About Mike Green
Mike Green is a Vice President of Strategic Development and Alliances at Brightcove with a background in Product Marketing, Business Development and media technologies.
Prior to joining Brightcove, Mike worked for Comcast, leading a number of the company’s technology and advertising partnerships and the incubation of new video services.
He is a graduate of Brown University and holds an M.B.A in marketing from Columbia Business School.
“People are finding better ways to personalize virtual experiences to drive conversions.”
– Mike Green, VP of Strategic Development & alliances at Brightcove
Socialive: What is a key takeaway you learned from brands producing video content in 2020?
Mike Green: This year has been challenging on so many fronts. With respect to video, I increasingly saw the concept of what world-class looks like for brands who want to use video.
“World-class” might be using video for a fashion show live stream, corporate communications from home, CEO town halls, or virtual training for new hires. The number of live and on-demand use cases for training and ecommerce really blew up. To me, “world-class” is a brand that found a way to accelerate video production at a greater scale and deliver on multiple of these use cases. That has been an important trend.
The other trend I’d like to mention is production value. The production value doesn’t have to be necessarily as high as it had been in the past. If you are a B2B or B2C company, the expectation isn’t that it has to be NFL or NBC level quality every time.
SL: What do you consider the top challenge for businesses looking to produce video content in 2021?
MG: The challenge is certainly engagement, and that has always been the case. I think even more so now since we spend all of our time in front of a screen on Zoom, Google Hangouts, Netflix, or whatever it is. To break through with engaging content in this environment where people are maxed out on video is challenging.
SL: How can businesses minimize digital fatigue?
MG: Here’s an example: We worked with HubSpot to stream INBOUND 2020, their big annual conference. They actually made a bunch of their content from the event available as audio only. If you really just want to hear the substance of someone’s presentation, you can take it to-go and listen to it while walking and getting fresh air.
Other ways to keep engagement up is by having personalization and making the content quickly available on demand. Take a live episode and quickly convert it to VOD. Chop it up into consumable bites, and make it easy to find by optimizing your metadata and SEO. That way, people can get the most important bits because no one wants to consume more [work] video at this point.
SL: What are your thoughts on what the virtual event space will look like next year?
MG: Virtual events are here to stay. We’ve seen a lot of customers have way more success than they anticipated when going virtual. It really runs the gamut for organizations.
We work with a company called FreightWaves, the Bloomberg of the shipping industry, if you will. By transitioning their in-person conference to virtual, they found 90,000 people touching their content, whereas perhaps it was usually a 2,000 in-person event. We have to have good data around video to see if you touched all those people, and look at the ROI.
Virtual events can scale and reach international audiences in a way that a local event might not. There are certain industries where in-person events will come roaring back such as food, automotive and textile. But overall, virtual events are here to stay.
SL: How will virtual events impact B2B purchase decisions in 2021?
MG: People are getting more sophisticated on how to enable the ROI of being a part of these events as a sponsor. Cvent, a partner of Socialive and Brightcove, did a great job with the Cvent CONNECT show, where I believe there were 40,000 attendees. Brightcove had a virtual booth there, and some of those
turned into real deals for us. So, it can be done. People are getting more sophisticated about it by using data and finding better ways to personalize experiences to drive conversions.
SL: How do you think a business can better personalize their virtual event?
MG: Over the years, people have become more sophisticated with connecting video consumption data to their marketing automation platforms. Based on video consumption, you can send different personalized messages.
For example, you can feed into Marketo, Eloqua, and HubSpot if you want to send an email follow-up to a user who consumed 90 percent of a video and showed a high level of interest.
On the other hand, if the user consumed 10 or 15 percent of the video, perhaps the user was not interested, or you need to convince them that the content or topic is important for them to invest in.
This is also relevant for the virtual event space when you send follow-up emails, or need to decide what imagery you want to include in the event recap email when the event is available on-demand. Some of it is AI, and some of it is just good, clean data hygiene and management.
SL: Will video replace other forms of internal communication in 2021?
MG: I certainly think CFOs would hope so. We have a Brightcove Sales Kickoff coming up next month, which is the most important time of year when the whole company across the world comes together. Obviously that’s not really happening [in person] this year, and that’s a big savings.
With video, we have to make sure the content is impactful and the relationships can be formed. CFOs should be happy in the short term, but hopefully everyone can figure out how to be productive through video in the long term. When things go back to normal, making those decisions on a case-by-case basis is going to be important.
SL: What’s next for Brightcove?
MG: Over the past year, there has been a great growth trajectory for the company. One of the things we have to do going forward is to make video available in more types of applications and experiences. We’re a trusted brand in delivering high quality video in any type of environment. So, how many types of environments need video at that quality and other things that follow, such as metrics? I think an important goal for us next year is to allow more companies to deliver their end user experience with Brightcove powering it.
SL: Any other thoughts you’d like to share?
MG: Tough times like this often force innovation. The experiences I’ve seen people create for all sorts of customer segments in media, marketing, and sports have been innovative.
For example, we saw the LPGA experiment with new ways to keep fans engaged. Two of their players streamed golf video games, while talking trash to one another. This may seem so small, but it really did force innovation.
Lastly, I think Socialive has been great at allowing people to put together video experiences on the fly and see what works. That’s one of the exciting things to have come out of a really rough year.
