Posts tagged Video Messaging

By Dave McLaughlin, CEO & Co-Founder at Vsnap

Here at Vsnap, we have an amazing new partner – and we’re very excited about it! We’ve reached an agreement with Dr. Johnny Walker (www.healthfounders.com), a Dublin-based interventional radiologist and healthcare entrepreneur, whereby Dr. Walker will use a version of Vsnap’s code base to launch a new, independent company to pursue cutting-edge uses of video messaging in engaging and empowering patients. 

The new company, called HealthSnap, will be headquartered in Ireland. 

Here’s what Dr. Walker has to say about this:

“Vsnap has made video messaging simple, accessible and measurable. Now HealthSnap will customize a version of this powerful tool to help healthcare providers bring more human warmth and empathy into their patient interactions as a complement to the face-to-face consultation. This is important because we all know that better engagement drives better care and better, safer outcomes.”

Dr. Ronan Kavanagh, a prominent Irish rheumatologist and leading voice on the intersection of medicine and social media, affirmed Dr. Walker’s perspective. “I’m very excited about what HealthSnap will be doing,” Dr. Kavanagh said. “This kind of tool gives us the ability to humanise our interactions with patients, and that matters greatly to engagement levels and outcomes.”

For Dr. Walker, this will not be the first time he has broken new ground in patient care. In 1995, Dr. Walker launched a fully digital, personalized, mobile ultrasound scan service to small aboriginal communities in Western Australia literally out of the back of a truck. That effort grew into the highly disruptive and successful international teleradiology enterprise Global Diagnostics Ltd (www.globaldiagnostics.co.uk), a company that Dr. Walker exited last year. What does the HealthSnap agreement mean for Vsnap and the people using our application?

First, it won’t affect businesspeople using Vsnap at all. HealthSnap will be a separate company with a separate product, separate development team, etc. The Vsnap product will continue to have a laser focus on meeting the needs and requirements of folks in Sales, Support, Account Management and Employee Engagement.

Second, since this partnership represents a new royalty-based revenue stream for Vsnap, it means we’re going to have more resources to invest in our product. We are committed to making Vsnap an essential resource for customer-centric companies in today’s multi-media, multi-device business environment.

Third, HealthSnap’s investment represents an important validation. It’s an example of the fact that, as the number of personal video screens skyrockets worldwide, more industries are exploring new ways to use video to solve persistent problems well beyond the Marketing department. 

We are thrilled to have found such a passionate, mission-driven partner in Dr. Walker, and we look forward to working with him and his team as they move forward. For more information, you can reach out to myself, Dr. Walker or Jim Joyce, Vsnap’s Dublin-based Co-Founder and CEO of Point of Care, a clinical healthcare company.  

Dr. Walker: @jwglobal7 or johnny@healthfounders.com

Dave McLaughlin: @davemacboston or dave@vsnap.com

Jim Joyce: @jimbojoyce or jim@pointofcare.ie

Note: for press and bloggers working on deadlines in European time zones, Dr. Walker and Jim Joyce are both based in Dublin. For American journalists working on deadline, Dave McLaughlin is based in Boston.

by Dave McLaughlin, CEO & Co-Founder at Vsnap

The Biomnis Healthcare Innovation Awards, held every year in Dublin, Ireland, recognize and celebrate initiatives that find a fresh way to attack persistent problems across several categories. This year, a small Irish company called Point of Care, was recognized with an award in the Patient Support category for its use of Vsnap to more effectively engage and help their patients.

Full disclosure: Point of Care CEO was my partner in founding Vsnap, and he is a shareholder in our company. 

In the pilot program that the award celebrated, Point of Care nurses vsnapped patients either before or after clinical visits. The team wanted to create personal connections with patients, with the goals of encouraging patient questions and diminishing the anxiety that many people feel when it’s time for a vaccination or other medical procedure. 

Basically, Point of Care believes that improving engagement will improve patient compliance and patient outcomes. And Vsnap is a way for them to improve engagement. 

I want to congratulate the Point of Care team for thinking outside the box in terms of how they help their customers – people like you and I who are receiving important medical attention. 

Their initiative is ongoing, so the company was not able to share final data with me. But we see more and more companies in a range of industries adopting this common sense belief – that sending simple, warm, one-to-one video messages makes your customer feel valued, and that how your customer feels has a direct bearing on what that customer does. 

Across industries, we consistently see three benefits: people you vsnap take action more than folks you engage via email; they tell their friends more; and they stay loyal longer.

We are excited about the possible applications for using Vsnap or other feeling-focused video tools to engage patients in ways that are warmer and more human. At this point, our technology is not actually HIPAA compliant, but we’ll have more news on this coming soon.

By Dave McLaughlin, Co-Founder & CEO of Vsnap

This morning we released v 1.4.0, which introduces the ability to bring individual Vsnap user accounts into a common corporate or organizational account. Up until now, each individual Vsnap account has been its own silo. 

Today’s release represents a key step toward providing shared billing and premium features, such as greater customization of branding and richer reporting on user activity and recipient behavior. Thanks to all of you who helped us understand your companies’ needs here!

How This Works

In the near future this will be self-serve, but for now companies that want the benefits of an organization account can just email Trish Fontanilla or me. You let us know who on your team you want to serve as the Admin Member, and we’ll give that person the ability to invite individual user accounts into your team’s Organization.

