The Snap portion of my presentation at the 2nd Annual New Media Marketing Conference.
Almost all internal communicators agree that the advent of ‘web 2.0’ and ‘social media’ has created a revolution in a stagnated industry, frustrated with a lack of solutions to reach apathetic employees and engage with them effectively. Newsletters, posters, emails, intranets, magazines etc. were just not creating the impact required to deliver their corporate messages.
When I discovered the potential uses within internal communications of this new technology standard, I jumped up and down with joy, booked the video media team for three days and recorded messages from my boss, for the marketing team, until he felt like an over-used answering machine! Back to the media studio, edited the clips, converted for easy web access, rushed back to my office, sent them up to my (well impressed) boss and got to work on showing the entire marketing department these videos, maybe one a week will do? That’s where I got stuck.
How am I going to send these videos or vidcasts, to be more in there with the web 2.0 lingo, to a targeted group of employees at a multitude of different locations across South Africa and the UK? Emails? Not possible. Company’s website? These videos are for an internal audience only. Intranet? It’s so boring that no-one goes on there, plus I.T. is concerned about badwidth demand on the intranet.
Disappointed and under pressure to deliver these messages, I hit the internet for a few days and found Snap. At first I wasn’t sure it was the solution I was looking for exactly but I saw potential in the product especially for a few other HR related comms issues I was helping to solve. So I arranged a demo version for me to play around with.
I was extremely impressed with the flexibility, scalability and variety of environments we got Snap to work in. I also discovered that you could in-fact deliver video (vidcasts), audio (Podcasts) and animated messages which were delivered directly to users’ desktops in a very interactive, engaging multimedia rich manner. This exciting content and delivery method would almost guarantee that the messages get read/watched/heard. Further tweaking and fiddling and I discovered that Snap is also great for delivering targeted messages to any group in any location as well as being able to engage in two-way communication with employees so it is not all top-down comms. I also like how you could attach documents such as e-newsletters and letterhead updates.
So on the surface, Snap can deliver screensavers, pop-up messages, surveys, quizzes, RSS feeds and E-mags. With more Web 2.0 style integration to come. But the real benefit for internal communicators is the ability for Snap to either bolt onto or drive your communications efforts with high response and enthusiasm rates from your audience. Whatever message you want to send out using any medium, be it web 2.0 style vidcasts or podcasts or just basic text and a pic, Snap will have an effective, engaging delivery solution for it, not to mention targeted down to the last user, if necessary, or to an entire global organisation.
Currently Snap enjoys working with clients such as Vodafone, Virgin Media, Netcare and a few more.
The true magic of Snap is hard to explain and is much more effective when seen in action so if you are interested in seeing the solution in action, drop me at line at jonmichaelbishop[@]gmail.com and I will arrange a fully working demo for you.
