Increase Retention and Reduce Recruitment Costs

Corporations can reduce staffing costs by using webcasting to increase retention. Sales is an obvious area where this approach can work.

It is critical to get newly-hired sales people ramped up and successful as quickly as possible. Many sales organizations are plagued with chronic turnover amongst sales people because they cannot consistently get new hires producing at plan.

If a corporation shifted some recruitment dollars to fund a new hire "quick start" training program, they can create a library of best sales practices that new hires could access to enhance their success. This is much more economical than training new hires individually.

Webcasting makes this possible because corporations can use the technology to create a web-based learning system that requires no investment in hardware or software. Corporations already know how to train their employees - but webcasting allows them to record the training and distribute it in rich media across the enterprise.

The ROI is easy to track: more sales people producing at plan and less sales turnover.

Is There Anybody Out There? Part II

I recently wrote about revver.com and its financial difficulties, arguing that a content provider must be able to track viewers to be successful with advertisers.

I would say the ability to track viewers becomes more important as the audience size decreases. When an advertiser runs a commercial on broadcast television, the audience is measured in the tens of millions, so the information from Nielsen is good enough. Perhaps one can maximize the impact by running ads for men's products during football games and women's products during Oprah, but an advertiser still relies on the odds that out of a pool of millions there should be enough relevant eyeballs on the ad.

When the audience is measured in tens of thousands, that calculus changes. Advertisers need to be able to track who is watching so they can measure ROI through actual conversion rates: who watched the content then bought the product or service.

Ian Schafer blogged about the YouTube Videocracy Event. He commented on YouTube's quest to make more metrics available to advetisers, to avoid revver's fate.

But the real news was YouTube’s announcement of an impending launch of
advanced analytics tools. You’ll be able to see where video views are coming
from (geographically and site-wise), as well as many other data points. This
will be a huge help to advertisers trying to extract more success metrics and
data from their YouTube efforts.

I have written before about the extraordinary potential for YouTube to break the hegemony of the relatively small group that produces entertainment content for broadcast television. If people can watch YouTube in the comfort of their living rooms, I believe the effect would be the same as the printing press breaking the monopoly of a relative few who controled what written material was suitable for mass comsumption.

Since the printing press gets some credit for the Protestant Reformation, the effects of egalitarian video entertainment on society could be extraordinary.

But before any of that happens, somebody has to make the business model work.

"You Can't Fight in Here. This Is The War Room!"

Wired News reports that new mapping of the Arctic may bolster U.S. claims in the region to rich reserves of oil and natural gas.

A U.S. study suggests as much as 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil
and gas could be hidden beneath the Arctic seabed. Growing evidence that global
warming is shrinking polar ice - opening up resource development and new
shipping lanes - has added to the urgency of the claims.

Is There Anybody Out There?

Onlinevideowatch recently blogged about the demise of video sharing site revver.com. The blog concludes:

As I’ve written extensively, maybe there’s just content that isn’t
monetizable. Fun to watch. Lousy business.

That may indeed be true. But I believe there is another factor at play that is more important: regardless of the content, if you stream video without tracking who watches you forfeit a great deal of the value.

This is the value that a webcasting company offers that a simple CDN cannot: the ability to track who watched.

What is an advertiser more likely to pay for? An impression or a qualified lead?

The Battle is Far From Won

Microsoft's bid for Yahoo is facinating on many levels, but I read something on the lost remote blog that almost made my head explode.

At the end of the post, the author gave two valuable links

Microsoft’s press release on the unsolicited bid

Microsoft’s Powerpoint presentation used on the conference call

Microsoft announced this via teleconference with a downloadable power point presentation.

Why not a webcast with a synchronized power point presentation?