If it wasn't an email, maybe I could send you a video.
We have all become accustomed to video meetings in recent years. But when it comes to asynchronous or non-simultaneous communication, we mostly turn to the tried and tested medium of email.
Email is good for a lot of things, but bad for communicating emotion or personality, delivering a demo, or showing off a scene. Video is better for this.
"Video messages convey the personality of the messenger in a way that the best-written emails have a hard time achieving," said Eric Burns, chief executive of Panopto, a video content management company. "Having someone talk to you through a spreadsheet is much better than sharing a sheet and a document."
Panopto is one of a growing number of companies developing ways to make asynchronous video convenient and easy for all sorts of tasks now handled over email or in live meetings. For product demos and tutorials, the value of video is obvious, but advocates say there are other ways to implement support to make organizations more productive.
Rethink the meeting
Consider how meetings typically run. The session starts a few minutes late to give latecomers time to chat. There is often a presentation, which has not usually been shared with the participants in advance. People ignore what the speaker is saying as they squint to understand what is on the slides.
Meetings can be shorter, more productive and more inclusive if part of the session is pre-recorded, said Michael Litt, chief executive of video messaging service Vidyard. "There is a prevailing perception that meetings should be live," he said, "but not everyone is confident in their ability to respond in real time." The format is not suitable for people who need time to analyze what is communicated. Physical meetings tend to be dominated by the more extroverted attendees, which skews the outcome.
Litt suggests that the meeting host instead record the presentation and send it out to attendees a few days in advance along with a shared document for feedback. "That way, when he walks into the meeting, he already has everyone's questions and thoughts instead of spending the first half presenting," he said. Each person arrives fully informed and ready to spend their time discussing rather than listening to a lecture.
The same goes for sales presentations and customer communications. "When you send a client a five-minute preview of a topic up front, you can have a more focused live conversation," Litt said.
information dense media
Burns states that “the information bandwidth of video, especially when combined with a demo or presentation, is extremely high. It is ideal for training and reference documentation. You can speed it up, slow it down, and watch it in chunks.
Capturing meetings, customer interactions, and corporate events on video also creates an archive of best practices and solutions. "If the support team sees a workflow issue with a customer, they can log it and send it to the engineering team," she said. "He's building a video library of the organization's digital exhaust while solving problems."
Panopto uses voice and optical character recognition to make audio and video content searchable. Despite the shortcomings of current technology, transcription does not have to be perfect to be useful. "Humans need 90% accuracy to remember something, but 35% accuracy is enough for a search engine to return very accurate results," Burns said.
Not everyone is comfortable in front of a camera, but the pandemic has been an indirect blessing in that regard. It forced all of us to learn at least some basics of video communication and made us a little more tolerant of other people's imperfections.
Burns recommends a few basics: Avoid messy bottoms, poor hygiene, and sloppy clothing. Faces should be centered and not cut off at the forehead. He invests in good audio and video equipment, because "research has shown that poor sound quality makes people think they are less intelligent." Respect the viewer's time and keep messages short. Use videos where it makes sense, but keep a good old email in your back pocket.
The last few years have seen an explosion of tools to make video capturing and sharing easier, including Vidyard, Loom, Hippo Video, and CloudApp. They may be onto something. A survey commissioned by Vidyard found that 89% of financial services professionals believe video messages have a greater impact than text messages, and two-thirds said they got to know customers better through interaction with video. Who said it had to be real time?
So read this:
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