I attended the Corporate Register's CR debates at the Royal Institution on 27 March 2009 where the main topic under discussion was the effectiveness (or otherwise) of written CSR reports. As the debate was drawing to a close at the end of the afternoon, several members of the panel and audience (including heads of communications from Shell International and Virgin Media), made the point that if we're going to get our message across, then as organisations we need to depart from traditional print media and engage with digital media and online platforms. Several specific ideas were advanced, and I thought it would be helpful to produce a list of 10 top reasons why video can be the most effective form of CSR communication.

1. Nobody likes to read dry lengthy reports, packed with statistics.
2. The human mind is programmed to remember pictures and images far better than the things we hear or read.
3. Video can have an emotional impact that the written word struggles to match.
4. Videos are far more authoritative than the written word. People tend believe what they can see, far more than what they read.
5. Video production can help bridge a communication gap between the generation that spawned corporate social responsibility and the younger generation whose responsibility it will be to sustain it.
6. Video provides a human face to an organisation. People connect with people.
7. Video streamed online is an environmentally friendly communications tool. Not only does it cut down the need to travel for presentations, it reduces paper usage and DVD production.
8. CSR videos are great for SEO. They can be repurposed and propagated online, driving highly-targeted traffic to your website.
9. A range of new online platforms are emerging to provide your film and your organisation with the visibility and the reputation it needs ( www.csrtv.co.uk, www.csrtube.net)
10. The video production process can inspire employers and employees to take part, helping to improve team cohesion. 
    

What with our membership in the Telegraph Business Club and London’s Business Junction, I ‘m doing quite a bit of networking these days. As an ice-breaker, people invariably start off with something along the lines of, “So, how’s business treating you in the recession?” Some have even suggested (and I can’t help thinking, somewhat tactlessly) that perhaps corporate video is a bit of a superfluous and unaffordable luxury in times like these. Well, if we’re talking about an expensive and glossy morale-boosting boast-fest for the AGM, I might be inclined to agree. But I would also agree with the worldly-wise Rob Vincent of Radley Yeldar. Speaking in the March edition of Televisual magazine, Rob commented on recession-driven trends, saying that ”Videos that are all about rhetoric, hype, spin and style over content are not what people are looking for. It doesn’t mean that creativity is out of the window, but it needs to be appropriate creativity”. In other words, a targeted message is still extremely important, and video is one of the most cost-effective ways of conveying that message. This is particularly true where online video is concerned, and respondents to a Televisual survey repeatedly made the point that the internet is where we’re seeing the biggest growth in the use of corporate video.

One of the emerging themes from all of the industry briefings I’ve attended over the last year (and there have been quite a few!) is that in a recession we need to market our businesses as never before. And yet, for many organisations, this coincides with a squeeze on marketing expenditure. We’re being asked to do more with less. Clearly then, if we’re going to achieve greater marketing impact with our dwindling resources, we’re going to have to do something differently. And for many, this means turning to the internet. Now, you won’t be surprised to learn that I happen to think that online video is one of the most cost-effective ways of reaching, and communicating to, a targeted audience. We’ve been around long enough to see this happen in practice. The videos we made for Durham University are routinely getting around 40,000 views a month, and applications, especially from international students, are up as a direct result. Aside from marketing and promoting products and services, video is a cheap way of getting all sorts of messages out there, from charity fund-raising drives to public sector campaigns aimed at increasing awareness of targeted initiatives. Of course, it’s not just video on a home site that does the all of the work, that same video can play on YouTube, Google, Facebook, MySpace and online directories like FreeIndex.co.uk.

At Spectrecom, we’ve seen the requirement for online video, as opposed to DVD, increase to 85% of our production output. And it’s comparative low cost has seen enquiries rise significantly – yes, even in the recession. We’re approaching our financial year end, and this rise in online video has helped us to increase our sales turnover by 38% compared to last year. And there’s still two weeks to go …
 

Back in 2006 we had recognised that online video was going to see massive year on year growth and we set up a small satellite website, streamwebvideo.com, to focus on one-off video clips. It was rather an amateur affair and without any ranking on Google, it was promoted through pay per click. But we did get some good enquiries and produced some good work on the back of it, but it didn’t take long to see that we had to move up a gear. For a start, we needed to bring the whole company into the mix, trading on all of our existing work. So we decided to put online video at the heart of our operation and to promote it from our main site.

We continue to look carefully at the way internet video clips are being used online, and at what people are prepared to pay for professional results. We settled on a one-off all-in fee of £600 for a 90 second clip. Below this, video users might just as well buy a small camera and film and edit the clips themselves. How long would that take? How good would it look? Where would the video go, beyond your own website?

It depends what you’re trying to communicate of course. If you’re trying to sell that grandfather clock in the garage on eBay, your own video would probably be suitable for the purpose, but if you’re trying to promote your company on the internet, and the video results are poor, you can imagine what that would do for your image.

Look at it another way. Business owners, including one-man bands, usually make a significant investment in their websites. The video is going to be one of the most important features on the website – if not the most important. So it makes sense to take the professional route to ensure the best results.  

