Multimedia Tours: Offering “360-Degree” Views of Your Company

As soon as a prospective customer walks into the offices of eMazzanti Technologies, CEO Carl Mazzanti uses a multimedia tours approach to sell the capabilities and personal touch of the Hoboken, New Jersey networking firm. First, the prospect’s logo and name appear on a monitor in the firm’s welcome area. “It impresses customers and adds an incredible level of class to the image of our company,” Mazzanti says.

As the customer tours the facility, material rotates on other screens scattered in different rooms, including video case studies and testimonials from satisfied clients.

All this is achieved using Windows Media Center, a multimedia entertainment hub, which comes preinstalled with Windows 7^® Professional. Windows Media Center has been widely embraced as a popular home entertainment PC software application, allowing users to watch live TV on their PC, view Netflix movies, or turn their PC into a digital video recorder (DVR). The software can be used for all types of entertainment, including television, movies, news, games, the internet, music, and photos.

Increasingly, many companies also use Windows Media Center for business purposes, such as training or, as in the case of eMazzanti Technologies, customer tours as well as lobby and waiting-area entertainment.

Three to four times a week, eMazzanti Technologies prepares a custom tour for a prospective customer. When a prospect calls, Mazzanti casually asks about his favorite music, and then loads the tunes into Windows Media Center and has them playing when the prospect arrives. The personal touch, combined with a deep display of the company’s technology knowledge during the tour, resonates with prospects. “We’ve had people come in for a tour and sign up as a client within 45 minutes,” Mazzanti says.

The presentation has had so much of an impact that Mazzanti has had clients, such as realtors and a scuba shop, ask him to prepare Windows Media Center presentations for them to use in their own offices.

And best of all, Windows Media Center never sleeps. When people walk by eMazzanti Technologies’ front window—day or night—a digital display powered by Windows Media Center can be viewed from the sidewalk.

“Especially at night, anything with movement in a space with light gets people’s attention,” says Mazzanti, who estimates a thousand people walk by his front window every day. “On the Windows Media Center loop, we use the slogan, ‘Why go to NY, when you could use the best networking firm in NJ?’ The geographic targeting works really well for us, and business owners who see the tape while walking home from work often schedule a tour and remark on it.”

Source: Inc.com