Author: Danielle Smith

Bringing the Right Energy to Your Video

Creating a successful video campaign begins with some very simple but important factors. You want to be yourself on camera but also provide a perfect balance between giving it your all and not enough. Although it can be intimidating in front of those bright lights, a quick boost in energy can often be the key ingredient needed to make a successful video. Coming off with too little energy in your video can be boring and uninteresting to your audience. At the same time, too much energy may have you coming off as scary or disingenuous. You’ll definitely need some practice to make sure your video doesn’t sound rehearsed or rigid. Thankfully, we can help! Next time you’re preparing to make a new video, try following the steps below to feel more natural and comfortable.

Positive Reinforcement

It’s a fact that most people really don’t like to be on camera. However, some positive reinforcement (to yourself or someone else making the video) can go a long way. Tell yourself (or the subject) that they’re doing great and use sayings like “you’ve got this” during preparation. This type of positive reinforcement creates good energy that’s also highly motivating.

Multiple Takes

Don’t finish shooting your video until you’ve made sure to complete multiple takes of it. The last thing you want is to sit down and start editing only to find that some of the shots were off. This happens more often than you would think and it can be a very costly mistake if you’ve hired someone to speak in your video. Save extra time and headache by doing multiple takes during your shoot. Then, if there are any issues during editing, they can be easily fixed or replaced by your backups.

Stay Positive

Messing up is perfectly okay. All of us have messed up at some point and one thing many successful performers do is laugh at mistakes. Have fun and shake it off because you’re going to be a superstar once the final piece is published. Shaking the jitters and mistakes out of you early on can make a world of difference to your final presentation.

Rip Takes

Do you or your subject sound a bit too rigid or rehearsed when practicing? Try delivering some of your lines with over-the-top energy. Believe it or not, doing this can actually reset your talent’s energy scale and make it easier to take levels down a bit. Remember, you want to hit the perfect amount of energy when doing your next take.

You don’t need to be a professional actor in order to make a great video campaign. Just practice and keep all of the points above in mind. The right presence and energy can turn into more sales and a really creative video could even go viral!

8 Ways to Increase Employee Engagement with Video Content

Whenever an organization implements a new program, its success is contingent on employee engagement. But video can sometimes take a little encouragement to make and sometimes it’s difficult to know where to begin. Here are a few video content ideas you can share with your team, utilizing everything from gamification to vendor collaboration, and beyond.

Hot tip: CircleHD has plenty of features to help you easily set up “games” for your company. Users can set a start and end date and a rewards section which are all tied to a points-system displayed on your virtual leaderboard.

SharkTank 

Is there an opportunity the company should invest in? A 2-5 minute pitch video may be the way to go. Big ideas come from anyone regardless of position and the best storytellers often win support. Let the collective smarts of your team identify and incubate winners faster.

Improvement Videos

If you can identify waste, you should have the job autonomy to fix it. Shoot a one-minute “before and after” video yourself, and encourage others to follow suit by highlighting the best content at the next company meeting.

A consortium of 500 companies in manufacturing, healthcare, and technology sectors have entirely transformed with this simple but high-impact culture hack.

CEO to CEO Video Series

RIP It

Want to record a live web meeting? Just rip it live from the source. Record your screen, assign it to a channel, transcribe and upload. Within minutes (not hours or days) your video asset is uploaded and published. Find spoken words now in search. Listen later in the company TV app on the drive home.

Vendor Corner 

Do you have a vendor with a particularly interesting proposition? Ask them for a video to share in your “Vendor Corner” where new opportunities go to be vetted company-wide.

Hackathon 

Set goals. Explain rules. Put the innovation to a video pitch. Highlight winners.

Sales Influencer Awards

The brands with the best stories pull ahead of the pack. Challenge reps to create their own unique video pitches then allow the company to vote for the best using the CircleHD 5-star rating system.

Train

Create a lineup of videos and assign a playlist lesson to other users. Viewers can mark when a lesson is complete.

Looking for something more complicated? CircleHD can integrate out-of-the-box with your existing LMS.

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Are you looking for a secure platform to host your original video content? Contact us for a demo and learn more about how CircleHD can facilitate better employee engagement and knowledge-sharing across your organization.

