I watched the CEO Summit live on the web this year. It is cool that they streamed Bill’s keynote and you can watch it now on demand. My favorite part was the following section about 10 minutes in:
The last thing here I wanted to mention is that with video arriving on the Internet, it’s possible for a company to create essentially their own TV channel. And it’s actually better than a TV channel in that people can come in and watch at any time video on demand.
A great example of this for Microsoft is that there’s a special customer group which are software developers, and having them excited about our work and getting their feedback is critical to our success. And historically while we would do face-to-face events, our ongoing communication with them was through the trade press. And of course we still do that, but what we have now is just a couple of employees who walk around with handheld cameras and interview individual developers, ask them what they’re working on that’s fun or hard, and they put hours of that video, new video up every week, and then we have over 4 million unique developers coming in and watch those videos on our Web site. That’s not buying advertising, it’s just buying that little handheld camera and having the right interviewer create a sense of dialogue, and then we use that channel for people to say did you like what you heard, do you think we should give that more priority, do you see something we’re not doing, and so it’s really changed the nature of our relationship with those developers. And so it’s actually a TV channel that if you compared it, it would actually have more viewership than most of the cable TV channels, and yet it’s a very targeted activity we’re engaged in there.
We’re also starting that up for our broader set of users, people who use Microsoft Office, learning about some of these best practices, and we’re just at the beginning of that. And so I think we’ll see lots of examples of where that can be done, whether it’s simply staying in touch with employees around the world or particular groups of customers.
I consider myself very lucky to lead the amazing team of individuals who have created
Always fun to get mentions like this. It has become quite the business with 6 million visitors visiting the sites across the network each month.
More on what’s coming next from us, very soon…
Leave a Reply