Combining Multiple Broadcasts in a Series

March 1st, 2010 by Anita Filed Under Education, New Features

Today, we released a new exciting feature in the Faculte Broadcast Studio: “Series”. Now you can bundle several broadcasts into a single container, and share them together as a unit. When your viewer clicks on the “broadcasts series”, he or she will be able to browse through all the broadcasts in a series, and play them inside the player one by one. Click on “play” below to see a series in action.

The Series feature comes in handy when you are trying to create a “course” composed of several lessons, a “product demo” composed of a number of slideshows and videos, or a series of tutorials about a single product or subject.

A Series of broadcasts can be Shared exactly like a Broadcast – by Email, Direct Link or Embed as a Player or Widget, and it can of course also be modified on-the-fly. Access of a series can also be controlled and managed exactly as you manage and control access to a broadcast: you can make it public, require registration, protect via a password, or distribute securely to a private group. If you are monetizing your content, you can prompt your viewer to pay one sum for the entire Series, instead of on a broadcast by broadcast basis. Ever thought about creating a course and selling it on your blog? Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Creating a series is very easy. Create it, Add Broadcasts, give the Series a title and Publish it! You can also set more advanced options such as Access Restrictions and Collaboration.

SeriesIllustration

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We’re pioneers, my friends.

February 15th, 2010 by Anita Filed Under Customers, Education, Faculte, Faculte Story

“Vernon, please help me. Can you figure out a way I can teach from home? Pleeeease?”, Donna Kato claims she whined to her husband, after being delayed for hours at a desolate airport, trying to make her way back home after teaching a class. “I love to teach, it’s just what it took to get to my students and home again that was really getting my goat.”, she writes in a recent blog post.

Vernon obviously could not say no to a tired, whining wife, and he started to look for solutions. They tried producing videos; it turned out to be way too expensive. They thought about creating downloadable pdf’s; they were so uninspiring. They kept searching and Donna kept traveling.

Then they stumbled across Faculte’s BETA site. To this day, none of us really know how they found us, but find us they did, and this has turned out to be a very exciting partnership for Faculte and what would eventually become CraftEdu.

Imagine the following scenario; you are at home, taking the afternoon off. You are feeling terribly creative, but have neither inspiration nor knowledge to actually create something. You step into the living room, coming to a sudden halt in the doorway: Right there, on your desk, sits metal clay artist Angela Crispin, polymer clay wizard Bettina Welker, fiber art ace Beth Wheeler, scrap-booking champion Brigitte Doss-Johnson, wirework genius Debbie Tlach, fabric printing authority Heidi Rand – in fact, there are about 50 amazing craft artists sitting right there on your desk. (needless to say; your desk is pretty full!) The artist are all eager to show you their artwork, and teach you how you can create it yourself.

This is the vision of CraftEdu - except the instructors will be available inside, not on top of, your computer, so it will not be as crowded as described above.

CraftEdu is founded by Vernon Ezell and Donna Kato, and as a modest beginning they have included 50 Arts and Crafts experts in their team. These experts have picked out their favorite pieces, and with the use of Faculte’s Broadcast Studio they are now in the process of creating online, on-demand classes available to anyone with a computer. The instructions contain step-by-step images, verbal explanations, videos – and lots of inspiration. You can follow them in your own pace, navigate the instructions to see parts of it several times, and revisit the class multiple times.

Being part of this project, the Faculte team has had the opportunity to have quite a few sneak peaks – and believe us, both the art work and the classes look awesome. Everyone is looking forward to the CraftEdu BETA launch in just a few weeks.

A few weeks ago, Donna truly realized what she got herself into, that long evening of whining in a desolate airport. To use her own words; “…there is nothing like it in the craft or art community. We’re pioneers, my friends. This may well change the way all internet instruction is presented.”

The Faculte Team is proud to be powering this amazing project!

Visit CraftEdu to learn more;

Blog
Website (under construction)
Facebook fan page

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Pre-recorded presentations; a better experience for you AND your audience?

February 10th, 2010 by Anita Filed Under Education, Faculte, Faculte Story, Presentations

For a student – and for most professionals – being able to give a good presentation or pitch is a key element of success.

Some elements can be learned through reading theory; how much text should you use per slide? How many slides are appropriate? How should your slides be structured? You can even read theory about how you should walk, talk, stand and dress, in order to make the right impression on your audience.

There is one thing, however, that only comes with experience; the knowledge of how you react to holding a presentation. Will you be able to stick to the script? Do you take detours; and where do these detours take you? Will you keep a fluent pace, or will you let your nerves get to you? Even when you are well prepared – and experienced! – your nerves can play tricks on you, and you end up rushing through the whole presentation, skipping several important points – or spending all the dedicated time on the first few slides, thus never reaching your conclusion. Not to mention all the unnecessary uh’s and ehm’s that tend to jump out of your mouth when you are nervous.

