Category Archives: Communications

Charlotte Metro Replay: Delivering Value in Video

08 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by in Communications, Conferences, Media, Technology, Video

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Last week, the Communications Media Management Association hosted a Metro Meeting at the Bank of America Broadcast Auditorium in Charlotte, where attendees gathered to learn and discuss how to deliver value in video.

For those of you who couldn’t attend in Charlotte, we wanted to share the recap video from the meeting, featuring case studies where media managers from Bank of America, Wells Fargo, SAS, Globecomm, and more discuss their recent initiatives, projects, and success stories.

Click below to watch the recap of the June 29th Charlotte Metro Meeting: Delivering Value in Video.
CMMA_Charlotte_Metro_Video

Be sure to attend our next Metro Meeting at a location near you! Follow us on Twitter, or stay up to date on future events here!

Quick Recap: Cincinnati Metro Meeting

06 Wednesday Jul 2016

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Central Region member Suzie Kroeger hosted a great Metro Meeting June 23rd at the Ethicon facility in Cincinnati, OH.  It was a mid-day event entitled, “The Integral Tie of IT and Media.” The main speaker was Pete Corso, Ethicon’s VP or IT VP, who shared with us how he has worked with media over years and how the landscape has drastically changed. CMMA partners AVI/SPL and Mediaplatform presented and kept us fed with breakfast and lunch. Lots of constructive IT discussion was had during the day. Suzie ended the time with a tour of her GS Studios and closing comments. We look forward to more meetings in the Central Region!

Cincinnati_Metro_Meeting_July2016

Be sure to attend our next Metro Meeting at a location near you! Follow us on Twitter, or stay up to date on future events here!

Announcing the 2016 CMMA National Conference: Leadership in Media

30 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by in Communications, Conferences, Leadership, Management, Media

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In honor of our 70th anniversary, we’re thrilled to present our most exciting National Conference yet: Leadership in Media: Honoring the Past, Shaping the Future, which will be hosted in Memphis, Tennessee, from October 22- 25, 2016 at The Peabody Hotel right in the heart of downtown.

To further our commitment to the professional development of members and media professionals alike, we’ve planned an assortment of interactive sessions each designed to help you make the most out of your experience at the conference. This includes keynote speaker Robert Swan, the first man to walk both the North and South Pole, who will present: Leadership on the Edge. Swan, with passion and vigor, has unquestionably been a driving force behind the preservation of the Earth’s last pristine continent-Antarctica. His pledge to keep Antarctica free of exploitation has gathered a lot of attention by the media, and in 2014, Swan was invited to present his story at TED Talks, an organization that highlights outstanding stories of discovery and innovation. We encourage you to learn more about Swan and his mission at 2041.com, or to watch his TED Talks session at ilink.me/SwanTalks.

In addition to Swan’s session, many more notable presenters are slated to address the storytelling experience, providing inspiration and insight as well as digging deeper into storytelling through a workshop experience. And, taking a cue from membership feedback, there will be plenty of sharing and networking opportunities, in conjunction with case studies and expert panel discussions – both formal and informal.

Rich with history, Memphis is a world-class city for sightseeing and attractions. You will want to plan on arriving in time for Saturday’s pre-conference activities, as well as staying through Tuesday night’s President’s dinner, which will be held on the historic Peabody rooftop.  Once you get there, you’ll come to understand what they mean when they say, “It’s a Memphis thing…”

Want to learn more?  Be sure to visit cmma.org/events, where we’ll post more information as it develops to keep you up to date on essential conference information. Ready to celebrate with us? Go to ilink.me/Go2Memphis to register!

Be sure to stay connected before and during the conference! Follow us at @CMMA1 and tweet us what you’re most excited for using the hashtag #CMMAMemphis!

How Video Moves the Customer Journey

06 Friday May 2016

Posted by in Communications, Technology, Video

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SAS has been using video as part of the marketing and sales process for almost 40 years, and we’re often asked how important is video in the various phases of the customer journey? Or, if you have budget or resource constraints, what are the most important touch points in that journey? In truth there isn’t any “one size fits all” answer. However, in our experience, video now plays an important role at every point in the customer journey.

At SAS we sell an intangible product – analytics software – that is at the same time critical to organizations and difficult to explain. Video helps make our products and solutions real by showing how they help customers solve problems and maximize opportunities. It also creates personality for our brand, and humanizes our company.

