Radvision is a publicly traded video conferencing company. Pravda Media was chosen to kick off Radvision’s corporate blogging project, define its strategy and provide on going support and training- all in full cooperation with the company’s evangelist, Tsahi Levent-Levi

Social media is all about commitment, and the recent case study I am doing with Radvision is a proof that enthusiastic employees, training, and long term activities brings value in the over hyped field of social media marketing.

I had the honor to consult Radvision with building a blog network based on their business units:

1. Code of Contact , written by Ran Arad, aimed at VoIP developers

2. Video over Enterprise , written by Sagee Ben Zedeff, aimed at enterprise collaboration decision makers

3. VoIP Survivor, written by Tsahi Levent Levi, the chief evangelist of this effort, which focuses about VoIP industry insights.

These blogs provide company information and general industry trends and analysis. The later helped establishing these blogs as industry resource, and not as a PR effort.

In the year since the project started, the company’s blogs provided value for both organization and writers:

1. Leads Generation -the blogs became source of information and thought leadership for the industry, potential customers contacted the company using the blog’s contact form, which in specific cases resulted in leads and deals. Also, 3^rd parties distributed these blogs to Radvision’s potential customers, positioned as expert opinion.

2. Relationships with Industry Experts - many industry experts maintain blogs which are perceived as independent source of information and analysis. These experts often affect customer’s buying decision. Radvision blogs established and strengthened its relationships with these experts.

3. Speaking Opportunities and Media Relations - Corporate blogs established its writers as industry experts regardless of their company affiliation. As such, they were quoted in industry publications and invited to participate in internal discussions by potential customers. Furthermore, Tsahi was invited to open a blog in a prominent industry publication, further strengthening Radvision’s market position.

4. Sales Support -customers referred to the blogs during sales process, as well as left comments on the blogs with relevant questions. This direct access to developers and product managers proved beneficial to the sales process. Also, the blogs became an internal briefing aid, which sales managers use to learn about industry trends and new product development.

5. Rapid Material Development - one of the bloggers created an ebook from a collection of blog posts in a specific area. This Ebook was created in a fraction of a time of writing a white paper, and was used to encourage readers to subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed. It quickly became an industry resource, that was distributed by 3rd parties to potential Radvision customers, as expert opinion.

6. Employees Satisfaction - all bloggers reported higher level of satisfaction due to their writing and industry exposure.

However, the blogs still didn’t maximize their potential:

1. Blogging effort is not directly linked with corporate marketing activities

2. The blogs are text based only, and do not utilize the benefits of originally produced video and audio shows

3. Blogs’ web addresses were only recently added to company publications and business cards

As one can see, corporate blogging could provide tangible value if done right. Stay tuned for additional information, including how to identify the right internal bloggers, required training, blog design and additional business benefits Radvision enjoyed from in its blogging effort.

Interested in receiving the full case study? Email us with the subject line: Blogging Case Study, and we will send you the full report as soon as it is ready.

We have great speakers at the event – starting with Joe Burton, CTO of unified communication group in Cisco, Matt Collier, SVP of LifeSize communications, Ty Wang, Senior director of Product Marketing at Oracle, Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho, Hakon Dahla, CTO of Tandberg, and Anatoli Levine, Director of Product Management, US, at Radvision, and IMTC President. The event covers both cutting edge technologies (such as the world beyond H264, Scalable video coding today, and conformance methodologies) as well as business issues such as unified communication beyond click to call, social networks and the enterprise, Multimedia and tele-health and many more.

It is an exciting event, taking place in an exciting location – St. Regis hotel in San Francisco. I am moderating several panels in the first day, and will be there through the event.

If you are in this business, or want to meet in San Francisco, you should come and say Hi. Here is the agenda, and you can register here.

We are holding our annual Forum in November – please find below our official call for speakers:

OFFICIAL CALL FOR SPEAKERS

2008 Fall Forum

Submission Deadline: August 15

Acceptance Notification: August 22

Technology Meets Customer Needs – Unified Communications Supporting Business

After a very successful 2007 IMTC Fall Forum Event, the IMTC is pleased to announce the 2008 Fall Forum Event taking place November 12-13, 2008 at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco, CA near VoiceCON (which will be held November 10-13 at Moscone).

The audience will be comprised of C, VP and Director level business and technical execs as well as technical management. Attendees and speakers will represent small, medium and enterprise size companies.

The IMTC

The International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC) includes more than 50 market leaders in unified communications and multimedia content delivery fields working together to create interoperable, standards based products in a non-competitive environment.

IMTC’s mission is to improve customer experience and accelerate market adoption of content delivery and unified communications solutions through interoperability of products and services based on open standards.

The EVENT PROGRAM

The 2008 IMTC Fall Forum Event will feature a combination of keynote presentations, interactive panel discussions, and individual presentations on new and exciting technologies relevant to multimedia communications.

Topics to include but not limited to the following:

• Health care Industry Unified Communications Requirements
• Financial Industry Unified Communications Requirements
• Conformance Testing & Methodology
• Online Collaboration

IMTC has launched an industry wide effort in the unified communications area, focused around creating a blueprint for unified communications implementations.

The forum will provide a venue for vendors, customers and analysts to come together to define the industry’s needs in the area of unified communications, and to create common and agreed upon implementation blueprints. The event will also provide the opportunity for the financial services and healthcare sectors to discuss their challenges and issues around the implementation of unified communications.

The program will combine business and technical sessions in multimedia telecommunications and Unified Communications. Submissions are currently being accepted for both business and technical subjects. All presentations will be given in English.

• Presentations – Presentations will be 30 minutes in length, including 5-10 minutes for Q&A. We are looking for presentations about business use cases where unified communications, video conferencing and collaboration play a significant role, the advantages of using standard technologies from a business perspective or the technical aspects of unified communications projects and protocols.

