Steve Jobs democratized creativity and communications in our personal lives. He turned us into prolific artists sharing ideas, pictures, and videos with our friends and families.
Video is personal. Video is impactful. Video is cost effective. Video is everywhere. I believe, there’s a cultural and leadership hurdle we need to get over to make video communications more widespread.
Why aren’t we always communicating with our teams using video?
Why aren’t we always updating our teams using video?
Why aren’t we always training our teams using video?
Why don’t we use video all the time at work?
Video won’t replace face-to-face meetings. We’ll never remove the need for real human interaction. Video technologies will help us prioritize agendas and be more judicious about time and resources. Here’s a list of ways to justify making video a bigger priority in our corporate communications and training:
#1 Lower T&E Costs With Video
We know how much it costs to fly teams to central locations to sit through training. How often do you hear: “The event was good but most of what was covered could have been done over video.” How much money is wasted annually for travel and entertainment (T&E) expenses that could be avoided with video?
#2 Improved Corporate Training and Retention With Video
We all know that knowledge retention from webinars, off-sites, or conferences is very low. Video is the way to improve knowledge retention and best practice sharing by serving up short, accessible videos on-demand for teams to watch and review on their own time.
#3 Share Tribal Knowledge With Video
Video is the only way to scale peer-to-peer best practice sharing. Silos come down with corporate video storytelling. Video becomes the ultimate in capturing and cross-pollinating ideas and feedback from virtual and distributed teams.
#4 Go To Market Faster With Video
Go-to-market faster. Product launches are usually very well planned out when it comes to external communications. Websites are updated. Press and analysts are briefed. Customers are briefed too. Though, internal communications tends to fall short of expectations. Video is the way for product owners to get internal and external teams up to speed fast on new product releases, campaigns, and launches.
#5 Create Culture With Video
With tens of thousands of videos recorded by sales teams over the past few months, I’m privileged to witness culture grow and evolve. Watching CEOs ask questions and inviting teams to respond in heart-felt, sincere sixty second shorts is priceless. Corporate tone and values are set top down, culture is nurtured bottom up. Video bridges the two by creating community.
#6 Demonstrate Leadership Sincerity and Intent With Video
For leaders, especially CEOS, before sending an email broadcast, think about sending a video message. Video is personal and emotive. Video based communications builds relationships between leadership and employees at every level. People follow leaders who look them in the eye and speak from the heart. Video helps makes this happen at scale.
#7 Correlate Video Consumption To Revenue Outcomes
Measure metrics. Know who is consuming your videos. It’s important to know what content is being consumed by who and what content isn’t valued. The power of video is we can know who watched our videos and for how long. The analytics is there to answer these questions in real-time. The next time you’re rolling out a product training or sending out an email broadcast or flying teams around for a kickoff event, ask yourself: What can we do with video first? How much can we save with video? How much more can we know with video? It’s somewhat ironic that you’re reading a message about the case for video in text. I’ve recorded this video selfie to experience the message on video versus just text. I recorded the video using my iPhone.
What’s your next video message going to be? How are you going to change the way you communicate and train your teams using video? How are you going to turn video into culture and revenue?
