Meaghan Sullivan, Google Cloud Interview

we are a software application that makes it super easy to collect video testimonials and then we automatically add music, graphics, subtitles, make them into a produced video for you.

You can do some edits and then we make it easy to share those videos and galleries of those videos with the world.

we love working with people who have encountered the challenge of this being time consuming and expensive to do with traditional methods, as well as DIY efforts.

We both had that, we've had both of that experience ourselves and we work with some of the most amazing and biggest brands in the world all the way to startups that are starting out.

I'm thrilled about our presenters.

We're going to introduce her in a second but I wanted to tell a very fast story about something that happened yesterday that I think for me is the epitome of like what Vocal Video is all about.

We had a positive, we had a VP of product marketing right into support.

He had a couple questions, our team answered them and then he had some really positive comments.

and we had a video collector, which is the link, that you get the videos with some email copy.

And our support person was able to email that, say hey, thank you and like would you be able to do a short video saying exactly what you said in the support channel, which is.

Vocal Video is the iPhone of video testimonials.

We're like great on video.

He recorded, that guy said sure.

He recorded within a couple hours.

Now we have a great new video to share and we talk a lot about the you know, customer journey in this in this world.

And that to me is one of the best ways to catch the enthusiasm when you can, when you can make the request right then and there.

so now I'm joined by Megan Sullivan who is just an incredible, been an incredible woman to work with over the last few years.

We started working with her at Google Workspace.

She's now building an amazing program at or we started Google Cloud.

Now she's within that.

She's building the program at Google Workspace and I'll let her introduce herself, and we'll get rolling here.

Yeah, awesome.

Thank you Lauren and hi everyone.

really excited to chat about Vocal Video, one of our favorite tools that we use over at Google Workspace.

like Lauren mentioned, I've been at Google.

For almost five years I've been a part of the Google Cloud team and now, for almost the past two years have been building up the advocacy and reference program for Google Workspace so that it's all of the productivity and collaboration apps that we know and love like Gmail and Chat and meet, that we probably use in our work life, but also our personal lives as well.

and as you can imagine, we have the very best customers that love to talk about how they're using our products and services.

and we have been very fortunate to be able to use Vocal Video to enable us to scale, and showcase our customer stories.

And we'll get into that in a moment.

but excited to join and chat and share a little bit about what we do.

Yeah.

And so, Megan, can you tell us a little bit about how you got started in Vocal Video?

What the challenges were that you had that led you to look for a more scalable view of videos?

Absolutely.

And the slide we have up here, for our DEI moments.

One of the ways in we got started with Vocal Video as an organization over in Google Cloud was we onboarded Vocal Video for the same reasons most organizations would onboard Vocal Video.

Right.

Video is a super dynamic channel, where we can have our customers tell stories, but also have internal folks tell stories, and through video, which is, you know, a way in which a lot of us like to absorb content.

we onboarded Vocal Video to use for traditional customer storytelling via video.

and we did start ramping it up, but personally I identified a use case almost right away.

it was, it was Women's Equality Day and we wanted to be able to capture as many stories from our amazing, customers who are women to showcase, you know, how, what, what does Women's Equality Day mean to them?

And we said, you know what, let's use Vocal Video to collect these stories.

And we were able to touch so many different women, collect so many different voices.

And that was back in, I think when we first started with you all.

And we've been able to do year after year celebrating Women's History Month and Women's Equality Day using Vocal Video, and that was kind of like my intro.

And then of course when we moved over to Google Workspace, we have a much smaller team and we really needed to be able to create dynamic content channels, beyond just traditional customer testimonials, blogs and case studies.

And we came up with the idea to start a video series.

This would be a Weekly series that people could rely upon to get to learn new customer stories, and to really absorb a quick a quick snippet about how a workspace customer is using workspace holistically.

Maybe how they're using chat, Google, Meet Gmail to connect, create and do their best work.

And we really found that Vocal Video was the most effective way to enable us to deploy this video series at scale.

And we kicked it off last year and it's been running weekly ever since.

And it really wouldn't be possible without local video.

Yeah, and I mean Megan, I know there's gotta be some folks on the call who are like okay, you're at Google.

You've got more budget and more resources than anybody in the world.

But can you tell us.

And I thought it was really interesting when we last talked just about how your the team's original at Google was.

The original reaction was to only use Vocal Video on you know admins.

I think you said SMB and just what, what your ex.

Maybe you can like let people in to understand a little bit more.

I think.

yeah, totally.

No, you're so right.

So pre Covid and we were thinking about Vocal Video traditionally for maybe it admins Maybe a little bit of folks that would be more receptive to self recording.

Whereas we traditionally had like this extremely high touch experience maybe for our executive customers.

and once we got into Covid all those lines got blurred.

Right.

Everyone got really used to recording videos at home.

Right now I have a ring light.

Before COVID I did not have one.

I am not a social media influencer.

Right.

But now a lot of us have these tools in our own homes.

We're so used to recording at home and we found that really helped to break the barrier of folks just being used to recording and really having the setup too.

Right.

To really have effective and really high impact videos.

And moving over to Google Workspace, like I mentioned we had a much smaller team resources, budget.

We those things are kind of trivial when you really need to be able to move at speed and service the demand and really be able to capture stories from all segments, all industries and all Personas.

And we thought people are used to recording at home.

Let's try out Vocal Video with all of our customer base, not just a specific segment or a specific Persona.

And really immediately people were perceptive.

I think right now you're even blown up on the screen with one of our.

I think you'll see.

We have in our user Love series, we have everybody from IT admins to CEOs and founders to CIOs really embracing this record at home capability and feeling comfortable with rerecording as many times as they need.

really embracing the prompts that we give them via Vocal Video and feeling really support like they would with a high touch experience, through this scalable platform.

and I really think that that was like a helpful pivot to people just being open to engaging in the video creation process from start to finish.

not just showing up for the, the director's chair, essentially.

Yeah.

And I, I mean what our last minute here, I thought it was, one of the things too that stuck out in a scalable thing is every, everyone's nightmare, right?

Rebrand.

And how that worked out at Vocal, at Google with.

Absolutely.

So, I know everyone hears about Generative AI these days, and we launched our Generative product, and then we rebranded, we renamed it, and we filmed a lot of customer videos before the rebrand.

And we needed to make sure that our new videos were on brand.

And if you can imagine if we had to sit down for like a 100,000, $50,000 video shoot, we just wouldn't be able to use that content anymore.

But what we were able to do is just send a new link and obviously apologize to our customers, but ask them gracefully to please rerecord.

and because the recordings only take 5, 10 minutes, depending on how many times you want to record or rerecord through your prompts, we were able to do it literally free of charge other than our customers and our time, because we already have the subscription with Vocal Video, which is something you would never be able to do with a traditional video work stream.

and we were able to get brand new videos with the new rebrand.