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Recent Posts

• Maintaining a professional and up-to-date help section in a start-up company
• Improving the Producer
• Collaborate like never before
• Purchasing content has never been easier – neither has tracking your purchases!
• Any questions?
• Searchable Channels – our latest innovation
• Latest release – Awesome Annotations!
• Combining Multiple Broadcasts in a Series
• We’re pioneers, my friends.
• Pre-recorded presentations; a better experience for you AND your audience?
• Your Faculte – Your Brand!
• Your feedback matters, Part 2
• Your feedback matters!
• Lesson Learned: When YouTube is NOT good for your marketing videos
• The art of telling your story
• How to turn a lifeless PowerPoint into a lively video
• We have officially launched!
• Life Is a Pitch!
• Version 3.0 is released – and we are out of Beta!
• New Look, New Features!

Your feedback matters!

November 24th, 2009   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.

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:

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!

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

October 30th, 2009   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!

How to turn a lifeless PowerPoint into a lively video

September 28th, 2009   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.