Over the years, we’ve seen video evolve from presenting demos and highlighting product features to serving as a ubiquitous element across all of our sales and marketing activities. That’s because our prospects respond positively to video throughout the cycle. At SAS, we define the customer journeys as a continuous loop with seven way stations (see illustration below), and we have identified different types of videos that work well at different stages.

Customer_Journey_Marketing_Image

NEED – We use video to accomplish two important goals in this phase. First, video helps to generate awareness of SAS and to communicate our brand. In a world where products evolve quickly or become commodities, customers want to know what type of company they are considering doing business with; what does it stand for; what are its values. Videos for this purpose use a storytelling approach and focus on higher-level messages about the essence of our company.

For example, the video, IOM in Nepal: Hope, armed with answers, can overcome hardship, dramatizes how advanced data management and analysis impacts people’s lives.

IOM in Nepal

This video performed extremely well for us, building awareness of SAS and humanizing our brand.  In less than six months on our website, there were over 100,000 impressions, and just under 15,000 views. Given the position on our website and comparing these numbers to other videos on our site, we are convinced that there is a serious interest in this type of content. We will undoubtedly pursue more of these types of videos in the months ahead.

Second, we use video in this phase to demonstrate thought leadership, showing that we understand the issues businesses are facing today and communicating that we are looking ahead at where technology is going. We’re not pitching SAS solutions at this point. Rather, we are demonstrating the value our solutions can bring to solving complex customer problems. In the example below we highlight this type of thought leadership by showing the linkage between advanced analytics and the Internet of Things through the lens of one of our customers, the Director of Smart Grid Technology and Operations for Duke Energy.

Jason Handley on Analytics and the Internet of Things

RESEARCH – In this phase we want to make sure we show up on a prospect’s list of solutions to consider. We do this by showing that SAS has solutions to solve a prospect’s business needs without getting too specific. In addition to straight videos like the demo of our Visual Analytics offering below, our live webcasts and social media integration of video come into play here. Buying the right SEM search words is also key.

SAS Visual Analytics Overview Demo

DECIDE – This is where prospects are thinking about becoming customers, and we use video for demos and customer case stories that highlight our unique differentiators. Videos such as the product demonstration and customer reference examples shown below are supportive in nature. We recognize that the sales executive plays the key role in driving the customer decision at this point in the buying cycle by highlighting specific details about how SAS will address the customer’s unique needs. These videos lay the groundwork for those efforts.

SAS Visual Analytics Forecasting Demo

Lenovo Captures the Voice of Customer with SAS

BUY – We use video a little differently at this point in the customer journey. For large opportunities where our sales team is meeting with the prospect onsite, we often produce a short, personal video directly from our CEO and senior management demonstrating our commitment to their business.  We’ve found this a very effective closing tool for large international sales when our senior management is not able to travel to meetings.

ADOPT – SAS uses video for tutorials to help customers understand the software they just acquired. Videos such as Get Started with SAS Visual Statistics, which you can see below, help customers get acquainted with our software, and engage actual users in the onboarding process at an early stage.

Get Started with SAS Visual Statistics

USE – At this point, we use video to focus on how to perform specific tasks. Training videos such as the one below, which demonstrates how to perform Cluster Analysis with SAS, accelerates the onboarding process and serves as a refresher resource, reducing ongoing support costs.

Perform Clustering Using SAS Visual Statistics

RECOMMEND – This is where satisfied customers step up to become our reference stories, sharing their endorsement of SAS with others. In this example, our customer Enerjisa talks about using SAS to lead the energy sector in Turkey.

Enerjisa Uses SAS to Lead the Energy Sector in Turkey

Collaborating with Key Influencers: Using Video As a 2-Way Street

In addition to supporting prospects through the customer journey, we also use video in innovative ways to communicate with analysts, and to bring their perspective back to our organization. As part of our annual analyst briefing, we create videos to inform the analyst community about SAS product direction, our vision of where the market is heading, and how we plan to address future market needs.

We use video in an entirely different way with analysts because we are very careful not to market to analysts. They don’t want a sales pitch, so we provide appropriate product information, roadmaps, and demos.

Perhaps the most interesting use of video comes at the end of the analyst meeting, when we use video to capture analysts’ honest feedback on what they saw and heard. We use this video internally to provide feedback to our marketing, R&D teams, and senior executives so they can gauge how our message was received. Video shows the real impact of our messages on analysts – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Prospect Expectations and Behavior Are Changing

Going forward, we will continue to see major innovations in how we use video to accelerate and enrich the customer journey. The length and role of video is evolving quickly. The trend for all types of video is toward short-form – two to three minute segments. Prospects and customers are looking at video on a myriad of devices, in-between other activities. If we have a broader topic with more than 10 minutes of content, we break the topic into a series of smaller, more digestible chunks to adapt to fast-changing viewing habits.

