Convincing Your Boss You Need Streaming Media

Streaming media is not a magic bullet or a miracle cure. It is merely a very cool and very useful technology that is capable of making business (and life) better for us all. Streaming media is powerful, but it is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. It is a technology of subtle application. It is not something that sells itself. Therefore, if you're anxious to introduce streaming media into your organization to improve your workday life, you're probably going to need to use a little persuasion with your boss.

Thankfully, however, even though streaming media is still a relatively new technology, it's been around long enough to have generated plenty of success stories. There are lots of good things to be said about streaming media. You can start with the old adage from Confucius: "A picture is worth a thousand words," and then pose a new question—if one static picture is worth a thousand words, how much are thousands of moving, interactive pictures worth?

The Power of Pictures
In a landmark 1971 study called "Silent Messages," Professor Albert Mehrabian found that "a person’s nonverbal behavior has more bearing than his words on communicating feelings and attitudes to others," and he concluded that 55% of human communication is visual. Put another way, communication without sight is less than half as effective as communication with sight. Yet many organizations have been slow to deploy visual communication systems, because the technology seems too complex, the cost too high, the benefits fuzzy, and return on investment unarticulated.

Virtually every organization seeks improvements in communications accuracy, immediacy, and effectiveness, while meeting return-on-investment objectives. "Streaming Media" can be an important component of a comprehensive communications strategy that includes face-to-face meetings, telephone calls and teleconferences, broadcast television, electronic messages, and similar forms of modern human communication. This is important because the deployment of streaming media rarely requires new infrastructure or significant changes within an organization. Rather, streaming is incremental to what most organizations are already doing and can provide tremendous communications benefits. But convincing your boss may be another matter.