Spice Up Your Bland Workplace With GIFs
Usage Tips to “Swear” By
When you write at work–whether it’s a Slack chat, an email, tweet, or presentation–it’s only natural for images and metaphors to come to mind.
But just because you’re not posting funny memes on Facebook doesn’t mean you have to be like, “Bye-bye, Tumblr and BuzzFeed,” and all, “Hey there, 63-page internal Google Doc.”
You can spice up bland workplace communication by sprinkling a little GIF over it.
If you want to impress Deveshe in talent management and make Ingrid from quality assurance LOL with your GIF wit and cleverness, remember this safe-for-work mnemonic, SWEAR.
S is for Searchable.
If you want to be a GIFmaster™, you have to be an efficient searcher. Speed is key; you wouldn’t want to give your manager another reason to criticize your time management skills. Making your spreadsheets look pretty is already a hill worth dying on.
The perfect GIF can be yours in under a minute. Think of a single word that best describes the image in your mind, then try a synonym or related word if the first search is a wash. Don’t spend more than 15 seconds scrolling through the results before deciding to change the keyword.
W is for Well-Played.
Don’t overuse them! One GIF per email, per recipient, per every few days is sustainable. In Gmail, put them on the small size setting so they don’t fill the browser window. This way, they aren’t too distracting and can easily be scrolled past.
On Slack, more than one GIF per channel per day might be overkill, unless you have a #gifs channel (or if you force the development team to bear witness to your one-woman GIF parties after late-night releases). All bets are off for frequency on Twitter though, because an animation is totally worth (if not 1,000 words, then) 144 characters.
E is for Expressive.
Be a visionary on the bleeding edge, like the thought leaders in the Valley. Disrupt the workplace communication space by being recipient-obsessed. Sunset the practice of standalone text. Evangelize bootstrapped images that emerge from your rockstar brain by leveraging the synergy of revolutionary GIF deliverables.
Translation: GIF usage at work is about enhancing communication and delighting other people. Your goal is to find a GIF that best expresses the content and magnitude of your imagination.
A is for Appealing.
Appeal to and empathize with your audience. Aim for them to recognize the content of the GIF, or at least relate to its theme.
If you’re obsessed with House of Cards, but the recipients don’t binge on Netflix original series like you do because they work 18 hours a day (or they’re still shelling out for a stone-age premium cable package with Starz), the GIF will fail like a fart joke at a board meeting.
R is for Relevant.
Avoid boring or generic GIFs. The ones that look like e-card clipart evoke a pre-broadband era and are the graphical equivalent of shopping at Talbots.
Make an impact with GIFs from film, TV, and other video, rather than computer-generated animations.
Use GIFs that are culturally relevant, because outdated references can fall flat unless the moment really calls for it.
And if all else fails, Beyonce is always relevant.