We’ve also seen evolution in customers’ expectations of video. Today, video represents our brand and therefore must reflect the same quality and professionalism our customers expect from our company and our software solutions.

Video marketing advice in a nutshell: plan, produce, and develop different types of video to support the different phases of the customer journey. And if you are not yet using video to accelerate your prospects’ paths through that journey, ask yourself, “why not?”

This article is contributed by Bill Marriott, CMMA Board Member, SAS Sr. Director of Video Communications and New Media.

Media Managers Bring Brands to Life

26 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by in Communications, Media, Technology, Video

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When someone mentions BMW… most people think about great engineering and high performance. And when someone mentions Apple… they probably think about clean, simple design and reliable technology. What do people think about when they hear your organization’s name?

Video, more so than any other media brings your brand to life. As Media Managers, we have an opportunity and responsibility to be active brand stewards.

Think about your organization’s brand attributes…the aspirational characteristics you want your organization to stand for. We are swift, agile, customer focused, innovative, etc… Now look at the video being produced in your company from the POV of your customers, and stakeholders. Does the video look, feel, and sound like those brand attributes?

We’ve all been trained to know the guidelines around proper use of our organization’s logo. These are generally clearly spelled out and very specific. These guidelines we’re driven and perfected by the print industry. This was a challenging task, but, at the end of the day, it only addressed one static image – the logo itself.

But as motion media has evolved and been democratized – we suddenly realize that people will judge our brand by the pictures, we show, the sounds we include, the pace and cadence of the video and most importantly, in the emotions we express. All of these components and more become our brand.

Writing guidelines around these elements is far more challenging, but, vitally more important than the guidelines around use of a logo.

As a Media Manager, you have an opportunity to champion the cause of bringing your brand to life. But, it comes with the challenge of developing guidelines that are clear, measurable and enforceable.

Well written video standards and guidelines are an important key part of governance. And as user/employee generated content becomes more commonplace, standards and guidelines become more necessary. Being proactive in developing these standards and guidelines helps position you and your team as the experts and gives you the tools to manage and control the video that is produced in your organization.

Without clear guidelines and standards, video becomes the wild, wild, west leaving you and your team with the feeling of trying to address a forest fire with a small garden hose. And more importantly, the raging fire of video that looks, sounds and feels arbitrary and inconsistent, is creating an impression of your brand and organization that can at best be inconsistent and at worst be detrimental to the brand your organization has worked so hard to create and maintain.

So, if you have not begun creating some brand standards and guidelines for your organization, get started. It’s not easy, but, the rewards can be huge for your organization and can help you and your team gain credibility as not just technical and creative advisors, but as a core part of preserving your organization’s most valuable asset – your brand.

This article is contributed by Bill Marriott, CMMA Board Member

Selling Storytelling

03 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by in Communications, Leadership, Management, Media

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Once upon a time, storytelling started “trending.” We now hear about it frequently from many perspectives. And with good reason: people love stories. We watch them, we listen to them, we read them, and we tell them. They work for us as entertainment and as a way to communicate information. And of course, this holds true in the business world. Facts are necessary in making a decision or building a case for change, but stories bring the facts to life.

McDonald’s is known for quantifying and measuring. When our department made the case for a single, global digital asset management system we had our research, numbers and facts ready. When we made our pitch, however, we told stories of teams of people searching for a single asset, of existing media being recreated and of the same image being stored in dozens of locations. Our leaders know how to scale. The truth of those stories combined with our data helped them understand the scope of the opportunity and the project was approved.

Selling the idea of using stories isn’t hard but, telling those stories can be. A story requires focus while clients often have volumes of material they want to include in the project. Too many facts and details get in the way of a good story but, clients often insist on what they want. How can we get clients to adopt an effective, storytelling approach?

I have found that one way to manage clients through this process is to give them what they want right at the start. Write a treatment or a synopsis or draw up a sketch that exactly reflects their wishes. Then work up the same thing for the version that you recommend. Sit with your clients and take them through their version. Don’t “pump” it or “sell” it, just tell it. Sometimes this step is enough to convince clients that their version is a poor idea. This experience can open the door to you presenting your second version.

