Interviews with Digital Media Thought Leaders

Easy Tool for Creating and Sending Business Videos

Podcast Video | Posted by Phil Leigh on May 27, 2008

While YouTube makes it easy to produce a video of ourselves that we can email to others, today’s guest-company enables us to just as easily produce and send personalized videos about our company to clients and prospects. It also provides crucial tracking statistics.

Our guest today is Gary Anderson who is the CEO of Netbriefings. For the past seven years his company has provided Webcasting services for companies that want to host Webcasts for large audiences. However, last year they introduced a hosted service called Proclaim that permits users to easily produce a short video of themselves and combine it with a professionally produced PowerPoint or corporate video.

Typically the service is used by a salesman to email to clients and prospects a personalized video message that is combined with a professionally produced video or PowerPoint that was earlier created at the salesman’s corporate HQ.

It is a lot like the BrainShark service that we learned about in the May 3rd interview. However, a BrainShark recording is typically only a PowerPoint presentation with voice-over narration. In contrast, Proclaim provides full-motion video of the sender.

Both services collect information about who opens the emails. Users of BrainShark need only know how to create a PowerPoint and use a telephone. Proclaim users need to have a WebCam, just as they would for YouTube.

Phil’s Take. Businesses will increasingly communicate with customers and prospects with video. YouTube already makes it easy, but it does not provide useful-enough information about the viewers who click on our videos. Moreover, it crowds the payer with YouTube branding. Thus, both Proclaim and BrainShark are useful tools.

While they are both simple to use, I like that Proclaim can be used to easily create a personalized video introduction. Ultimately the better service will be the one with fewer devils in the details. That can only be discovered through extensive testing which each company makes available via trial use.