I have blogged professionally. Seriously. Stop laughing! I blogged for work projects. Here is one of my posts for our North Main Street Improvement Project blog.
Updated: Project Updates for July 12-23, 2010
The following was for our online video company, Granicus.
Blacksburg’s Video Success Goes Mobile
by Lisa Sedlak, 9/7/2010
Lisa is the Communications Specialist for the Town of Blacksburg. She is responsible for the town’s social media accounts, web content, Blacksburg Alerts and some video production. Then there is that “other duties” part of her job description which may or may not include making sure everyone in the office is caffeinated.
Blacksburg was named “The Most Wired Town in America” by Reader’s Digest in 1996. That’s quite an accomplishment! As the Virginia Tech community and town citizens became more wired, the town found itself needing to offer more and more services online. Add in the fact that WTOB, the town’s community access TV station, is only offered with Comcast cable and many people in town use other means to get broadcast programming, we needed to find a way to put our Town Council and Planning Commission meetings online.
Enter Granicus.
The Town of Blacksburg has been using Granicus for about four years to air WTOB produced programming online. Recently, we wanted grow and market our online services in technologically creative ways. Here’s how we did it.
Increasing Exposure of Government Programs
The Town of Blacksburg prides itself in being an open government. For 24 years we have been airing Town Council and Planning Commission meetings on WTOB. We also started marketing Blacksburg services and events. Implementing a fully hosted online streaming solution allowed us to get more exposure of our content among people who live, regularly work, or do business with Blacksburg but didn’t have access to WT0B programs via Comcast.
In 2001 the Town began offering streaming video to broadcast meetings online, but the entire procedure was done in-house. Because of hosting and storage constraints, we were only able to post a single meeting at a time. Plus the process of posting a video content online was very tedious. Encoding, compressing videos into five minute increments, and posting sometimes took up to 10 days. The long turn-around time and inability to measure our viewership made us question whether streaming media was worth the effort.
Then in 2006, we were introduced to Granicus.
WOW!
Granicus allowed us to automate the streaming process and measure the popularity of programs with their reporting tools. Using the numbers from these tools, we were able to justify our use of online video and freed up time so we could produce more innovative content including Blacksburg High School Football, Dodge Ball (which was really popular with some company in San Francisco), Historic Lectures, Blacksburg news shows and community events.
In our first month of streaming we have over 3500 viewers! To date we’ve had 40,000 successful streams and over 14,000 of them have been for non-meeting content. That means, over a quarter of our online audience is taking advantage of the additional programming we’ve posted. Not bad for a town of 40,000 + (19,000 without VT students). If we would have tried to produce this content without Granicus, we would have had to add 2 more full-time positions!
Expanding Reach to Mobile Devices
After realizing that online video was appealing to our community. We decided we wanted to be able to reach citizens without them having to come to our website to get new information. Granicus was able to work with us to expand our WTOB content to a mobile platform.
Residents can now download video and audio to any computer, smart phone or other media-compatible mobile device to stay informed with what’s going on in town government or to listen to the witty commentary of Tom and Jed with the Dodge Ball Game of the Week. Also, through Granicus’ integration with iTunes, residents can get content synchronized to their accounts automatically for fast downloads to any iPod or iPhone.
The Town of Blacksburg is frequently featured in the local government podcast section of the iTunes Store, and recently ranked 74th in the top 100 local government podcasts on iTunes. This national exposure is invaluable and has really helped the Town of Blacksburg gain creditability in digital media distribution. These numbers give a strong indication that the community is utilizing the technology we are offering and gives us even more incentive to continue to grow. Right now we are using social media to promote our online presence and show off our wonderful programming.
What’s next for Blacksburg and Granicus? There are a couple of things in the works. But I can say this, like Bogey and Bacall, Blacksburg and Granicus are a great team.