Either way, then say that you’ve been thinking about their objectives and their audience, and you’ve come up with another version. “Would you like to hear it?” I’ve never had a client say “no.” Pitch your idea and make it come alive. Use the power of the story to do the work. The engagement, clarity, and focus of your version will be apparent and can be easily approved.

Frequently, your clients will then spend too much time thinking of ways to add back in most of their previous information, which creates another client management item for you to handle.

I look forward to hearing your story of how you succeeded with that.

Article contributed by Jeff Boarini, CMMA Board Member

Is It Time to Caption Everything?

18 Wednesday Nov 2015

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One of the “Fast Track Solutions” topics at the recent CMMA National Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico was titled “Captioning Conundrum”. Working in smaller groups provided an opportunity for the media managers in attendance to share how each of us is approaching (or avoiding) the issue of captioning the videos we produce.

The American with Disabilities Act of 1990 prohibits discrimination and ensures equal opportunities for persons with disabilities in employment, government services and facilities access. But there’s still a lot of gray area surrounding the concept of “reasonable accommodation” for the hearing-impaired. However, technology is making it easier and faster to provide captions than in the past, which moves the needle on “reasonable accommodation” closer to the “always caption” side of the argument.

At Q Center, we recently contracted a vendor to provide CART services to a hearing-impaired guest during a two-day event. We sent audio from the sessions through a phone bridge, and a CART transcriber (presumably working from home in their pajamas) turned the audio into text in real time. Our guest was able to view the text on his smartphone or tablet, which allowed him to participate in the meeting in a more meaningful way. It was surprisingly easy to do, and could have easily been expanded to additional guests or even projected on the screen for everyone in the room.

Which highlights an often-overlooked benefit of captioning: it not only allows hearing-impaired people to participate, but it also is very helpful for those who are not native speakers of the language. Non-native speakers often can understand language much better when they see it written than when they hear it, particularly if the person speaking has an accent (doesn’t everyone?). Years ago, we were captioning English language videos in English for just this reason – it can be a useful tool for improving the language skills of the viewers, rather than simply providing the text in their native tongue.

But at the conference, I learned about a potential benefit of captioning that I’d never considered before — the value of captions as metadata. Since the caption files that accompany the video contain the full transcript of the video as well as time signatures, they give you the potential to make videos searchable by text without creating a complex taxonomy of keywords and search terms. In theory, a digital asset management system or your corporate website could allow users to enter specific phrases and quickly pull up not only the video files that contain those phrases but the exact location in each file as well. YouTube is already including the caption files in their search criteria, which helps with search engine optimization. My question is, is anyone using this data within your corporate intranet? If so, I’d love to hear your story.

Article contributed by Thomas Densmore, CMMA Board of Directors

A CMMA Leader Requirement: Rely on Your Rookie Smarts!

21 Friday Aug 2015

Posted by in Communications, Leadership, Management, Media, Video

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While attending a recent leadership conference, I was peppered with numerous helpful and inspiring leadership messages. These were all good, and for the most part, satisfying. I love this stuff, and the more leadership ideas, the better! Thinking back on the two-day conference, I realized that I had heard versions of these subjects before; these were “refresher” lessons in leadership development. I saw some of the brightest minds on the leadership spectrum, and one message delivered by author and consultant, Liz Wiseman, stood out from the others: Apply the skills you came into your career with in everyday interactions, decisions, planning and thinking – apply your “Rookie Smarts”.

Rookie Smarts is a concept of going back to the basics that launched our careers and our passion for learning and leading. The idea is to capture that youthful energy and innovative spirit we all had when we began our careers. Use that energy again to foster a culture of learning and mentoring the workforce that’s creeping up behind us…the future leaders, and future members of CMMA.

Admit it. We’ve seen them; the rookies in our organization who think they know everything about anything, and they aren’t afraid to let you know. Sometimes these rookies fall flat and learn lessons the hard way. These rookies also move quickly through organizations with their new ideas, new energy and relevant skills for today’s workforce, and find success. I’m attracted to the concept of Rookie Smarts, and believe that as CMMA members, and leaders within our own organizations, we have an obligation to continually canvas the talent landscape for those rarest of rare jewels: future leaders with vast potential. Face it; many of us will be hanging up the business suit for a canoe paddle in the next ten years (more or less), and it should be incumbent upon each of us to chart a course for developing these new leaders in our organizations. We were the rookies at one point in our career, and if we look back to the traits we employed to bring us to where we are today, just think how we can inspire the rookies of this day. Why should we look back?

