This past December, I was lucky enough to attend the Massachusetts Conference for Women for the third year in a row—thank you, Brightcove! After the event each year I feel inspired and ready to tackle the world. This year specifically, I could not stop thinking about all of the intelligent, kind, and powerful women that I work with at Brightcove, and how wonderful it would be to learn more about them. Maybe corporate video could be the channel that connected women employees across our company.
I’ve been with Brightcove for four and half years as a part of our Account Management organization. Throughout my tenure, I’ve seen many phases of our internal women’s group and as of late, due to busy schedules, the programs that used to be in place have fizzled. I regularly listen to “All the Social Ladies” podcast where the CEO of Likeable Media, Carrie Kerpen, has insightful and candid conversations with some of the smartest women in marketing and advertising. During my morning commute, while listening to one of her stories it hit me: I wanted to emulate this with our very own ‘Women of Brightcove’ speaker series! The wheels started turning and I quickly realized we could host the events in our Boston office and make them available via secure live stream on our internal communication platform for our other offices and remote employees.
Tapping into Subject Matter Experts
My first action item in accomplishing this goal was to meet with our fabulous HR leader, Katie Kulikoski, to see if something like this was even possible. She was quickly on board with the idea and actually secured our first speaker, Diane Hessan, one of Brightcove’s female board members. With the speaker and date in place, this meant I needed to start executing.
I set up a meeting with our IT team to help set up, test, and facilitate the live stream. We scheduled a testing period the day before the stream and also confirmed an hour of set up and test time right before the event.
Once we had the testing times scheduled, I knew I needed to lean on Laurent Bridenne, our Sr. Solutions Specialist for corporate video. Laurent ran online video operations for companies like Sun Microsystems and Cisco and has been instrumental in helping us roll out our own internal video solutions. Being the go-getter that he is, Laurent did much of the technical heavy lifting.
"The technological implementation of this live event was actually relatively simple. I used our own product, the Brightcove video platform, to create a secured live template and a live video asset - ensuring only our internal employees would be able to access this content. The next step was to give IT the information they needed for encoding, and communicate which URL to send out to the online audience." — Laurent Bridenne, Brightcove Product Marketing Specialist
Getting the Word Out
Now I needed to inform the women of Brightcove about my idea, and get people to tune in. This is where the magic of live internal events comes in. Brightcove is made up of 10 global offices and plenty of people that work remotely, which is why in the initial idea phase of this project, I knew a secure live stream was essential. Because we are so spread out, we lean very heavily on email and Slack. In an effort to reach everyone, I decided I would use both. I wrote up an email explaining the series and created a “Women of Brightcove” Slack channel for ongoing group updates, inspiration, and knowledge sharing.
The group attendee numbers on Slack were amazing. Within the first day we had over 50 people in the group and it now sits at 139 members and growing—and the event feedback was incredibly positive.
Using our Corporate Communication Platform
As the event date approached, Katie and I worked together to determine the speaker series layout. Our hope was to create an inviting environment that would lend itself to open sharing and collaboration. We settled on a “fireside chat” format with Katie as the moderator.
About an hour before the event started, I sent out a message via Slack and email as a reminder, encouraging women to head down to our office classroom if they were in the Boston office and to tune into our Brightcove-powered Gallery live stream if they were remote.
I checked in with the IT team to confirm live stream testing was underway and going smoothly and then assigned a couple of my fellow Account Management colleagues, Caroline and Nikki, to monitor the Slack channel during the event for feedback and questions. It’s impossible to do everything yourself, so you have to lean on others around you for help.
Troubleshooting our live stream
Right at noon, the fireside chat began! Diane and Katie were incredible, discussing topics ranging from their “super powers” to their perception of the ‘glass ceiling’ and philosophy on mentors. The discussion was inspirational and everything I’d dreamed for it to be, except for one thing…
Audio issues for remote viewers listening to the live stream.
Our Slack channel was filled with audio issue comments. Being new to live streaming, it’s hard to predict all of the different things that could go wrong. Being an Account Manager, I have first-hand experience dealing with lots of varying issues including trouble with the encoder, positioning of the speaker, or even network connectivity.
After a thorough investigation into the audio issue, our IT team was able to diagnose that the microphone Diane was using was faulty and replaced it with a new, even smaller microphone to use for future events.
As I alluded to before, we utilized Brightcove’s secure live streaming capabilities to broadcast the event. Out of the box, we can clip the live event to an on-demand version in a quarter of the time it would take us to use a video editing solution. Because the issue we identified was isolated to the microphone, the on-demand version turned out beautifully. Brightcove’s Gallery product made it easy for us to distribute this video-on-demand (VOD) version within our internal communication platform, “Brightcove TV.”
What’s Next?
In order to keep the speaker series alive, I knew I needed to tap into the video analytics for performance results. I set about to figure out how many people the event impacted and if they found it to be a good use of their time.
Due to the ease of Brightcove’s video analytics, I was able to see that the live stream was viewed 83 times and 68 unique viewers watched, which means 27 people were so engaged that they went in and watched it more than once. This represents 48% of our female employees.
The results proved that we needed to keep this initiative alive! Not only have we since hosted four additional speakers, but we’ve opened up many of them to the entire company and viewership has increased each month. The Women of Brightcove Speaker Series also encouraged our IT team to update our microphones in the classroom and has pushed other teams to start live streaming more internally. Now we are working through enhancements to the experience, like moderated chat using one of our trusted partners, Pigeonhole. We are excited for all of the great things to come!
Interested in all things corporate video? Check out our post Level Up Your Enterprise Video Strategy with These Workflow Tips.
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