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Al Maag |
As seen in Business Journal of Phoenix -- Video may have killed the radio star, but it’s giving businesses new ways to train staff and educate customers.
Online video also gives companies a forum to display their wares on specially designed YouTube channels or on their own Web sites.
Marianne Cherney, founder and CEO of online training firm GoGogh.com, has seen her business turned on its head. Two years ago, 80 percent of her clients wanted in-person training. Today, the same number expect it to be streamed to their desktops.
“What we’re seeing is everything is going online,” she said.
Online video has seen tremendous growth. According to comScore, a Web site that tracks Internet use, more than 157 million people in the U.S. viewed videos in June, watching a total of about 19.4 billion. Google, which owns YouTube, accounted for about 39 percent of those views.
While most sites in the top 10 are entertainment-related, businesses have begun taking notice of the online video surge and have started using it to educate and train buyers about their products.
Training the masses
GoGogh is an example of a business adjusting to new technology and the changing demands of the digital age. Cherney, who has 19 years of experience in the information technology training field, launched the company about three months ago.
The site is designed to provide IT professionals with training on the latest technologies. Cherney said she went digital to cut down on travel and expenses associated with in-person visits, and to provide a lower-cost option available anywhere companies conduct business.
The timing proved right. Many companies were looking to stretch their training dollars in the face of the recession and were looking for alternatives. Online video makes it much easier to train multiple people at different times while maximizing their productivity, Cherney said.
GoGogh’s software, developed by Sonic Foundry, allows trainers to incorporate voice, video and PowerPoint slides into a seamless display that can be viewed live or archived for a later date, Cherney said.
“You can create the content very quickly, and we host the content on our servers,” she said.
Cherney is expanding her business into a multimedia storehouse of training, where companies or workers can sign up starting at 12 courses for $198 a year. The site maximizes podcasts as well, and allows instructors to interact with people taking the courses.
GoGogh also has been approached by large corporations interested in setting up internal training sites, Cherney said.
“It’s where everything is going,” she said. “People are moving faster. They’ve laid people off. They only way they’re going to get training is if you bring it to them quickly and cheaply.”
Companies are looking at GoGogh and others like it because of tighter budgets, said Kevin Kearney, product line manager for storage protocol products for Chestnut Ridge, N.Y.-based LeCroy Corp.’s Protocol Solutions Group.
“Apart from those considerations, GoGogh provides us with a new way of delivering content that is very much in tune with the way engineers — and everyone else, for that matter — tend to access information these days,” he said.
The company offers short- and long-form tutorials, and Kearney said the short-form videos have enabled customers to learn bite-size information at their own pace.
A better way
Tempe Police Department officials went with online training largely because its training budget was slashed as the city looked to make up revenue. Another reason was the department needed a way for several hundred police officers to get their required training without having to be removed from their duties for days at a time, said Gina Pinch, training coordinator for Tempe Police.
“To just get all the officers in a room, we had to schedule 20 sessions,” she said.
Tempe Police opted to go with Flypaper Studio Inc., a Phoenix-based startup with a foundation in corporate and educational training. The company’s software uses Adobe Flash to incorporate words and pictures into materials that are easy to build, said Jared Vishney, vice president of business development for Flypaper.
Video often is a better way for people to learn, Vishney said.
“I would argue that some of the best educators in the nation are the Discovery Channel and the History Channel, because they present information that is compelling,” he said.
Even with its limited budget, the department can offer multiple training programs that officers can view on any department computer, including those installed in patrol cars. While Pinch could not estimate the amount of money the department is saving with online training, it has been able to cut in half the amount of time officers spend in training each year, from about four days to two.
“The supervisors and the administrators love it because it pulls people off the street much less,” she said.
Surfing channels
While some companies go to training centers or YouTube for their video, Avnet Inc. four months ago launched its OnDemand Web site, developed by New Angle Media. The site allows the Phoenix-based electronics distributor to host its own videos or videos from suppliers to provide more product education in a business-to-business environment.
Al Maag, chief communications officer for Avnet, said the idea was to leverage video as a form of social media so companies can provide education through specific channels.
“I knew we had a success when our competitors were calling it up and looking at it,” he said.
New Angle, which developed a virtual trade show for Avnet, was looking for a way to showcase business videos without having people wade through a lot of media they weren’t interested in, said Business Development Director Steve Roberts.
“We went in and understood their business and developed this for that business,” he said.
The site lets Avnet partners develop and post their own videos. The system also allows customers to buy those components directly, Roberts said.
Video is a way to keep people more focused on a topic, he said.
“When you read, how much do you remember? When you see it, hear it, you’re going to remember it better. You’re going to be more engaged,” he said.
