Why Video Is the New Enterprise Normal

As a consumer today, it’s impossible to miss the power that video has in our relationship with brands and services.  Marketers use video in creative and engaging ways.  (Do we all remember “The Old Spice Guy” and “Will It Blend” campaigns?)  Once you become a customer, companies are using video to provide easy and convenient ways to self-serve.  (Forget about Help text – I just go right for the Youtube video!)  So based on this enormous external success, why wouldn’t a company use video internally to communicate with and amongst employees?

Video is a rich medium to engage with employees.   People are more apt to engage with, respond to and retain messages from video. In a recent study by FlimpMedia, results demonstrated that video communication helped drive engagement for employee benefits enrollment.  The video communications campaigns utilized employer branded interactive video postcards.  Results across all participants showed exceptionally high engagement and response rates.

Video is more engaging than other forms of media for 3 primary reasons:

1. Video promotes knowledge retention – Video is more memorable, and the simultaneous processing of both auditory and visual information increases viewers understanding and retention.  Studies show that retention rates of information that is both seen and heard is 80% compared with 10% retention for hearing and 20% retention for seeing.

2. Video connects emotionally – if you’ve ever watched TED talk, you know how powerful a video can be to communicate.  It allows you to create a shared experience with your audience. Distributing a video related to upcoming company reorganization, product launch or change in sales strategy allows your team to share in the vision, excitement or ownership of the event.  How many different ways can an email about something so important get interpreted (or ignored)?

3. Video can accommodate real-world situations – Video is particularly useful to engage people in reasoning, thinking and problem solving because it can convey setting, characters and action in a more interesting way and can portray more complex and interconnected problems.

Companies have massive amounts of content but users are not consuming and realizing the value.   The content consists of emails, documents on shared storage drives, and presentations on intranets.  It’s not the amount of content that is the problem.  Producing the kind of content that engages the user and creates value and “pull” is the biggest challenge that many organizations face.

Every executive, product manager, sales leader or HR leader should be thinking about how to engage with their team or across teams in a way that leaves a positive lasting impression.  Video is arguably the most powerful online media we have for persuasion, training and communication.  A video knowledge platform can help to build the foundation on which to start delivering engaging content to your entire organization.

In our next post, we will talk about four considerations when choosing a video & knowledge sharing solution.