How can you 'Gather Voices' to make a compelling story for your organization? With video as explained by CEO Michael Hoffman.

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Speak PR podcast. My name is Jim James and I'm delighted on this episode to introduce Michael Hoffman, who is the founder and CEO of Gather Voices, who's joining us today from Chicago. Michael, welcome.

Thank you, Jim. Good to be here, Michael.

I was looking online for innovative solutions to do with video and how people can share stories around their organizations, where it's from the outside in rather than the inside out. Please share with us about Gather Voices. What's your service offering and how can people find that as a part of the value for their businesses?

Sure. So Gather Voices is software that makes it easy to create or collect videos from anyone, anywhere in the world, on any device, and to easily manipulate that video, that media, to edit it, to add branding, add a call to action, those kind of things, and be able to publish it. And the reason that that's interesting right now is there's two reasons. One is that video is the kind of content that's dominating online. And video gets 1,200% more shares than text or images, for example. But video has been traditionally expensive and slow. And so especially for organizations without the ginormous budgets and the ability to have large in house production agencies, video is important, but hasn't been able to be solved. And so we solve that. But I think there's another piece of this that has really fueled our growth that is very relevant to PR professionals, which is that today things need to be real and authentic and can't be made up and fake. And so when I started, I started a digital agency, a marketing agency, 15 years ago, and at that time, production quality was the most important thing and cleverness was really important. And today that's not it. It's, it's real, authentic stories. And what companies are figuring out is that when they ask their people, when they ask their community of customers or members or fans to tell their own stories, those people come up with things they could have never imagined, never invented. And that's the best material. That's the material that people want. And so what, what we're doing at Gather Voices, we're unlocking that opportunity to collect those stories with video, to create a powerful new stream that supports what PR professionals really want to do.

That sounds amazing. So how does that work from a practical point of view? Do you have one client account and everybody sends in? Could you just walk us through? From a practical point of view, does who has the contract, as it were, with Gather Voices and how does it work from a practical point of view?

So Gather Voices Contract can be with the company or with the agency that supports the company. And the software is fully branded, every instance of the software. So if you, if it's your company, everything's going to look like and feel like it comes from your company, not from us. We're really just the, we're powering this activity. We're not creating some kind of consumer brand. And so the company creates in our platform what we call a request for video. And a request is basically that prompt that gets somebody to make a video. That somebody can be an employee, can be a customer, can be a thought leader, it doesn't really matter. The request has branding in it, of course, but it also has a time limit. It has talking points. And so a time limit because you don't want somebody rambling on for 20 minutes because you have to then edit that. And that creates a tremendous amount of more work as you know, and slows things down. So when you create time limits and you give people very clear instructions, the content you get back is much more focused. It's that piece that you want. And you can assemble different pieces together into a bigger piece. But giving that user some real narrow clarity helps a lot. So that request for video can also include a video introduction. So imagine that I'm asking you for a video and when you click on something you see me saying, hi, thanks for coming to make a video. Here's what we want you to talk about. And what we found is that that video request actually creates more engagement. Because the psychological thing that's going on is, oh, that's a video that doesn't seem so hard. I can do that. And that makes sense. So the software bottles that request up into a link that can be shared via email, via social media, via text message, or it can be embedded directly into a website or form or existing workflow. For example, if somebody's purchasing something, that thank you page can have one of those requests for video built in so that you're collecting content in a passive way all the time and finding those gems of stories.

Yeah. So you could really get real time customer testimonials with video in real time, which is golden.

Yeah, exactly. And you can ask questions that aren't necessarily just self serving questions. Right. That's something I think PR professionals know better than marketers maybe is that you need a hook that is relevant and interesting. And that hook can't be, we've got great stuff, buy our stuff. Right. It has to be some story. So being able to ask people about, you know, the first time that they experienced something or, you know, things that ladder into your company and your product, but aren't necessarily that direct, self serving testimonial, which of course there's a place for. And of course this software can do that. But we're thinking in a much broader way about creating a story environment that supports a brand.

That sounds fantastic. My mind's going wild with all the opportunities there for doing that. In terms of what kind of case studies, who's using Gather Voices now? Because it only started just in 2017, I think, right?

That's right. We're pretty new to the market for sure. And we have both an eclectic group of customers on the one hand, and then a lot of traction in particular in one area. So in terms of eclectic, we have leading hospitals, we have some large law firms and other kind of professional service organizations. We have some big consumer packaged good companies. But a lot of our traction has come from member organizations and those doing virtual events. I think the reason is that a member organization in particular, their whole reason for being is the members. And so the member stories have a value that maybe is higher than, let's say, customer stories for a company that.

Sells because they're subscribers to the organization, aren't they? They fund the organization themselves and they.

Want to be part of a community of members. And so building that community becomes really important.

So, Michael, then tell us, you know, in this era of Zoom, where we've. We've probably got enough video, haven't we? How does Gather Voices, you know, do something different for organizations and companies?

