I always think that size does matter, especially when a company appears to be larger than it actually is, and just because you can list 23 subsidiaries on 5 continents, for e.g.. Anyway, as a communication professional I feel strongly about selecting the right external providers for your internal and external communication activities. Not the biggest, fanciest with the most luxurious, but someone that understands my communication needs, be it for a simple recording of a statement from the CEO to organizing the entire communication of a live broadcast of an extraordinary annual general meeting which is viewed by hundreds of people across the globe.
Bringing the world together
Truly I’d start with a small communication project, see how it goes and see how you like it. Do a video on demand, as you are less under pressure in case the speakers mess up or the weather is bad (if you are doing the shooting outside) or some technical emergency pops up. Over the years I did a lot of testing with different scenarios, and depending on the bandwidth, employees in a small office would gather in front of one screen to watch the video. They’d tell me many times that they enjoyed coming together and through the video felt more closely connected to the headquarter thousands of miles away.
Creating a big bang
Compared with traditional communication (print) tools, and don’t get me wrong, I have had great experiences working with ad agencies and producing plenty of print material, the cost of webcasts on average is often lower and the impact so much greater. Assume you are using a webcast for a message from the CEO, an update on the business strategy and your are introducing a new Executive Team member, that is three in one right there. Don’t have to bother writing individual pieces including a speech, a presentation, an internal announcement etc. No need trying to copy all different user groups into the ‘To:’ field of your E-mail. As soon as you have the video up on the Internet a broad audience can view it as much and as long as they want. And, you can even track the traffic.
The place was full of interesting equipment they had built into mobile trolleys themselves as they explained how they’d go on location and record, encode and stream a company’s investor presentation, press conference or other live event onto the web. So how would this work for us? Basically we wanted to replace the old way of recording a staff event on VHS cassettes (!) which would be copied manually and then sent by mail to the various offices around the world. How endlessly tedious and time-consuming!
The good thing was that our streaming provider has their own encoding center where all the equipment is permanently installed on site. This means that they are always ready with many encoders and backup devices available, a redundant and reliable Internet upstream, optimized connectivity to Akamai (a 