Wiseman says that in a rapidly changing world, experience can be a curse. Careers can stall, innovation pauses or stops and strategies grow tired and stale. The concept of being new, naïve and clueless as being an asset is a hard one to grasp; however, I see this as the perpetual learner. This is the experienced leader who is always looking for the new twist to solving an age-old problem (analog to digital, anyone?).

So, take this advice, and invest in your past success, and embrace being a rookie again. Love learning, and embrace mentoring. And by the way, “Rookie Smarts” is also Wiseman’s new book. Embrace the thinking and behavior of that young, energetic person you were, and ponder hanging up that canoe paddle for a few more years. You’re just getting started!

Article contributed by Warren Harmon, CMMA Board Member

Lead Yourself

10 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by in Communications, Leadership, Management, Media, Upcoming Events

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Where did the summer slowdown go? You know, that little ebb in the tide of work demands? It used to happen every July and August. Yeah, that one.

I just did my July metrics report and our business requests and output increased in July, and it started me thinking. Is my team getting the rest and recharge time that they need? They take their vacation time (when I give them the stink eye), but are they really doing anything else to manage the stress that comes with additional demands?

CMMA has a great conference coming up in Albuquerque, NM in October, and one of the many things we’re going to learn about and experience is how mindfulness and managing stress can boost morale, productivity and engagement in your team. Stay with me, I’m not going all “woo-woo” on you, I promise. If Ariana Huffington can take a nap every day in her office, surely you can take a few minutes in your office to close your eyes and let some things go.

At Wells Fargo, leaders are expected to “Lead Yourself, Lead the Team, Lead the Business”. Notice that “Lead Yourself” is first. That’s because leadership begins with you, whether you manage people or not. Part of that is managing your own thoughts, emotions and actions. Managing stress and your personal response to it in a mindful and deliberate way helps you build better relationships and strengthens your ability to influence outcomes and manage change in a positive manner. Ahhh yes; some real tools to help you manage the challenges of leadership. That’s what CMMA is all about.

For Communication Media Managers, we have an added budget stress reliever: if you attend the CMMA Fall Conference and love the experience, you get 50% off your membership fee if you join within 30 days of the conference.

Take a moment and just breathe…

This article is contributed by Patty Perkins, CMMA Board Member

Hanging with “My People”

06 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by in Communications, Conferences, Leadership, Management, Media, Technology, Video

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I just got back to the office after attending CMMA’s Spring Development Conference at Marriott’s World Headquarters outside of Washington D.C. It was my last conference as CMMA President, and in the couple days since then, I have been in a reflective mood about my tenure in that role – and about CMMA in general.

Bottom line, it’s been a great ride as President and with CMMA. But why exactly?

I’ve been an active member for over 9 years. For me, to put it simply, the essence of CMMA is to learn and share. Looking at the conferences we put on the last couple years, the themes were respectively, “The Innovation Conference,” “Communicating in a Digital World,” “From Hollywood to Topeka: Differentiating our Value through Story and Craft” and “Become a Center of Excellence.” My hope is that the events not only gave us an opportunity to stretch our thinking (maybe even disrupt our thinking) and deepen our knowledge, but also to share and learn from each other’s experiences so that we would be that much more savvy going back to the office.

At its heart, peer to peer learning is arguably the most compelling benefit of CMMA membership. In all the busyness of the D.C. event there were a couple of moments where I took a step back and thought about who I was in the room with, thinking to myself, “These are my people! I’m in a room hanging with my counterparts from Bank of America! Mayo Clinic! Kate Spade! Sandia National Laboratories!” Those guys handle nuclear weapons! What an eclectic bunch!” (Feel free to name any other combination of companies or organizations that attend our meetings).

It’s awesome knowing these folks, all of their experiences and know-how are accessible: across the table from me at breakfast, in the bus on the way to the President’s Dinner, just an email or phone call away. In D.C. I certainly took advantage and engaged with them on a number of topics.

What’s also awesome is that these relationships turn into lasting friendships and can blossom in a myriad of ways as we journey through our careers together. The challenges, the opportunities, the highs and lows. And the same dynamic happens with our Partners too.

I can’t think of any other organization that is so elegant in its simplicity. Professionals getting together, learning, sharing. That’s CMMA.

This article was contributed by Chris Barry, CMMA Board of Directors