Technology

You’ve probably heard the term “Gamification” by now…but are you wondering what does this really mean? How can it be used effectively in my communication with my employees and customers?  Gartner defines Gamification as “Gamification is the use of game mechanics to drive engagement in non-game business scenarios and to change behaviors in a target audience to achieve business outcomes. Many types of games include game mechanics such as points, challenges, leaderboards, rules and incentives that make game-play enjoyable. Gamification applies these to motivate the audience to higher and more meaningful levels of engagement. Humans are “hard-wired” to enjoy games and have a natural tendency to interact more deeply in activities that are framed in a game construct.”

We like to think that Gartner is suggesting that gamification can be used to align your audience’s goals with your own. That is what I like to think is the main objective of incorporating gamification into your business. Applying gamification techniques into certain tasks can make them more engaging, which in turn can help your audience achieve your goal, whether it be to complete a training module or fill out a survey, as an example. Gamification creates a sense of community and touches on our need for achievement and competition. Many gamification techniques such as awards, points, and levels reinforce that feeling of achievement and make more monotonous tasks fun by receiving that reward. These techniques can lead to higher employee engagement, retention, and completion rates. Examples of gamification can be found all over. Upwork lays out several examples of gamification in several SaaS apps. For example, “Twitch is a well-known video streaming platform and a mine of gamification ideas. Leveling up, getting achievements, climbing up in the rankings, comparing your stats—Twitch successfully adapts these and many other gamification techniques:

1. Drops are rewards given just for watching channels on Twitch. The only thing users should do to earn it is watching broadcasts. A pretty good job in terms of user engagement.
2. Also, here’s a gamified motivation for users to upgrade their plans. Twitch premium members have an ability to earn in-game loot like characters, vehicles, skins, virtual currency, etc.
3. Moreover, Twitch goes beyond just giving badges: it enables streamers to reward most loyal viewers themselves with custom loyalty badges.”

Incorporating gamification can be an incredibly effective tool in your webinars, whether they are e-learning based, or more of a marketing centric webinar. The big fear a lot of people have about incorporating gamification into their webinar is that it will trivialize their presentation, and from our experience, that just isn’t the case. Sure, for some presentations you may need to maintain a specific tone, but gamification doesn’t have to be silly. You can use polls for instance not only to get information from your audience, but also to engage them more, by asking them to guess, or make suggestions. Social Media, and other group collaboration tools such as breakout sessions on certain platforms like WebEx and Adobe Connect are a great way to get people engaged and learning from each other.

Need help figuring out how to integrate gamification into your next webinar? V2 is always here to help!

Jessica Bradford | Virtual Event Manager
v2crew@virtualvenues.com
503-286-3581

Tips on creating videos for your virtual events

Videos are a great asset to a webcast – especially if they are interesting and pertinent to your content. It breaks up the presentation, and allows your speakers a little break as well. However, if you are going to incorporate videos into your webcast, there are a few key technical items you should consider first.

You want to make sure that the videos are in the best file format recommended by the webcasting platform that you are using. We typically recommend an .mp4, it’s a pretty universal format on most platforms from WebEx to ON24. You also want to make sure that the files size and bitrate of the video are small enough to play and be consumed by your attendees without causing issues. The best way to do this is to look at the bitrate of your file and compress it down to as small as possible without impacting the quality of the video. What exactly is the bitrate you ask? You’ve probably heard the term but let’s break it down to the different “pieces.”

Bitrate

In all video files, you have the video data, audio data, and “Overhead Container” which has the data about the video and the codec type – these are basically the instructions that a computer would use to play the file. The Bitrate is the number of “bits per second” (bps) at which data in a video is being delivered. The size of the file and the quality of the image and sound are both controlled by the bit rate used. The higher the bit rate, the better the potential quality and the larger the file size. Lower bit rates should be used for international audience or events with a large number of people accessing the webcast from the same network. Higher overall bit rates may be utilized, but when exceeding 800 Kbps, many attendees may experience latency, buffering or playback issues.

Frame Rate

If you are looking at the details of a file, you will also notice a Frame Per second rate or (fps). For low movement videos, such as instructional videos and live webcams, a 15fps frame rate will provide a clear and quality stream to the audience. Higher frame rates are permissible but do consider that 24+ fps is utilized for HD video and broadcast television; 15 fps will greatly reduce the file size without noticeably affecting quality. If a cursor is the only constant motion, 1 fps may be sufficient.

Frame Size

For most webinar platforms, video clips are displayed in the slide viewing area, so to keep things consistent, we recommend matching the video frame size to the same aspect ratio as your slides. So if you are using slides that are 16:9 (widescreen), you would ideally want your video to be 16:9. If your slides are 4:3, then your video frame should also be 4:3 so it fits in the space without being stretched or resized. Dimensions for videos – for 16:9 ratio you would want 640 x 360, 480 x 270 and 320 x 180. For 4:3, you would want 640 x 480, 440 x 330, 400 x 300 and 320 x240 pixels.

Audio Format and Specs

AAC Audio format is preferred if using H.264, with MP3 the mobile stream might encounter issues. 32 Kbps audio is sufficient and will allow the video to be encoded at a higher bit rate. Anything over 96 Kbps for the mono audio stream is superfluous unless the audio was recorded in a studio.

So next time you are creating a video for your webinar or webcast, keep the specifications and tips above in mind to ensure your video will shine without the risk of streaming issues for your attendees. V2  is happy to assist with any file compression or clean up needed to ensure your videos play flawlessly.