For the fall semester 2009, the Master of Science and Engineering Management Class at Marquette University used, for the first time, Faculte’s Broadcast Studio for their final Presentations. Approximately half of the groups chose to create and pre-record their presentation using Faculte, while the rest distributed powerpoint slides only. All presentations were posted on a class website, and some of them were Presented live.

Instead of me telling you how the experiment went, I will let the students do it in their own words:

“In the future I would attempt to use faculte first rather than using powerpoint.”

“I enjoyed the Faculte presentations much better than the non-faculte presentations. The Faculte presentations seemed to flow better.”

“The overall process significantly added to the quality of the presentations. If students/teams used this for all their projects, additional quality gains would accrue.”

Clearly both the students and the Faculte team were pleased with the results!

When I talked to Professor Polzcynski right after the live presentations, he had made a couple of observations that I found particularly interesting. Usually, with my theatre background, I have always claimed that “being live, in person, on stage, always gives the best results”. However, I think the Professor proved me somewhat wrong.

First, he told me that in one of the groups all but one student were traveling through work. The one student being present not an accustomed presenter, and strongly disliked being in front of an audience. Imagine his relief that their whole presentation was already created, and all he had to do was click a link and press play!

The second observation the professor shared was this: When you do a recording, you have the chance to review your work. This means that a) you write a good script and prepare well for the recording – you will actually have to listen to your own voice! and b) you re-do it if it is not good.

This resulted in the groups using Faculte having presentations that were within the dedicated time, following a comfortable pace, explaining all important points, not de-touring into unimportant details – not to mention, without the uh’s and ehm’s.

The professor said that all the presentations were good – but in the groups that used Faculte, there was not a single incident of student’s nerves or unpreparedness getting in the way of the presentation.

Knowing how you react to holding a presentation comes with experience – and I still believe that being present, in front of your audience, gives a good result. However, in using Faculte for your Presentations, you can relax! Be your charming self next to the screen, and let your nerves kick in when it is time for the questions after the presentation.

Unless, of course, you have prepared another Broadcast, with answers to all the questions you might get. Then you’re all set.

Click here to see the student’s Presentations

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Your Faculte – Your Brand!

January 28th, 2010 by Anita Filed Under Faculte, Faculte Story, New Features, Presentations

One of the things I appreciate most about working in a start-up company is that one of our main focuses is Feature Development. This means that a lot of the changes that appear with every new deployment are visible – this time around, incredibly visible!

Our latest invention is developed with larger organizations in mind; preferring to use their own brand. They want their employees or affiliates to see their Company Brand, and not the Faculte Brand, when they are in the content creation process. With the changes to our Branded Templates, that is exactly what they are able to do.

The feature is of course there for every Premium Account to use, large organization or not – providing a nice way to re-decorate your work environment! Personally, spending hours on our Platform every day, it was such a relief to be able to change the color of my background, header and footer. Yes, my boss hated the bright pink. No, I don’t really care. (Okay, fine, I cared enough to change it to purple.)

To change the whole look and feel of your Premium Faculte Account, go to Settings and Branded Templates – and go ahead and create your personalized style. The changes are reflected right away, making it a simple and immediate process.

We all hope you will enjoy the new feature, and stay tuned – there are more changes to come. Our developers are doing an amazing job!

BrandNEW

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Your feedback matters, Part 2

December 18th, 2009 by Anita Filed Under Faculte, New Features

New release – new features – and they are still what you wanted and did not hesitate to ask for!

With your honest feedback, we understood that when creating broadcasts with a lot of pages, the navigation might get a bit difficult, both for you and your viewer. So we took a closer look on our Chapter feature to see if we could make some improvements. With this release we introduce the Sidebar Menu. You can, as before, give your pages names and divide them into chapters. Your viewer can now open a sidebar next to the playing broadcast, to easily get an overview of and navigate your chapters.

Sidebar

We know that the two most important things when it comes to your videos is that the videos play smoothly – and that they look good! With the latest release, we changed the Video Conversion Process, to ensure that your viewers get the best possible video quality with as little loading as possible.

Our Wizard has gone through some cosmetic changes – but it still provides an easy, step-by-step creation of Broadcasts.

Wizard We hope our existing and new customers will enjoy the changes – and as always, keep the feedback, suggestions and honesty coming!

On behalf of the whole Faculte Team, I wish you all Happy Holidays, and may 2010 be just as good a year as 2009 – if not even better!

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Your feedback matters!

November 24th, 2009 by Anita Filed Under Faculte, Faculte Story, New Features, Presentations, Video

Over the past weeks and months, our faithful customer base has given us the most valuable thing a young start-up can get; they have given us their honest feedback. Yes, sometimes it hurts, but we have kept our ears open and listened.