• Panel Sessions- Panels can take between 45 to 60 minutes. Unlike presentations, panel are a place of debate between different views and approaches to video conferencing and unified communications issues in addition to the topics above, panels will also cover the role of online collaboration in unified communications market.

SUBMITTING YOUR ABSTRACT

IMTC is accepting session proposals via the email to cfp08@imtc.org. Please include the following:

1. Name, title, company name & contact information

2. Brief biography

3. Presentation proposal with information on the vertical industry upon which your presentation will focus, and whether your presentation is more technical or business in nature. You are welcome to submit several distinct proposals.

We will be accepting proposals for consideration through August 15, 2008 and notifications of acceptance will begin the week of August 22, 2008.

SELECTION PROCESS

The program committee will receive all valid proposals and will review them. The choice of a session will be based on the presentation of the session and its value to the audience. Submitters will be contacted individually about their session. All decisions taken by the program committee are final.

The quality of the proposal is very important and preference will be given to business related content for November 12 and technically focused content for November 13.

Questions can be directed to the IMTC planning committee at cfp08@imtc.org

We look forward to receiving your submission!

Sincerely,

The IMTC Fall Forum 2008 Planning Committee

Over The Top Video

Tuesday 2:50 PM

Using the Internet and IP technology to deliver video services has dramatically changed the end user’s experience in both choice and control. Video options abound, from special interest portals and closed circuit programming to the new intelligent set-top devices that use computer processing to deliver rich digital options. What will these options mean to the access carrier and what does it mean for the future of content delivery?

What will keep them coming to TV, when will they turn to the computer? Will changing viewing habits continue to change the options for video delivery? Will picture quality play a determining factor in the success of these new services?

Speaker(s):

Stephen Dennison Director of CDN Solutions, Content Markets, Level 3 Communications

Maribel Lopez Research Analyst, Lopez Research

Perry Wu, CEO, BitGravity

Moderator:

Kfir Pravda IMTC Vice President of Marketing and CEO, Pravda Media

Online Video and Social Media

Wednesday 4:50 PM

Integrating video into social media applications seems to be a natural fit. New online video sites are beginning to shift more toward community-oriented platforms, where people with common interests can experience video content with complete social networking functionality such as chat, text messaging and interest profiles. This panel examines the viral growth of social networking in combination with traditional broadcast media, user generated content, live broadcast and video chat and how it will affect our viewing future.

Who will be attracted, and what are the benefits of online video to the social networker?

Who are some of the companies today providing online video and social media?

What online video advertising models will take effect in community sites?

Speaker(s):

Matt Gore Vice President of Marketing, Paltalk

Kathryn Jones Co-Founder, Synchronis.tv

Rex Wong CEO, Dave Networks

Moderator:

Kfir Pravda IMTC Vice President of Marketing and CEO

Pravda Media

Deploying Cross-Vendor Implementations in the Real World – a Customer View

Thursday 3:00 PM

A panel discussing the issues in implementing cross vendor communication solutions for video conferencing and unified communication.

Speaker(s):

Mike Brosetti, CEO and Founder, Abovetel

Dan Bruckner Director of IT Operations

Stanford Hospital and Clinics

Anatoli Levine

IMTC President and Sr Director of Software Support RADVISION

Moderator:

Kfir Pravda IMTC Vice President of Marketing; CEO

Pravda Media

I am also participating in the following panel:

Reference Architectures for Content Delivery & Unified Communications

Thursday 1:30 PM

This panel will address how to extract content from enterprise communications and insert content into both communications and collaboration within the enterprise. This covers everything from conference recordings to social network content, and there are a few standards, but this is mostly unknown territory. The focus here is not on solving the problem in the panel, but identifying how critical an issue this is, and what the major challenges are.

Speaker(s):

Mike Borsetti CEO and Founder, Abovetel

David Boyer Chief Architect, Unified Communications Division

Avaya

Cary Bryan, Cisco Systems

Kfir Pravda IMTC Vice President of Marketing; CEO Pravda Media

Moderator: Anatoli Levine IMTC President and Sr Director of Software Support

RADVISION

I am looking forward to hear the following panel:

General Session: Real-Time Social Communications

Tuesday 4:00 PM

This session will explore the state of Social Communications.

Speaker(s):

Jonathan Christensen General Manager for Video and Audio Skype

Brad Hunstable Founder, Ustream.tv

Loic Le Meur CEO and Founder, Seesmic

Robert Scoble Managing Director, Fast Company

Ramu Sunkara CEO, Qik.com

Moderator: Jeff Pulver Chairman and Founder

pulvermedia

And:

Moving Content from A to B: Issues and Options

Tuesday 11:00 AM

In a world of multiple devices with multiple connections to ‘open’ Networks and the virtualization of “The Deck”, multimedia content delivery is no longer about simply getting it there and billing for it later. It’s about dynamically choosing the least cost route and highest margin content sources…transcoding and transcrypting… ingesting from and publishing into multiple destinations simultaneously …intelligently generating and leveraging metadata for making recommendations and targeting ads…making efficient use of thenetworks at hand..and making sure everybody in the value chain gets paid. Come hear experts from Vantrix, Roundbox, and RealNetworks, discuss the challenges at hand and share best practices

Speaker(s):

Jean Mayrand Co-Founder & CTO, Vantrix Corporation

Vinod Valloppill Vice President Product Marketing, Roundbox

Moderator:

Chris Steck IMTC CTO, and Director of Technology, RealNetworks

If you are attending the event – email me at kfir@pravdam.com, or sms me at +972-544-9458066 and let’s talk!