The Five Starter Moves series includes moving into audio and video. Is your organization is ready for that yet?
Getting your organization into more than just listening to the social sphere and blogging is not always the right move. Using these other media can be time-consuming, and the return on the effort is sometimes questionable. Yet audio and video connect people much more powerfully than just the printed word. It is with these tools that your clients, customers, partners, and colleagues can see the human behind the organization. This is at once scary and powerfully wonderful.
Why would your company want to use audio and video? Are you hoping to build great viral videos like Will It Blend?[97] Are you hoping to share what's going on inside your organization? Maybe you are hoping to use it for recruiting, as promoted on Standout Jobs.[98]
For audio, there are lots of applications, including giving quick audio status messages, one-to-many, instead of using voice mail way (although you can sometimes collect audio from a mobile interface as well). You can use it to do conversational tips and advice.
In video, you can screencast on your products or share inside footage about how things are made (people love that stuff). You can share video status messages, use it as a tool for field engineers, and perhaps as a way to build relations between multilocation organizations.
Some simple tools are in order here. There are complex ones aplenty, but here are some really good, simple, baby-step tools to help you get into creating audio and video for your organization.
Utterli is a platform to enable sending audio, pictures, video, and text to the Web (to its community site, but it also can hook to your blog and post there simply, too). The audio messaging capability works on any phone that has the number 2 on the keypad. Technically, it works like leaving a voice mail, only it takes that message, digitizes it, and allows you to play it back as a digital file from your phone, Utterli's web site, or your blog.
Magnify[99] offers a Flash-based webcam video-recording platform that is simple if you have a webcam to attach to a computer or if you want to upload movies you shot from another camera. I've used it for a few months and it works well.
I'm not so sure. I think it's up to the organization, how you're thinking of using audio or video, and what you're thinking you can accomplish. I think the status messages idea for either audio or video makes for a great start, though. From there, you can explore, take small steps, and decide whether there's something else to consider.