Do you want your employees to not just sit up and take notice of your company’s content, but to engage with it? Here are some tips for turning a yawn-inducing corporate videos into a compelling conversation your staff can join.   

 1. One Size Does Not Fit All

Target videos to specific departments, positions, time zones, or languages. If you deliver your new forklift safety video en Espanol to everyone, including your customer service reps in Mumbai, you can rest assured that next video you deliver will be swiftly deleted. 

 2. Don’t Beat Around the Bush

Get to the point of your new philanthropy PSA as quickly as possible to keep your staff from meandering over to Facebook for some “multitasking.”

3. Less is More 

Short and sweet is best when it comes to content like corporate updates. Resist the temptation to cram all your news into one delivery or risk losing viewers’ attention. 

 4. Encourage Interaction

When your employees realize that you are genuinely interested in hearing their ideas and feedback in the form of questionnaires, response videos, and more, you’ll watch your analytics soar.

If your employees prefer to catch up on department announcements on their BlackBerrys, iPads, and iPhones make it easy for them. Offer flexible delivery choices–let them decide how they’ll view your videos.  

When you open the flow of communication, and when your content is short and sweet, relevant, and convenient, all will join the conversation to affect change in an organization they are committed to!

Happy producing!

For me, this year’s conference was most notable by how the session topics have changed over the last few years.   There’s been a noticeable trend toward showcasing informal learning tools as a legitimate means of training. These include new social media applications that so many of us are using in our personal lives, things like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and MySpace, as well as videos, podcasts and virtual worlds.  I admit I’ve been slow to adopt these tools both professionally and personally.  It’s safer and easier to stick to the classroom-based PowerPoint presentation and endless bullet points we’re all use to. But times are changing, and fast!  And we have to change with them if we want to maintain our value to the organization.

I came back from the conference excited about ways to incorporate these new ideas into our current employee and customer training.  I plan to share my experiences, both the good and the bad, in the coming months.  For now, I’ll leave you with the following YouTube video, which nicely presents this new wave of social media.

Ignite is first headed to Streaming Media East held in New York at the New York Hilton, May 11 & 12th. Ignite has exhibited at the show for the past four years.  Ignite customers from Bank of America and Huntington Bank will be speaking on a the panel, ‘Cost Savings from Enterprise Streaming‘ on Tuesday, May 11th at 11:45am.

On May 17th Ignite will be exhibiting at ASTD International Conference in Chicago at McCormick Place.  The American Society for Training & Development organization holds its premier event for workplace learning and performance professionals. The conference features over 230 educational sessions from industry-leading experts, and a world-class EXPO filled with the latest products and services available from top suppliers.

Each year we have seen an increase in demand for elearning delivery solutions. The ability to create rich content provides an engaging learning experience and many companies are looking for solutions to deliver these large elearning files directly to the end user desktop, laptop or mobile device without impacting  the corporate network or end user experience.  The Ignite Solution helps to solve these delivery challenges enabling end users to view rich media content directly online or offline and easily integrates to learning management systems.

We are looking forward to these two industry events and hope to see you there!

Based on the input of over 150 organizations, the study is intended to look both at the current state of video in the business environment and line-of-business video usage to discover how video has created business value. Aberdeen used the following key performance criteria to distinguish Best-in-Class companies:

• 100% were able to measure ROI for video solutions
• 186% annual ROI for video solution (payback time of 6.3 months)
• 81% of employees have access to enterprise video solutions

Not there yet? The report suggests required actions to achieve Best-in-Class performance, companies must consider the following video benefits from a business value perspective:

• Align video solutions to line-of-business needs throughout the enterprise, rather than treat video as a pure technology solution.
• Track and manage the green and sustainability benefits of video from a travel, document creation, and employee development perspective.
• Think of video content and communications as corporate assets that can be parlayed to help additional employees, customers, partners, and suppliers.

The report has extensive information, useful statistics and compelling graphs to support the justification for an enterprise-wide business video platform.