform enables corporate processes and policies but then provides the capabilities to make video initiatives, realities. Enterprise video initiatives become actionable when your OVP is integrated into the digital tech stack. Critical areas of integration are Identity Management, Digital Asset Management for setting content usage rules/policies, CMS for enabling an efficient publishing workflow, marketing automation (MAP) for campaign measurement down to the individual viewer, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to nurture sales and renewals.

At Brightcove, we have an extensive partner ecosystem of over 200 Technology Partnerships in over 20 ecosystem categories to create an end-to-end enterprise-wide solution that seamlessly integrates video with your existing technology stack.