Marketers have long understood the advantages of video: it’s multi-media, it’s exciting, and it conveys a lot of information. According to Hubspot, 87% of marketers use it and according to Google, 50% of customers expect it. So if video is so clearly the preferred method for communicating with our customers, then why are we still doing so much emailing internally?

For many organizations, there are a variety of reasons. Video isn’t how things have traditionally been communicated and email culture has a lot of momentum. There’s also the fact that we’re all a little camera shy, and that recording technology up until a few years ago has been cumbersome. Yet with the emergence of simple sharing video technologies like ViewedIt, you can wipe all those excuses aside. Video is the internal comms tool of the future. Here’s why.

3 reasons why video is ideal for internal communications:

 

1. Video is far more effective

Video allows you to get your point across in less time. Just take this common office scenario: a new employee needs help getting set up in a software system. They ask a colleague for help, and after a few back and forth emails and screenshots, their coworker just walks over and points at their screen. Why? Because the combination of talking and showing is more effective. You can now easily perform this point-and-show maneuver through video and once created, that clip can be stored for the next person, or shared at scale from the start. Your employee isn’t just saving one walk across the room, they’re saving tens or hundreds from all the people who will be hired in the future.

Are you starting to see the possibilities? Video can speed up and streamline onboarding, weekly team updates, and peer-to-peer tribal knowledge sharing. It can disseminate information from product teams to salespeople, from salespeople to product marketing teams, and everyone in between. Even finance can get in on the action. Here at Vidyard, our finance team put an end to silly expense reports errors with a series of how-to video snippets that really showed off their sense of humor. Check out this one from Lucy as an example:

2. Video is simple and secure

Tools like ViewedIt make video even easier than email. Within a few clicks, you can record yourself, your screen, or both, and send it in email or share the link directly over a messaging platform like Slack. Research by Forrester suggests that one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words which, were you simply typing, could take quite some time. Video conveys more information with less effort.

For many organizations, video still seems daunting. For example, assuming create-your-own video tools like ViewedIt didn’t exist, how would you send a video around to your company? If you tried sending an MP4 file you’d likely find that it doesn’t fit within the 20 to 25 MB file limit for your email provider. And if you tried uploading it to YouTube and sharing the link, you’d likely have to play with the privacy settings to limit the rest of YouTube from seeing it. Plus, if you wanted to prevent Justin Bieber’s new single ‘Baby’ from auto-playing after it, you’d have to pay. At the end of this desperate journey, some poor souls have even yielded to the siren’s call of Sharepoint, but were never heard from again.

With ViewedIt, videos are stored instantly and securely, and you can track when they’re watched. Want to know which employees are engaged and see who watched the fiscal year review from your CEO? No problem.

Previously there was no simple way to create, share, and track video, but now there is, and there’s no excuse not to.  

3. Video is engaging and fun

With time, video becomes the internal communication path of least resistance. Employees find that in many situations, it’s easier to record themselves talking through a problem than to find the precise words to put into an email, and they start to have fun with it. It becomes a way to reinsert some personality into the workplace and builds bonds of fraternity. But how do you push an entire organization past their initial camera shyness? The same way you treat film: exposure.

We know this because every new employee here at Vidyard goes through it. First, they start sending videos to trusted audiences where there’s no judgement. Then, they start sending three to four bite-sized videos per day and graduate to sending to audiences of peers who can provide minor feedback. Before they know it, video is barely different from an in-person conversation, and while it’s never a replacement for face-to-face, it’s the very best next thing. So move over marketing, it’s time for internal communications to take the mic.  

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