How Employee Collaboration Impacts Your Business

Employee collaboration is important for any organization. Not only does it help foster better company culture, but it can also help a business become even more successful. While there are no hard KPIs for employee collaboration, these are some areas teamwork can positively impact.

Expertise Specialization

Often time, collaboration empowers employees to become experts on the specific subject matter. Not only does this help their professional growth, it benefits the company to now have someone who specializes in a particular area. When these experts socialize and work with each other, they share this knowledge and are able to solve complex problems for the organization.

Setting Up A Team-Oriented Environment

In order for collaboration to be effective, the company must first set everyone up for success. Encourage employees to shift their mindset from individualism to focusing on the team. A great way to do this is to promote any existing collaboration efforts the company has already undertaken.

Leaders should also find ways to illustrate how this teamwork strengthens the company using growth, reputation, financial profits and more as examples.

Implement the Proper Technology Tools

One great technology that promotes employee collaboration is CircleHD. With useful web-based tools, users can create and share on-demand videos or interact with live demonstrations throughout the company–easily sharing each other’s specialized knowledge with others.

Leadership can also utilize CircleHD to amplify the new company goals and help employees understand their role in the overall success of the company.

Hot tip: From reports to data and more, staff members can easily dictate which team members can see certain pieces of content and more.

Want to learn more about how CircleHD can help your company increase employee collaboration across your entire organization? Schedule a demo today.

4 Ways to Build An Effective Sales Onboarding Program

A new team member is always exciting. In order to create a successful future for them at your company, you’ll want to engage them right from the start with an effective sales onboarding program. One example of this is to implement a “pre-hire program”, which will feature everything they need to know about working with your company. This will set the foundation for their tenure with your company and give them a structured engagement model that will enhance productivity.

How can you set your sales onboarding program up for success? Let us count the ways:

Start Before Their Hire Date

Since your pre-hire program will set the stage for the rest of the onboarding schedule, you’ll want to get them engaged with the company before they even start. You’ll want to show them your company’s value and mission and this can be done before their first start date. You can provide them with things like a mentor, an introduction to the team, provide them access to group technologies and more. This way they are more familiar with their job even before they start.

Be Structured and Consistent

Meet that new hire’s expectations with consistency and structure. This can be done in a number of ways, such as giving them a welcome package, linking them with a mentor or doing icebreakers with the team so that they feel excited about working with your company. You want new hires to feel excited because they’ll be more effective at their sales goals.

Have a Team Mentoring Program

It can be daunting coming into a new sales team, which is why a formal mentoring program might be a good idea. Have them link up with a more experienced member of the sales them so that they can see what’s expected of them at the company. This will also accelerate their professional development and help get the accumulated with how things are done.

Have a Sales Onboarding Playbook

Creating one sales playbook will provide new hires with specific knowledge on things should go, including product knowledge, selling activities and approaches. Give them a detailed understanding on how the sales process goes within your company so they can easily follow it.

The Role of Human Resources In Corporate Digital Transformation

We live in a digital world and many of today’s new technologies have found themselves in the workplace. Enterprises are constantly adopting new digital tools to help them succeed, be more productive, get more leads, generate more sales and so on. Even today’s workforce is much different than generations before with younger employees more inclined to adopt these new technologies than generations before them.

These new software platforms have expanded into every part of an enterprise, from sales, to IT, marketing, payroll and more. While some platforms work independently of each other, it’s the ones that place everything in one convenient place that are gaining more traction and popularity.

What About HR Departments?

So this leaves the question about HR leaders and their new role in such a digital age in business. Well, HR departments need to evolve to catch up with the times, changing from a supporting and administrative function to becoming a true business enabler. As the HR department becomes more digitalized, it will greatly impact a company’s chances to succeed over the competition.

HR staff needs to not just sit back and let the IT department handle the responsibilities of a digital transformation for the rest of its employees and needs take ownership of some aspects of it to get all employees on board. Having the HR department behind the technological transformation will not only showcase leadership and better adoption with the rest of the staff, but it will also raise the department as a strategic partner in the entire process rather than just a support function.

And there are many digital programs for businesses that are meant for HR departments and their particular job tasks. Many of these platforms help streamline some of their everyday tasks so that they can easily focus their attention on other matters like creating a corporate culture that’s more inclusive and positive or implementing ongoing employee education.