Who could have anticipated the entire buzz about video today? Companies on the forefront of communications and related technologies have found that videos build organization cultures, improve workforce engagement, reduce costs and contribute to business growth.

Video can actually add efficiencies and improve deliverables, while opening up new opportunities to cost effectively share ideas and information with customers, prospects and employees, and supporting thought leadership in your industry and with the public.

When you think about it, there are numerous ways to leverage video to strengthen most any organization and bring the stakeholders together to meet its goals. Kaltura's Aaron Wald was our primary resource to develop this overview of the many valuable ways that video can contribute to the internal and external communications strategy of your company.

For Corporate Communications, video provides a scalable solution to deliver engaging corporate announcements to thousands of employees with:

• Recordings of company events for on demand viewing
• Executive video messaging
• Recording interviews
• Congratulatory messages (holiday greetings, employee recognition, etc.)

This is a valuable management tool, by improving top-to-bottom communications and opening communications channels. Video can raise the level of organizational knowledge and improve collaboration of a decentralized workforce. The personal on-camera appearance adds authenticity to senior management, and also creates an engaging approach for leaders to communicate and align goals. Management may use video for employee or team briefings, town halls and announcements, interviews and recognition, for example.

Human Resources can use video to build employee communities. It is an aid to recruit talent, promote initiatives (rewards, volunteering, and diversity). It can be used to promote HR initiatives and contests to highlight company spirit, share HR information for employees (benefits, maternity leave, and performance appraisal). The benefits to strive for include an increased sense of corporate community, improved employee engagement, retention, and improved internal mobility by providing employees insight into various teams/groups.

Training is essential to prepare employees for your business' constant evolution. With a global workforce or a smaller one that operates across multiple locations, fast training is needed to keep the organization unified. Video can be used for training modules, employee on boarding, "how to" videos, learn on-the-go, and establishing a searchable video knowledge base.

Improving access to IT and support help with effective videos can reduce customer support calls, reduce support response times, and increase governance and security with all content centrally managed. FAQ videos are a valuable resource for employee customer support.

Product development (and R&D) is able to utilize video to develop products faster and with cost efficiency. Video can be produced to summarize information about new technologies involved with testing and development, record and share technical collaboration (e.g. record how to design, build or configure and get feedback on it). The results can be an increase in the number of product ideas and enhancements that are generated by enabling employees from across the organizations or from partners to connect with the process and participate in idea generation and problem solving.

Marketing has helped pave the way for video as an internal communications device by demonstrating the value of bringing brands to life through social and digital channels. Externally, video continues to grow in popularity for brand awareness, promotion and education.

As marketing continues to innovate with video to generate leads, increase web and social traffic, we continue to learn the power of video to engage customers and the public. This learning is an important resource for developing internal communications strategies.

Sales can use or repurpose video produced for employee training or marketing for product demos and share customers success stories. From a training perspective, video is an excellent tool to keep sales up to date anytime, anywhere. Video can be a sales accelerator. It can lead to increased sales, faster sales cycles, improved productivity among sales reps, and access to latest information on products.

The resource for this article is Aaron Wald, Kaltura

In case you have yet to leverage video across your organization, here are samples of smart, clever and effective approaches.

Corporate Communications: Uses from employee engagement to training

"We (heart) Our Workplace" Video Contest (Cirrus)

Human Resources: To develop corporate culture and set policy

Workplace Discrimination story (ABC News)

Management Tool: To model leadership, engage and build culture - using serious and humorous approaches

Stanley McChrystal: Leadership is a Choice (Stanford Graduate School of Business)

Millennials in the Workplace Training Video

Sales: To educate about products or train on preferred sales techniques

SellingPower TV

Marketing: Some campaigns that entertain can even go viral

Honda's iconic Ferris Bueller ad

By Eric Frankel, CEO and Founder, StarGreetz

In 1941, TV station WNBT changed the face of advertising with the first-ever "authorized" television commercial for the Bulova Watch Company.

Since then, advertisers have been looking to find new and unique ways to deliver video commercials to consumers -- while consumers have tried to find new and unique ways to avoid watching commercials.

The advent of big data, social data and user-generated data, along with the invention of high-
speed video personalization platforms, have created the opportunity for brands and advertisers to utilize these data sources to deliver millions (or billions) of versions of commercials rather than one-size-fits-all TV spots.

As brands seek to increase their relationship with customers (or potential customers) and as DVRs/ad skipping becomes more ubiquitous, newspaper/magazine circulation continues to decrease and online banner ads garner fractions of a percent click-through rates, relevant, robust and compelling video advertising is likely to become the norm.

Personalized video messages may take the form of a thank you email from the chairman of an airline for a recent flight or a Facebook reminder from an auto manufacturer about a lease's expiration and an offer to test-drive a brand new model. With 66% of online shopping transactions sitting in abandoned "shopping carts," imagine how activating a personalized video message might be in convincing consumers to "check out".

In the future, many experts predict that most, if not all, video will be streamed directly to your IP (Internet protocol) television. Accordingly, advertisers will be able to deliver tens of millions of specific messages to individual homes and even unique family members who log in or are recognized by these "smart sets."

In short, the way brands converse utilizing video with consumers is rapidly changing and hopefully the outcome for advertisers and consumers will be beneficial to all parties.