Today, we launched the first of a larger series of customer-requested changes. Our development team have been focused, and will keep focusing, on what YOU want and what YOU need. So please, everybody, keep the honest feedback coming! It is the only way to make our product perfect!

You told us that being able to add background music to your broadcasts would make them even more professional. So we added the Audio Background feature. When you edit your broadcast, go to Preferences and select Audio Background. We have given you a variety of music loops to choose from, and we do hope you will find your favorite amongst them! The selected Audio Loop will play continuously, without pausing in between the pages – even if the rest of the content is loading.

Labels

You told us that you’ve started having a LOT of files and broadcasts, and it is hard to manage them. We want you to create a lot of content – so of course we want to give you the possibility of managing it easily! Thus, we are now releasing Labels – so you can easily administer and access the files and broadcasts you want.

You told us that you love being able to add webcam recordings to your broadcasts, but that the first second of your recording – the one where you look at the timer, realize you’re recording, smile awkwardly, draw your breath – was so difficult to avoid. So instead of giving all our customers acting lessons (which may have been equally awkward?), we have now released Video Trimming. When you hit Record, and the countdown starts, just draw your breath and relax. You can trim away the first second of the video anyway!

There have also been several changes to your home page:

NewHome

We hope these changes will make you a happy customer!

We promise to keep the improvements coming – if you promise to tell us what you want!

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Lesson Learned: When YouTube is NOT good for your marketing videos

October 30th, 2009 by miki Filed Under Privacy, Video

I was having a chat with an entrepreneur the other day who was lamenting about his great marketing idea gone wrong. He was launching a new product and wanted to send out personalized videos to influential bloggers. Each video was a product demo featuring an exclusive treat for the blog readers. The goal was to grab the blogger’s attention and give them a great video to embed in a post.

Naturally, YouTube was top of mind when thinking about sharing and embedding videos. He uploaded 5 videos, all targeted towards different competing blogs in hopes that one would get him coverage. He sent each blog a link to their video. An hour later he checked his YouTube account to see if any of the videos had been viewed. That’s when he realized YouTube wasn’t the best way to go. Let’s take a closer look at why:

1. No control or limited control of viewing

The moment he uploaded his video it was available for everyone to see. But he wasn’t ready for everyone to see it. Not yet that is. Not until it had been seen by the blogger and THEY chose to distribute it to their readership. He could disable comments and ratings to avoid random (and many times inappropriate) comments but the number of views still displayed exactly how many people have seen the video. He couldn’t even pretend it was exclusive! So he enabled private sharing to avoid this problem all together. However, making a video private on YouTube creates another problem. Only 25 people are allowed to see the video in private mode, a limit set by YouTube, and the video can’t be embedded. By avoiding the unwanted publicity problem, he in turn inhibited the wanted publicity!

The lesson learned: YouTube is designed for public viewing and content discovery. It’s not designed for controlled distribution. Not all marketing videos are meant to “go viral” and control of timing and release of content can be very important for certain marketing initiatives. YouTube is only part of the video mix and businesses need a distribution solution that has been well thought out and designed for all types of business marketing needs.

2. No Control Over Related Videos

You can’t turn off related videos. It doesn’t matter if your video is public or private, it will still have related videos placed next to it. He noticed that some of the related videos placed next to his were offensive and reflected poorly on the target blog’s brand. That definitely wasn’t the impression he was trying to make. He spent hours trying to modify the video name and re-uploading a new version, trying to get different related video results. You never know what keywords your video will trigger, but it’s never good to have unwanted explicit and sexual content placed directly next to your communciations.

Lesson learned: YouTube is trying to keep your audience watching YouTube content. They will push related content on their site and even on their embedded player. Again, this overlooks important business needs for branding and reputation management.

3. No Individual Tracking

An hour or two after sending the links, this entrepreneur wanted to know if any of the bloggers had viewed the video. Unfortuantely, YouTube doesn’t give you immediate individual stats and he was faced with the message “there is no viewing data for this video”. When viewing data was finally registered, it doesn’t give any detailed information about who had recently seen the video and from what location. Lesson learned: YouTube is great for high level aggregate data. However, when looking for viewing stats on particular users, from a particular location, YouTube can’t help.

After he finished recounting his tale of frustration, I couldn’t help but let out a big smile. It may have seemed condescending at the time, but it was really just a renewed appreciation for what we’ve accomplished here at Faculte. We’ve always known the pitfalls of YouTube when it comes to video publishing and distribution for business needs. That’s the problem we’ve set out to solve. We’re constantly mulling over different cases for sharing video and pay close attention to the intricacies in access rights when sending out communications to customers, partners, investors and other business stakeholders.

