Excite Communications

Video can help bring your company’s story to life, saying in a few moments what might ordinarily take several pages of text

Video can encapsulate the essence of your business and portray you as modern, forward thinking and innovative. It can be used to celebrate innovation or success, or to highlight the breadth and diversity of your business. Video doesn’t replace well written web content – video complements and enhances it, bringing greater colour, life and value to your corporate story.

The growing popularity and acceptance of social media have added a new dimension to the use of video in corporate communications.

Using video can bring your company message to a wider and more diverse audience. From BBC iPlayer to YouTube, watching video online is now a part of everyday life for huge numbers of people. As a result, people are increasingly looking for the same breadth of content delivery from corporate communications.

The announcement of company results is a major part of corporate communications and many large organisations have come to see the value of live webcasts.

These are broadcast on the company website and work in tandem with other site content – charts, presentations, reports... They provide an excellent vehicle for management to explain and expand on the results and to emphasise key messages for the year ahead.

Video can be a really effective way of delivering company announcements.

It provides a very flexible and dynamic way of keeping people informed and completely up to date. It is also a very good way of demonstrating control during difficult situations – a direct message from senior management at a time of crisis can be a great way to reassure staff and investors.

Video can provide a tremendous insight into the daily life of your company – helping to attract new recruits.

Many companies use videos of their staff doing their daily jobs or talking about their roles to highlight the diversity of opportunities, to show the company’s global breadth or to demonstrate the company culture.

Video can play a great role in internal communications too, via intranets – and has become a key training tool for many organisations.

Video training provides great flexibility for employees to learn at their own speed and convenience. It can also prove to be very cost effective for employers – with reduced teaching costs and great longevity.

With the advent of digital video and hard disk storage, the process for capturing, editing and delivering video is both quick and cost effective.

Modern video cameras are coming down in price almost as quickly as they are reducing in size. And yet the quality and sophistication they provide continue to increase. Streaming video on to your website via a content management system is as simple as adding text or a picture.

For multinational organisations, video need not create a problem with communicating in more than one language.

At Excite, we have sophisticated subtitling applications that can ensure a five-minute video is converted into a streaming format, subtitled and uploaded to your website in as little as 20 minutes – something that can take many companies days.

As a result of developments in technology, social media sites have provided more compelling ways to tell stories and deliver content, but many corporate websites continue to lag behind – with technical concerns often given as an excuse.

Today, high-speed broadband and more sophisticated computers provide a very high technical baseline, with few users unable to access rich media on websites.

The modern web-user now simply expects to find video and other rich media on websites – with companies that do not deliver a range of content increasingly seen as being out of touch and behind the times.