Level up your communication with ad-hoc video messaging

Working remotely presents unique challenges, one of which is the geographic and/or timezone gap between disparate collaborators. If you, as a remote worker, are trying to bridge this gap, putting ad-hoc video messaging into your toolkit is one of the easiest things you can do to supercharge your communication effectiveness.

Capturing video (and audio) used to be complex, before new technologies matured sufficiently to put powerful and fast tools into the hands of the average computer user. A decent headset ($30 at Amazon) is essentially all the hardware you need to create functional ad-hoc video messages — though a decent webcam, a core part of most off-the-shelf laptop models these days, can add a personal touch (your smiling face and talking head) to your messages.

The most common use case here is NOT just a video of your head while you’re simply talking out loud.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a short video is worth at least a million. And I’m not talking about a simple video voicemail message — which is LESS useful than actually typing out the email you just avoided composing and sending. This might be fine in certain contexts (a CEO sending quick video messages to her assistant, e.g.), but in some scenarios, it’s lazy and rude: you’re now putting the burden on your recipient to ingest all the content, make sense of it, and turn the core pieces of it into actionable intel.

Instead, the use case I’m describing is where you record your screen in order to depict and demonstrate something to somebody who’s NOT sitting next to you in the office — something that might be difficult to articulate in writing — where you might feel tempted to walk over to their cubicle, tap them on the shoulder, and run through the demonstration face-to-face. Similar to sharing your desktop with a remote videoconference participant, but better — in that your recipient can pause and rewind as many times as might be necessary to fully follow along.

Particularly when geography or timezone or work schedule doesn’t permit such in-cubicle, face-to-face collaboration, ad-hoc video messaging can help you nimbly and routinely bridge that gap. For example:

• When you need to describe a work product you’re delivering to a colleague or a client — something that might be difficult to describe via simple email (or Slack message, or whatever).
• When you’re spinning your wheels trying to explain to somebody how to accomplish a certain task within a program or web site that might be new to them.
• When you’re trying to specify a task or tasks that you’re delegating to a colleague, subordinate, or subcontractor — particularly tasks with a highly visual component.
• When, for the love of all things holy, you’re trying to show your Mom how to log out of Facebook BEFORE she closes her web browser…

Video explainers are not new, of course. The fundamental principle here is that it’s now super-fast and easy to do an off-the-cuff 90-second video run-through or explainer — fast and easy enough for it to become an in-stream part of your day-to-day workflow. It’s as simple as a few clicks to turn on your screen recorder, walk through the process you’re trying to demonstrate, then click a few more buttons to post it to a streaming service and generate an obscure link to send to your target audience.

The value proposition is highest when you DON’T have to create a super-polished, smooth, video experience.

When you don’t care if your video is full of “ums” and “ahs” or when it doesn’t matter if you’re stumbling around with the mouse looking for something, or when it’s completely acceptable for your instructions to include “oh, wait, sorry, that wasn’t right, you have to first click on THIS, then click on THAT.” This permits you to flow right through the whole video once, without having to do retakes to fix mistakes and such.˙

You may have done this or seen this before — it’s definitely becoming more common. I once recently submitted a trouble ticket to the support desk of an online service I was using, complaining that I was unable to complete a certain task within their product, and a support rep replied within 20 minutes with an ad-hoc video explainer showing exactly where I was going wrong.

This is now in-stream for me in a few different ways. For example, when I specify and assign work to my software developer subcontractors, I try to include a brief (< 2 mins) video overview of the changes I’m requesting to the software interfaces they’ll be working on — not to replace the written technical specification (which is necessary to mitigate the risk of misunderstood instructions), but to complement the spec and facilitate rapid orientation and improve comprehension.

Or when I update my own software dev clients on work completed (or in-progress), I often have to demonstrate some obscure nooks and crannies of web apps that might take several paragraphs to effectively articulate in writing. In many of these cases, a simple video (often taking less than 10 minutes to produce and share) takes a fraction of the time to produce AND consume, saving myself and my client time AND brain cells. (As you can probably guess, the recipient is usually far happier to watch a 2-min video than to read through several paragraphs and then be forced to reproduce all the steps themselves in the software that my dev team is building for them.)

Even when the subject matter is not complicated, a video explainer is both useful and appreciated:

Or, when I want to show somebody how to do something in any kind of computer (or web) interface, the ten minutes it might take to record and upload a video could easily replace a half hour (or more) of tediously composing a descriptive narrative with screenshots and arrows, etc.

It’s outside the scope of this blog entry to actually demonstrate how to use these products (that will be another blog entry — stay tuned!), but I recommend either Loom (the full desktop app) or Snagit (along with a Screencast.com account). (It’s worth noting that I have no affiliation with either of these companies.)

Once these are installed, it doesn’t take a lot of tinkering (for the modern knowledge worker of average tech savvy) before you’ll be able to competently produce ad-hoc video messages worth sharing. Both tools are also capable of more advanced editing and features that will permit more polished video presentations, but that too lies outside the scope of this blog entry.

Happy video messaging!