businesses that can articulate their strategies and explain their products and services in compelling, believable, visually interesting ways. Humor, sincerity, and physical action make great video. Mundane products and undifferentiated messages can no longer be glossed over with high-definition sunsets and background music. Rapid and candid responses to negative situations will be expected by all audiences. Top-down messages, whether from the brand to the consumer or the corner office to the troops, no longer work the way they always have.
A business embracing Enterprise Television will need to enact policies that enable and empower employees as brand ambassadors (but not before training them on expectations and boundaries). Company leaders will need to become more involved in delivering messages and stories in compelling and authentic ways. PR and marketing communication professionals will need to think more like advocacy journalists and operate in newsroom-like environments that are in synch with our 24/7 viewing habits. Lawyers will have to weigh in on risk tolerance with more open minds. IT departments in companies will need to focus on a digital infrastructure that is flexible, scalable and robust.
Further complicating the challenge, user-generated video content now flows to the same audiences, sometimes with far greater impact than the company’s messages, which quickly are transformed into collateral damage. Is there any question that the explosion of online video will only intensify this challenge?
The lessons of how much company pain can be inflicted so quickly were exemplified by a memorable 2009 crisis management situation, when a Domino’s Pizza employee posted a homemade video on YouTube showing another employee putting cheese in his nose and blowing mucous onto a sandwich. The company’s awkward, delayed response suggested they were not prepared for such an unforeseen incident. Had they already implemented an Enterprise Television strategy, the top executives and their communications team would have sprung into action more quickly and televised online a much more credible and sympathetic response.
Fortunately, the power of user-generated content has far more potential to help companies than harm them. The wisdom of the crowd is more valued than the official line. How many of us today, in choosing a restaurant, trust the unfiltered online customer reviews more than the seductive menu on the web site?
While it may seem advances in technology have created this new wave, the appeal of video has its roots in basic human nature. Chris Anderson, Curator of TED.com, a leading online video site, believes this megatrend is nothing less than “the reinvention of the spoken word.”
“Reading and writing are actually relatively recent inventions,” Anderson said at the TEDGlobal 2010 Conference last July. “Face-to-face communication has been fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution. Five hundred years ago, it ran into a competitor with a lethal advantage, the printing press. Print scaled. The world’s ambitious inventors and innovators now could get their ideas to spread far and wide, so the art of the spoken word pretty much withered on the vine. But now, in the blink of an eye, the game has changed again. It’s not too much to say that what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communications. So that primal medium, which your brain is exquisitely wired for, that just went global. Now this is big. We may have to reinvent an ancient art form. Today, one person speaking can be seen by millions, shedding bright light on potent ideas, creating intense desire for people to respond.”
Seen in Anderson’s context, we are in the very early stages of a new age of face-to-face communications. For businesses, the promise of Enterprise Television is sure to become transformed as a critical source of competitive advantage. Those who are able to organize and execute a company-wide strategy that mixes technology, cultural awareness, content and style will be in the best position to reach their multiple external constituencies.
They will enhance brand identity and corporate morale, and be poised to respond effectively to the inevitable crises that arise when random uploaded videos reach a global audience overnight. And those who are thinking smaller and narrower—“it’s just video”—risk betting their company’s future by denying the powerful inevitability that online and mobile television will have on how a business is perceived in our collective minds.