In the video production business, £600 would be considered about as cheap as it gets, and I did worry about damaging our brand by putting the package together. However, right at the centre of our brand is our ‘Video for All’ statement, which means just that – making professional video available to all who want to use it. Moreover, our business model allows us to offer it. We compete with some of the UK’s largest production companies, and they have considerable operating costs. But the Spectrecom studio is based in Deptford, not Soho, and we’re an incredibly lean and mean operation. We have our own in-house staff and equipment to help make sure the budget gets spent on the films we make, and not on fancy offices and coffee machines (Matt take note!*).

So what does the client get for their £600? Well in practical terms, a project consultation for starters, a 2 hour shoot at their premises or elsewhere, up to 90 seconds of edited video clip with titles and music and one draft edit approval, our branded video media player, and advice on propagating the video on various social networks and directories. But the marketing consequences for the client can be enormous. Not only do they get a show-stopper for their website, possibly adding that all-important human face to it for the first time, but in terms of online marketing potential they get access to a whole new range of sites and directories, and all the interest that generates to help drive people to their own site. In 2009, there can’t be many better ways to invest that £600!  

*NB: Matt has taken note - he gets his fix in the morning before work.

a.greener@spectrecom.co.uk

For our new website, the main imperative was to feature online video as much as possible – not just loads of video clips of our films, but in a way that showed people in the non-video production sector just how valuable and important video on a website can be. The first thing we asked Webstars to do was to develop a new bespoke media player for us. We were thinking along the lines of the BBC iPlayer, something that offered a great viewing experience and that allowed the video to be shared with other sites for online propagation. And we wanted a media player that would not only work across our site, but that we could supply to our customers.

On our homepage, the media player would take centre stage. The film it showed would have to encapsulate something unique, and something special about Spectrecom rather than the work we produce. Last August, we went up onto Blackheath on a sunny Friday afternoon (probably the only one last summer!) to put all of our creative heads together and to decide what the film should look like. Steve even brought his kids with him, and amidst the fun, and later the drinks, a brief slowly emerged.

As always with any brief, we identified the messages we wanted to get across in the 90 seconds available. We felt that a fly-through would be able to show off our studio, hospitality and post-production facilities, introduce key members of our staff, show our work behind the scenes, and of course, allow us to screen some examples of our work. The film would have to be high-end (we opted for ‘cinematic’) so that in itself, without us having to resort to clichés like ‘creative’ and ‘quality’ in our narrative, we could simply show what we are capable of. It’s a bit like a personal ad boasting of GSOH. Don’t tell me, prove it! Just make me laugh. And finally, the film in its whole had to say something else about us, something that emerges which is more than just the sum of its component parts. We wanted this to be ‘honesty’, and in this case, being open and honest about who we are. In other words, we weren’t hiding behind the anonymity that a website can engender, where you get to see only the parts they (whoever ‘they’ are) want you to see. And for me, this precisely sums up the power of online video.  

a.greener@spectrecom.co.uk

Our old website was built back in April 2005 when Spectrecom first started trading as a limited company.  At that stage we were just excited to be in business, and the website included aspects of just about every television programme, film and corporate video Sarah Aynesworth, Steve Milton and I had ever been involved with.  It was a competent but aspirational site and made us look bigger and more accomplished than perhaps we really were at the time.  However, we soon started to develop a reputation in key production areas, notably online video, CSR, and student recruitment for colleges and universities.  But as our website grew organically, it failed to reflect our emerging brand.

We commissioned Webstars to build this new website back in July last year and from the outset, the emphasis would be to nail our brand and to focus on our online video offering.  We needed to demonstrate just how powerful online video can be, and to do that, the obvious solution was to feature video on our site about ourselves. On our old site we had a team page with a picture and a profile of each staff member.  After the studio page (which was always ranked in the first three on a Google search for "green screen studio") we found that the team page was receiving by far the most clicks on our site, sadly far more than our corporate video pages!  It taught us that people want to know who we are and our roles in the company.  OK, maybe some of our visitors were maybe just being a bit nosey, but we do, after all, work in a collaborative medium, and clients want to know what they can expect from our staff.  The maxim, "people buy from people" remains true, and we've recognised that online video has a big part to play in that.

Even now, I remain surprised by our competitors' sites, where they routinely screen their showreel material but very little else.  Don't get me wrong, they produce some great films, but they just don't use video to tell the story about themselves and their company.  It's as if to say, “we want you to buy our online video, but we won't be using it ourselves”.  More to the point, how can a visitor look at a glossy showreel on a video production company's website and say, "Yes, I can do that, I'll put that on my site".  Of course, they can't – they don't make videos. 

So with our new website we wanted show how videos should be used on a website by our clients. We decided to place video about ourselves right at the heart of the site. That's something that visitors can see working for us, and that they can copy.  In my next blog, I'll be talking about how we made those videos about ourselves. 

a.greener@spectrecom.co.uk