Stephen Condon, Hive Streaming

Hi, I'm Steve Condon. I'm Vice President of Global Marketing for Hive Streaming. Hive Streaming enables companies to scale their video broadcasts internally. We obviously think video is extremely important and our customers obviously do as well. There's lots of pressure on organizations at the moment to embrace video. Consumers have become very used to seeing video and seeing video on their computers. They're becoming more comfortable in broadcasting video and putting themselves on camera. They're wondering, why can't I do this in my company? Video has a lot more impact obviously than just voice. What we're also seeing at the moment is lots of applications are embracing video. Unified Communications applications such as Skype. Unfortunately, a lot of enterprise networks are lagging in their ability to cope with that video. That's what our solution provides, an ability for organizations to cope with that video. We're seeing greater use of video in webinars. I remember doing webinars 10 years ago. We'd usually avoid using video. We'd use audio with PowerPoint slides. We're seeing much greater use of video now in webinars. What our message here at Webinar World is to the audience is don't just use your webcasting platform for external communications, but also use it for internal communications. Yes, we do use webinars in our content marketing strategy. When we have new white papers or we have partners who are releasing new products, we'll often get together with them and do joint webinars where we'll get them on video. We're actually doing one tomorrow with a partner where we're doing a late afternoon broadcast in the UK, professionally produced. Late afternoon in the UK, you can get coverage here in the US, so we're promoting it globally. We'll have a white paper to go with that content. Webinars are a key tool that we use to launch new content and then to engage with an audience through the content and through the webinar. Hive Streaming is not a large company. We have lots of big customers and we have lots of big partners. We don't necessarily have all the marketing resources to reach new audiences, but webinars really help us because our partners love to do them. Doing joint webinars with them helps augment their message and give them some news to communicate to their customer base and prospect base. Plus, it helps us expand our audience and the awareness of our service offering. At Hive, video is a big part of our marketing strategy. We have a number of videos that explain various aspects of our product, who we partner with, how our product works with different platforms. We have a WebRTC only product and we have a video explaining that. Those videos that we've created which are available on our website offer great kickoffs to webinars and augment our webinars in terms of content. Video is a big part of our marketing strategy and it's not just broadcasting webinars, but taking the video content we've created and combining them with the webinars to have a bigger impact. The success of our webinars is judged by engagement. We have the typical funnel that goes from a lead to a marketing qualified lead and then to a sales qualified lead, then to an opportunity. We find webinars are critical at moving people from being leads to marketing qualified leads. We're very interested in the engagement people have with us during our webinars, how long they're spending on, if they're asking questions, the type of questions they're asking. It all helps our marketing effort to move people through the purchasing funnel. Often it's from the lead stage to the MQL stage is where we primarily focus our webinars. They're a great way to build engagement with an audience, to educate them further and to create an asset that can be used not only at the time of the live webinar, but also the content lives on forever. Ongoing engagement with customers in terms of I use it to send them links to webinars that we may have done in the past that address particular needs of our customers. If we've done a webinar with Microsoft and they're a Microsoft customer, I'll send them a joint webinar we did with Microsoft. For a small company like Hyde, it gives us credibility to be doing a webinar. I know what they're interested in as a customer. I can use a webinar if they won't engage over email or won't engage with our salespeople. I can educate them further with the credibility of that partner through a webinar on demand. I'm often using webinars, past webinars targeted at our customers as a great engagement and education tool. One of the things at Hyde we're trying to do more of is recording presentations. It's pretty easy to do a capture of a video presentation of you and running through a presentation deck on a targeted sales message to a customer if you can't get them on the phone. Recording a video with PowerPoint slides and sending them a link to it is very easy to do and straightforward. I encourage people to practice that because it's really easy to do and produce. With your PowerPoint slides there, it doesn't have to be too buttoned down or whatever. It's like you do a video presentation with a recorded PowerPoint slide and send it to the customer just as if you were delivering a sales pitch to them.