Business 2 CommunityFrom Text to Online Video: the New Business Media Landscape
From an initial glance at the top business press outlets, it may seem like everything is business as usual. Business leaders are still drawn to familiar publications like BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fortune, the Harvard Business Review and the Wall Street Journal, among others. But all of those publications are currently experiencing massive, rapid changes to the way they present stories. They’re moving toward a multimedia model to engage with audiences that have increasingly fragmented attention spans.
Enter online video.
As my colleague Brendan mentioned in a post about video for PR, organizations are turning to video because it enables them to tell stories in a format that audiences want to engage with and share on social platforms. This is a smart move, since Invodo expects that video will comprise up to 74 percent of internet traffic by 2017. The reason video will dominate? Because people love sharing interesting visual content. In fact, content that incorporates video attracts three times as many inbound links.
‘Seamless’
Gabriel Dance, interactive editor of the Guardian U.S., said, “Captivating people means something different with the new technologies of the web. That means allowing people to engage with it; that means allowing them to connect it to their social network. It means making it seamless, and having videos automatically play.”
Publishers are well aware of those trends and have seen the value of incorporating video first hand, as natural producers of engaging, share-worthy content. In my recent post on what the acquisition of Forbes means for PR strategies, I noted that Forbes has decided to make video a major priority for the reasons mentioned above. They’re just the latest major business press outlet that has joined the trend.
For the past couple of years, the Wall Street Journal has truly pushed the boundaries when it comes to online video. Last year, it launched WorldStream, a smartphone app that is based on reporters’ real-time video commentary, and the previous year, it introduced a reality show (!) titled Startup of the Year, in addition to its “traditional” online video channel, WSJ Live.
The Huffington Post and the Washington Post have gotten in on the action as well, with HuffPost Live and PostTV, respectively. Virtually all of the major business publications are now producing video content in one form or another.
Even Broadcast is Going Digital
This trend is not just limited to press outlets. More broadcasters are learning that it’s no longer enough to just post content from broadcasts amidst so much innovation from former print outlets invading their turf. They need to post content tailored for the digital medium. NBCNews.com, for example, put more emphasis on digital video in its relaunch earlier this year. It was clearly inspired by watching its print publications excel in the new digital medium.
According to Nieman Journalism Lab’s Caroline O’Donovan, “A lot of the activity in creating digital-first video has come from print outlets that didn’t have a broadcast legacy — think of The Wall Street Journal’s forays into WorldStream, or The New York Times’ efforts around projects like Op-Docs. TV news operations, already producing tons of video, sometimes defaulted to simply putting the same pieces online that appeared on air.”
It’s clear that the rise of business IPTV is affecting every media outlet, and it’s increasingly a factor in their prospects as companies. The outlets that are producing quality content have a bright future ahead of them, and the ones that don’t must work hard to catch up.
The PR Perspective
All of these new business IPTV channels represent a tremendous opportunity for proactive media relations efforts. With more video content being generated every day, there are more stories that a brand could tell to promote its thought leadership. Plus, because viewers are able to see and hear spokespeople, they’re more likely to feel a connection with them, which will result in a more positive impression of a brand. Combined with the fact that viewers are more likely to share the content, being included in an online video could one day be much more impactful than receiving coverage in a text-based story. It’s still early days for business IPTV, but it’s a trend worth watching closely.
Want to learn more about building an effective PR message? In The Evolution of PR, Content Marketing and Blogging, we cover:
- The ongoing changes in the world of PR
- The principles of content marketing for tech companies
- Important blogging strategies
- How to use press releases for more than just brand-building
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: From Text to Online Video: the New Business Media Landscape
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