Behind the Scenes with Brightcove: Building culture with video

When your workforce is spread across the globe, whether in regional offices or remote home offices, building a cohesive company culture is a challenge. Because we’re a video company at heart, we rely on internal video communications to build up our culture and unite our global workforce, and we’ve found that it works pretty well. The key is personality. On two recent occasions, we had the opportunity to revitalize a couple of ongoing internal video programs, so they aligned more closely with our personality. Here’s how we did it.

C suite communications

Internal videos, particularly those involving company leadership, can be challenging for creative teams. Generally, there’s a tight lid on messages coming from the C suite, and the first impulse is to produce a tightly scripted video so the outcome is guaranteed from the start. The problem with that approach is that it ends up feeling robotic, the message doesn’t come across as friendly or warm, and natural personality is lost.

We wanted our update videos to show who Brightcove CEO Jeff Ray really is—a fun-loving, approachable leader who’s passionate about video—so that our entire global workforce feels like they know him no matter where they’re logging in from. Producer Jason Oliveira pitched a genius concept—create a “video podcast” style set, ditch the script in favor of bullet points, and let an organic conversation unfold in front of the camera. Check out the video at the top of this blog post for a behind-the-scenes look at how we did it.

It took some trust, but our first video in this style managed to inform the company of important midsummer updates while still feeling warm and conversational—and it’s much more engaging to watch than a stiff talking-head video. Jeff and his guests, Chief Revenue Officer Rick Hanson and VP of Design Carolyn Pampino, really brought it in terms of personality.

Internal events

We’ve live streamed our annual ping pong tournament in past years in an effort to help our regional and remote teams feel like they’re part of the event. It’s one of Brightcove’s big summer traditions, and we want to include our entire global workforce! This summer, we took the opportunity to build on that foundation and add some personality (there’s that word again). Like a lot of tech companies, the ping pong table at Boston HQ is a central gathering place, and the annual tournament is a tightly contested battle. We wanted this year’s live stream to reflect the drama...and, let’s be honest, the inherent silliness and fun of ping pong.

For the final match of the tournament, we added color commentary and a graphics package to the stream to mimic a real live sporting event. We also trained a camera on the scoreboard for real time, picture-in-picture score updates and mic-ed up the table for crisp game audio. Because we knew the final product would be a great way to showcase our internal culture to an external audience, we decided to stream it live to Facebook using Brightcove’s Live to Social module.

Within just a few hours, the social engagement and reach of this live event had already out-performed all the videos we’ve posted on Facebook over the last three months. Our conclusions are:

• Facebook is a great channel for behind-the-scenes and recruiting content—so consider repurposing your most fun internal comms content for Facebook.

• A little polish and personality, combined with strong visual elements and a sense of fun, boosts results for live events on Facebook.

In the end, this was a pretty low-lift, high-reward effort. We got to try something new, use the Brightcove Live solution and Live to Social, and create engaging content for social media on top of our regular internal audience.

Video is a special medium, because it can convey authenticity in a way that text and photos can’t. But you have to embrace the risk and uncertainty—otherwise your videos come off as “corporate trying to be authentic.” It’s not a good look. If you do embrace that risk, the reward of conveying your company’s personality is huge—it brings together your workforce in a way that email updates just can’t.

Need to convince your boss that video is the future for internal communications? Here’s our guide to building a case for video comms.