Once you do this, your Admin Member will notice the following specific features:

Organization Data Dashboard

The Admin Member now sees a simple snapshot of aggregate Vsnap activity from all members of the organization. This includes total vsnaps recorded, view rate, type of share, and an overview of recipient feeling indicators (Helpful, Thoughtful, Amazing).

Administrative Oversight

The designated Admin Member now has access to all vsnaps created by individual Organization members and has the power to delete vsnaps from any member. This provides an important safeguard for the Organization. 

Organization Ownership

If you are an individual Vsnapper and you accept an invitation to have your account become part of an Organization, then the vsnaps you create from this point forward will belong to the Organization. This means that individual members cannot delete any vsnaps they record once they become part of an Organization.

A few more things worth noting…

This Will Become a Paid Feature

The ability to link accounts in an Organization is intended to be a paid feature. We are absolutely going to continue to offer a killer free account, but it will be for individuals and not for organizations. Having said that, we’re happy to let you use it for free for the next month or so while we complete some other important premium features for businesses.  

Discount Pricing this Month

If you’d like to take advantage of special pre-launch pricing, let me know  or sign up for our premium mailing list to be updated. This month we’re offering 40% off pricing on annual subscriptions for early Organization subscribers. This will give the upcoming premium features to all members of your Organization, and it will allow us to “turn on” new features for your whole team as soon as those features become available. 

Mobile vsnaps

Although these Organization features are currently visible only in Vsnap’s web interface, they do affect vsnaps created on the mobile apps. For example, a vsnap created on the mobile app of an Organization Member now can be deleted by the Admin Member and not by the individual who created it. 

Nothing Changes for Non-Organization Accounts

If you have a free individual Vsnap account and don’t create or become part of an Organization, then nothing will change for you. You will still have free use of business features for the time-being, like the logo feature and the SMTP feature. And you’ll still own your own vsnaps.

Video Improvements

Actually there is one change that affects everybody – we improved how we handle the video file to ensure that your vsnaps play perfectly behind enterprise firewalls. This is good news for anyone using our application inside a large corporation, or to engage clients at large corporations. We’re now seeing a perfect performance on playing vsnaps in those environments.

That’s it for now. There will be much more in the coming weeks for the companies that are using Vsnap to make customers feel appreciated. Stay tuned!

By Dave McLaughlin, CEO & Co-Founder of Vsnap

I am very pleased to share with the Vsnap community that Trish Fontanilla is stepping into a new role as Vice President of Community & Customer Experience.

I can practically hear the cheers already!

As Vsnap’s first ever Vice President, Trish now has an expanded level of input and authority in every single customer-facing activity at our company, from customer engagement and support to product development and strategy. Creating this new role is a recognition of Trish’s incredible work and her great contributions to Vsnap’s success so far, and it is also an expression of the company’s commitment to keeping the customer at the center of everything we do, especially as we prepare to introduce premium features and paid accounts a little later this quarter. Because, whether you know it or not, Trish is first and foremost a fierce advocate for you.

I hired Trish as our Community Manager in the summer of 2011 when Jim Joyce and I founded the company. She is an incredible force for good. She lives the five simple beliefs that Vsnap is built on, and she personifies the character and commitment that defines our whole team, and indeed our whole community. Internally, Trish keeps us all honest. She is like true north when it comes to making sure that every decision is contemplated and debated with the average Vsnapper in mind. Externally, she is a powerful champion of the Vsnap vision for how businesses can bring warmth to the web.

The fact that we created a Community Manager role before we even had a product should tell you something about the value we place on understanding our users’ needs, capturing your feedback, and supporting your success as you experiment with vsnapping. I hope you will welcome the fact that we are doubling down on all of that.

Because Vsnap is about you. Our mission is simply to meet your need for an easy tool that you can use to make your customers feel special. Feel valued.

We are fortunate to have Trish on our team, and so is everybody who uses Vsnap. In that spirit, I want to give you a little nudge to vsnap her today and give her a pat on the back. You can do that via Twitter to @Vsnap or @Trishofthetrade. Or, if your message feels a little more private, you can reach her at trish@vsnap.com. Thanks!

http://www.vsnap.com

 (Picture originally from http://www.the-red-kitchen.com)

by Trish Fontanilla, Community Manager at Vsnap

(Our own March Madness… pictured above is the Vsnap team playing PerkStreet at Raise the Rim, a charity basketball tournament benefitting TUGG)

Hey vsnappers! 

Hope you all had an amazing month. I know some of you out there may have missed some of our blog posts (did you know you can sign up to receive emails when our blog is updated?) or perhaps you’re new here, so here’s what we were talking about in March:

• At the beginning of the month I wrote about my trip to Social Media Week NYC and four themes from my visit
• Dave gave you a taste of what’s to come with our premium feature sets for business vsnappers (sign up here to be notified when premium launches and for special discounts)
• We shared our practice of vsnapping people that follow us on Twitter (and our pretty amazing rate of engagement)
• Then there was Dave’s post encouraging people to apply to MassChallenge. One of my favorites for his use of “bellyachin” and reference to Bill Withers (deadline is Wednesday, April 3rd by the way, and we’ve got a couple more discount codes)
• And last but not least, all of the videos are now up from the Customer Love Summit! You can view the blog posts for individual speakers by clicking here or watch the whole summit by heading to our Vimeo channel. 

And if you have any questions, want to talk about pie, or suggest an April blog post, tweet us at @Vsnap or send me me an email/vsnap here. 

Here’s to an incredible April! 

http://www.vsnap.com