YouTube for the Enterprise Finally a Reality
For all the talk over the last few years about the idea of "YouTube for the enterprise," it's only recently that the concept has become a reality. More and more organizations are encouraging their employees to create and share video content, and the session "Challenges, Opportunities, and Best Practices of Enterprise Social Video" at Streaming Media East offered a fascinating window into how three leading companies—Wells Fargo, Microsoft, and IBM—are doing it, with additional perspective from a technology provider that makes sure that content is accessible in multiple languages.
Wells Fargo has studios in San Francisco, North Carolina, and St. Louis, and delivers video to around 300,000 employees across the world. Its flagship program is "Take Five," a company newscast produced by employees for employees and delivered to each employee's desktop every business day. "That content is gathered from employees, it features employees, and it features a different theme every day of the week, and that theme comes from employees," said VP and IT team lead Bob Killmeier. "We feature three types of content: knowledge-sharing, perspectives and opinion, and branding," he added, "and our challenge is trying to bring all those things together into a governance model that can be shared with all of our employees."
Jonathan Foster, content publishing manager for Microsoft Office, says his division used to do exclusively printed manuals, but now create interactive documentation, including video. "We have a Sharepoint-powered, employee-generated video platform called Academy Mobile, predicated on the concept that everyone in the company is a subject matter expert," he said. "It allows for all the social media bells and whistles, including RSS feeds, sending emails, interacting with podcasters, engaging on the page."
And how does Microsoft train its own employees about how to create effective video? "We're all finding the need to become experts at video production," he said. "We have the objective of teaching people how to do video, through video."
David Stark is the digital expertise evangelist for IBM, and spearheads that company's social and video communications efforts. "One of the things we struggle with at our organization is making sure employees feel like they're a part of something," he said. "A lot of our workforce is mobile all the time, so we leverage video quite a bit to keep people connected. You'll see more casual videos produced, things that go out on YouTube and on various IBM channels. We also have our own internal employee-generated content channel called BlueTube."
Michael Smolens' company dotSUB provides comprehensive closed-captioning for online video to any device. Smolens said that somewhere between 60% and 70% of the employees of all the Fortune 1000 companies live outside the United States and speak another language as their native language, and multinational corporations based in the U.S. are combatting the "ugly American" stereotype by using closed captioning. "Even if many of them speak some level of English, all of them would feel much better about the message and about the company if there were efforts made to communicate with them in their native language." That's a lesson that's also applicable inside the U.S., given the large number of non-native English speakers working for organizations of all types and sizes.
Foster and Stark echoed Smolens' comments, acknowledging the challenges involved in making sure that all content, especially employee-generated content, conforms to company standards regarding accessibility.
Watch the video below for the entire discussion.
Challenges, Opportunities, and Best Practices of Enterprise Social Video
Social media and online video are changing the way employees engage and collaborate inside leading organizations. A mobile workforce needs information accessible at any time and from anywhere in the world. In this session, attendees hear from real end users about how they were able to harness the power of online video and Enterprise 2.0 strategies to crowdsource knowledge from employees, increase collaboration, and connect communities.
Moderator: Paolo Tosolini, Enterprise Social Video Consultant, Tosolini LLC
Speaker: Bob Killmeier, VP, IT Team Lead, Creative Services, Wells Fargo
Speaker: Michael Smolens, Founder, CEO, dotSUB
Speaker: Jonathan Foster, Content Publishing Manager, Microsoft Office
Speaker: David Stark, Digital Expertise Evangelist, IBM Corporation
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