Last week, I sat down with Pam O’Neal, Vice President of Marketing Communications, and Kyle Flaherty, Director of Marketing Communications, at BreakingPoint Systems which provides resiliency testing tools for content-aware network devices and application servers.
In this first piece, I talk to Kyle about using video as a B2B tool for engaging an intelligent and technical audience.
Marketing complex software and hardware tools to a technical customer is often a difficult task because your audience just doesn’t want to see traditional content. It doesn’t engage them intellectually and platitudes wrapped in case studies or whitepapers don’t educate them in a meaningful way.
Pam and Kyle turned to video as a way to give personality to their company’s online presence:
So we started dipping our toes into it just kind of doing one on one videos that our CTO does. It’s just, “Hey, what do you do?” You know maybe they’re a development engineer. Maybe they’re doing something on the security side. Maybe they work in our shipping department. Whatever it is, people love to see the faces of this company. That is new to them and that becomes extremely powerful.
Lately, there has been some web chatter about video as a social medium. Larry Kless talks about it here, and I wrote about it a few weeks ago. Kyle agrees that there is no question that video is a social tool:
It’s one of the most social things that you can actually do…Pam has a great comment that people don’t forward websites, but they forward videos – all the time…The same thing goes for our audience. They see a video from us about that details how to better test their server load balancer they’re going to pass it on to all of their colleagues. They’re going to post it up to a Linkedin group. They’re going to share it on Facebook or Twitter.
We often talk about about how social media removes the black box from business and makes transparency the new currency of B2B conversations. Whereas blogging gives you access to someone’s mind, video provides a 560×340 window into your organization.
Kyle wraps it up quite nicely, saying it better than I ever could, “Video is the visual aspect of social media. And I think that to be in social media is to be in video.”
Check out the pilot we produced for TAKE Supply Chain’s web video series. More to come soon!
Our friends at Phurnace Software asked us to help them create a show that highlights their ability to automate java application deployments. Phurnace builds software to help companies automate the deployment of J2EE applications and configuration of WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss or WebSphere Portal.
Shot on a Canon HV30 and performed by Larry Warnock and Jessica Gass [...]
Our friends at Phurnace Software, who make Java application deployment software, are gearing up to announce a new “rollback” feature in their Portal Deliver product at the next Websphere Portal Excellence Conference.
They asked us to put together a quick promo piece to invite people to their booth.
We are gearing up for a great [...]
We put together a book trailer for the book “Smoke Screen” by Sandra Brown.
Ms. Brown isn’t a customer of ours, but we felt like playing around a little with graphic animation, and intrigue. You can find out more about the book and the author over at Barnes and Noble.
The Pink Slip Festival in Austin, Texas provided free live music, family fun, cheap beer and hotdogs for Austin’s unemployed families. Dan Dillard of Amplify Financial created the Pink Slip Festival as an Austin styled response at to the down economy. The Pink Slip Festival was held at the Spider House coffee shop and featured [...]
It’s no big secret that @bigmanweston and I like to eat.
My wife is a killer cook and Weston’s culinary paramour, @girlblake, can make a mean Sunny Side Up-Cake.
So when she decided to take her cupcakes on the road to the Cupcake Smackdown 1.0, we thought we’d tag along with a camera.
There were many entries. [...]