That's a great question, because everyone is very focused on zoom these days and audio, video conferencing, which is terrific, but it's only one tiny slice of communications that we need to do. Zoom is a synchronous medium, which means you and I have to be on here at the same time, which is great. If our time zones match up, for example, which is great. But we don't want to spend all day on this. And what if we want to communicate with a group of thousands of customers or members? How do we do that with Zoom? So there's a large world of asynchronous content, the kind of things that are recorded in advance and used later, and they could be used on websites, social media. Most of the video content is not synchronous. And so companies really need this ability to collect video that they're going to use later and that later could be in a virtual event, because you don't want to run an event where you have to worry about Everybody's Internet, not just your own. So collecting content in advance also allows you to have many more people engaged in your event. And one of the things that we've discovered is that when you ask people to tell their stories and you include their stories in your content, whether it's a virtual event or elsewhere, people pay attention differently. They feel much more like co creators than they do like they're being talked at. And that creates a deeper sense of connection and community, which is a very powerful thing for brands.

Yeah, I can really see the value of getting the prepackaged content and as we find even just ourselves. Right. With technology not always being reliable, even, you know, live shows are not all live. Right. There's a lot of prepared material. What about a case study? Can you give us an example of how Gather Voices has been used by an organization?

Sure. So we have a lot of different clients Gather Voices. We have professional services firms and all kinds of different organizations, but many of our clients are those who run events and virtual events now, of course, and also membership organizations. And one that comes to mind is the Emergency Nurses Association. They are a large group association that represents emergency nurses around the world. And this is obviously a very important time for them. Emergency nurses are on the front lines of the COVID crisis and so they need to communicate out to their membership. They have a lot of important information. Well, how do they do that? Well, they can send yet another email that's all text that we all get all day long that people don't want to read or open. Or their leadership and experts and thought leaders can make videos very easily using Gather Voices and then share those videos out on their website in an email on social media in a way that's much easier. In the old days, those experts would have to either hire a camera crew or go to a studio or some complicated way to create content. With Gather Voices, they can record on their own device. But what's. What's different about just recording on your own device by yourself is the content's automatically routed to your communications team and you don't have to learn how to do Dropbox or complicated things. All of the content's in one place and there's a set of tools that allow your team to put your branding on it, put a call to action on it, trim the part where your finger is touching the screen to turn it off or whatever, and do that really simply.

Good. I was going to say, because actually one of the big problems with any project where you've got more than one contributor is compilation. Right and the editorial work that takes place in post production for any kind of TV show, you know, the number of minutes you actually get to watch are often just, you know, maybe even 10% of the ones that were filmed in the rushes. So.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think one of the insights that we've had is that if you give people very directed instructions, you get back much shorter pieces of content that require less of that post production effort. And so part of the way our system's built is to guide people to talk about the part that you really want and give them time limits that enforce that and make them give you that sound bite or that short piece of content that you don't have to pull out of some larger video.

Michael, that sounds absolutely fantastic. I can really see the benefits. Having sat and tried to edit numerous videos myself, I can really see the value of that. And then in terms of the kind of agreements that companies have on a commercial side, I always like on the speak PR to talk about the money as well, because our listeners are business owners.

Sure. So most of our clients are, are organizations that have in excess of 5 million US dollar revenue or budgets. And so we're not yet able to serve the lower end of the market. And most of our clients are purchasing annual or multi year subscriptions to our product which average around 18,000 US per year. And you know what they're finding is that the amount that they spend less on professional production. When I ran a marketing agency, that annual subscription amount was the average cost of a single video.

Yeah, I was going to say that's not dissimilar to maybe a sort of three to five minute shoot, especially if you go on location. Right.

But we also have a different model with agencies as well. So when the way that we are servicing either one off event video or smaller organizations is through their agencies, and we have models that allow agencies to purchase a license, but to be able to sub license out to their, their clients because. Yeah, and here's what we know, and you know as well, is that the software, all any software, is great for what it does, but the software doesn't contain the intelligence that those agencies and those practitioners have about how do you use it, how do you make it effective, what do you do with that content? Those are the things that we believe, you know, that the practitioners really bring to the table. And what we're trying to do is create an ecosystem of folks who believe in video and believe that video is really important and they can create whole opportunities and services around what our software enables. So all of the sudden you're able to get a lot more video content from a lot more people. Well, what do you do with that and how do you weave that opportunity into all of the initiatives that you're taking?

Michael that's absolutely fantastic. Michael Hoffman, CEO and founder of Gather Voices if you want to find out more about Gather Voices, yes, they can.

Just go to our website, it's gathervoices Co. And they can go there and learn more about what we're doing. And they can also just give me a ring, let's say virtually. They can send me an email. I'm just michaelathervoices co and I'm happy to to speak with anyone.

Michael, thank you so much for joining us today. And under digital storification, which is part of our five Stage Speak methodology, I can really see the value and the power of Gather Voices. I'm really flattered and delighted that you've been willing to come on our show and share firsthand about your offering.

Well, thank you, Jim. I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

So with that, I'd like to wish everybody great health and a profitable business and that you keep on communicating and preferably by Gathering Voices. Thank you so much.