This frustration could have been avoided using Faculte. When a video is uploaded to Faculte, it is only seen by people you send the link to. There is no unwanted public community who can discover your content. The video can then be shared just like a YouTube video and the person you share it with can embed it in 4 different sizes, whichever fits best. Your content is secured and can be branded as well. There are no ads or related videos to confuse or send the wrong message. You also get a breakdown of views by unique individual viewer, which gives you a much clearer picture of when your target actually watched the video.

Lesson learned: YouTube is great when you want to try and get more exposure, but when you want more control over your video communications, it’s wiser to use a platform that’s designed specifically for business needs. If only I had met him a few weeks earlier!

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The art of telling your story

September 30th, 2009 by Anita Filed Under Storytelling

A good story is not necessarily about great deeds and intriguing action – it is your motives and passion that makes it worth listening to.

“Two tomatoes were crossing the street. The first one got over, but a car hit the other one. The first one shouted Come on, ketchup!”

I guess you’ve heard that one before, huh? And – even though I have heard kids tell this joke with amazing passion and laughter in their eyes, causing me to laugh heartily – I cannot claim anything but: This is the most told and most not-funny joke in history.

In one of my storytelling classes a few years ago, we were given the following assignment: Tell the tomato joke. Tell it as a story; tell it like you mean it; tell it to thrill your audience. Impossible?? Not at all!

What if the first tomato is a small, scared kid tomato, while the other one is an obnoxious, annoying, large bully? Or what if these tomatoes just escaped from the tomato farm, running for their lives to avoid being slaughtered to ketchup? Or what if the hottest girl tomato ever is waiting for them on the other side? Or what if this road is a four-lane highway filled with monster trucks?

The story remains the same; two tomatoes crossing the street, one of them being squashed by a car – but the motive driving the story will lift it to a whole new level.

Take a look at your company’s story. It might look simple and boring at a first glance – but there’s always something beneath the surface. Which “what if’s” can you find? Which motives can drive your story? Which passions can you emphasize, making it worth listening too? I promise you, if you look close enough, you will find the motives that will drive your story from a common joke to a thrilling work of art.

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How to turn a lifeless PowerPoint into a lively video

September 28th, 2009 by miki Filed Under Faculte, Presentations, Video

Imagine this. You have to train a sales rep on a new product offering OR you need to educate new hires on your company culture and inner workings. How would you do it? Let me guess… a PowerPoint Presentation is the first thing that comes to mind. Well isn’t that exciting (note sarcastic tone). Ok, Ok, don’t be embarrassed… most people will think of PowerPoint as their go-to tool. There always seems to be this love-hate affair with it. We know its easy (relatively) to create and is synonymous with a presentation. But we also know that it can be excruciatingly boring and tedious to go through both for the producer and viewer.

Now think of video. Go on… visualize a video. Most likely it’s much more entertaining than a PPT. So why don’t you use video instead? Oh it’s time consuming? Oh and expensive too? Nonsense!

When people think of video they either think of professionally produced hollywood-style masterpieces or low-quality user-generated chatter on YouTube. For training a sales rep or onboarding new hires, video just seems like too much.

That really shouldn’t be the case. Producing video for business should be as easy as creating a PowerPoint. In fact, it should be easier! That was our central theme when we presented at last week.

Now, I’m not asking you to toss those PowerPoints out the window and start from scratch. Think of your PPTs as a head-start. You have content to work with! Great! Now I’ll give you a few tips to turn them into videos. Start by uploading your PowerPoint into our Broadcast Studio. That itself will make it available online and allow it to be played like a video. Now for some tips to make it really feel like a video:

Narrate over as if you are presenting to an audience

The key here is to not read your PowerPoint. Talk over it hitting on some key points, but feel free to make your talk more free form. Also be mindful of the time you spend on each page. From experience, 15-20 seconds is great to aim for. Of course some pages will just have too much information to fit in that time, which leads me to the next tip.

Annotate (Draw, Sketch and Doodle)

You can increase the attention span of your viewer through movement. That’s where you take the pen tool in the Broadcast Studio and underline keywords, draw lines as callouts, draw little arrows, exclamation marks or circle things.

Use transitions that fit your content

I create stories through PowerPoints and use the wipe transition to give the story a timeline effect. Similarly, you can choose different transitions that turn your PPT into a narrative.

Record yourself through your webcam

Humans are social creatures. We learn better and are more engaged when there is a real person talking to us. Add videos in between pages to mix things up and change the flow. I recommend at least having one opening video introducing the content and a closing video to wrap things up.

Use music and draw to it

Who says you have to talk? Some pages may be a diagram or self-explanatory. Try uploading a short music file and just drawing over your content to the music.

All these 5 tips can be done directly in our Broadcast Studio, so there are no more excuses! Next time you think PowerPoint presentation, stop immediately. That will limit you in so many ways. Always, always, always think video.

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