Why Video Reigns Supreme — The Knowledge Sharing Paradigm
Regardless of the field, business is becoming increasingly information-dependent. Today, companies across industries are looking at data and insights to guarantee continuity and success.
Successful examples of this insight-orientation are myriad, ranging from Spotify’s ingenious curation of Discover Weekly to Avis’ customer value determination. Conversely, companies that aren’t on the insight wagon, don’t seem too attractive in the eyes of prospective employees, customers or investors.
The more complex and layered information becomes — due to the abundance of available data — the more challenging this information-dependency gets. No wonder we keep spouting the word disruption in every turn as insights, or lack thereof, can make or break companies almost overnight. Just look at the cautionary examples of Blockbuster, Nokia or Kodak. Disruption arrives with a new set of demands.
Information used to be power: something that was hierarchically disseminated and used for control. Today, information is about cohesion and continuity. As the significance of data and insights for companies grows, the mass of information grows in equal measure. Handling that mass requires new tools for condensing, conveying and accessing information.
However, we tend to talk about the age of transparency — or data revolution — as if it’s something that happens regardless of our commitment to the change. Well, it doesn’t. To get rid of the soon-obsolete attitude towards information as just a means to control, requires effort and dedication.
To harness information at its most efficient, is to let go of the old approach of safe-keeping it. Leaders of the future understand the need for sharing their knowledge. As the author and speechwriter James Humes eloquently asserted:
“The art of communication is the language of leadership”.
Video To Rule Them All
With regard to fluid communications, condensing and sharing information, video is the solution to rule them all. The reasoning behind our statement is quite simple: a bit of video content can condense vast amounts of information and insights in an unparalleled manner.
Just imagine a team of 10 people reading a 30-page white paper — how much time is consumed? With all the time spent, it’s still not guaranteed that these people draw the same essential takeaways from the content. Now, imagine that same team watching a 3-minute video crystallising said information and highlighting the key takeaways. The difference in time spent, and in terms of the essential insights ingested, is drastic.
A video won’t replace the white paper, but it can serve as a bridge to more detailed information and indicate whether or not the details are relevant for you to read. As Nicola Mendelsohn, VP for Facebook, contended:
“[video] commands so much information in a much quicker period so actually the trend helps us digest more of the information in a quicker way.”
At its best, a video conveys depthful insights within minutes. Video is emotive, intelligible, engaging, time saving and — in mobile formats — immensely attainable. Arguably, video is essential in today’s knowledge building paradigm, alongside collaboration and community.
We are, above all, visual beings and nothing quite supports this precondition like video. Therefore, consumption and production of videos present undeniable advantages to learning processes. That being said, it is all too easy to rely on the belief that the “medium is the message”.
Video is like an amazingly robust and versatile new brick: you still need a skilled constructor to build a house of it.
Video ought not be assigned an intrinsic value as a medium, for video is no fixer of broken communications in itself. Rather, it’s the best accessible means to condensing and disseminating knowledge and insight.
A technology-oriented approach to video communication tends to dismiss the crucial matter of quality content. The potential success by video starts with the content, though, not with the medium. Video is like an amazingly robust and versatile new brick: you still need a skilled constructor to build a house of it.
The Struu Premise
In order to improve the way people and companies interact in terms of information, we at Struu embarked on a journey to design the go-to video platform for better and safer knowledge sharing. We believe that knowledge and insights should
1) be shared amongst all participants to given community, team or group to create cohesion and a shared truth,
and
2) be a process which includes each member, because only true participation promotes empowerment and subsequent commitment.
This is not to say there’s no need for hierarchy, leadership or control, for safe and efficient communications depend on robust frameworks. However, a member to any community must be accepted and empowered as a crucial actor to its operations.
To validate our presuppositions regarding an emerging need for more equal and efficient means to implementing (video) communications, we asked decision-makers what do they think about the idea of a ‘new communications culture’. Below you’ll find a few interesting snippets from the study. The entire study will be released as a broader publication later in 2018.
Survey: The Future of Video Communications
At first, we asked our respondents — majority of them representing enterprises with 250+ employees — how significant is the new communications culture of knowledge sharing to their company’s success. Vast majority of the decision makers we reached view knowledge sharing, collaboration and democratised content creation as “very” or “somewhat significant”. (Graph 1).
However, only ⅕ of the respondents indicate that their existing communications resources fully support the cultural shift. A mere 15% seem content with lesser communications infra (intranet, emails and social media), whereas over 56% see a need for new tools emerging. In addition, 7,7% of the decision-makers claim their “communications is in shambles: no strategy, no resources, no tools”. (Graph 2)
We also sought to find out how significant is the role of video in the respondents’ respective communications matrixes. What we attained is an explicit indication of a need for improved video ecosystems.
Nearly 70% of the respondents claim they “understand the amazing effects of video in communications, but aren’t yet using it to the fullest extent” and 18% say that “video is the most important format for us and has a growing importance in our communications matrix”. Less than 13% have little or no interest in deploying video in their communications and a mere 10% claim they don’t use video nor see the situation changing anytime soon. (Graph 3)
Well over ⅔ of the respondents claim their organisation would benefit from improved video content consumption and productions tools for mobile devices, which is a clear indicator of the shift towards more fluid and contemporal working hours and environments.
In terms of organisational challenges to carrying out communications, the most challenging aspect to our respondents’ respective companies is “internal knowledge sharing and collaboration”. This only goes to highlight our initial claim regarding an emerging culture, calling on a shift from top-down communications to democratised mesh models.
Finally, close to 60% of the decision-makers we approached were adamant about their need for a new video service to improve internal knowledge sharing; enable democratised production and consumption of content, and empower their employees as active participants.
What’s Next?
To conclude the findings, we affirmed that organisational communications is calling for a shift in terms of both culture and technology supporting it. To facilitate this shift, we aim to provide companies with an intuitive and communal video platform to enable safe and engaging knowledge sharing, contextual curation of insights and empowering participation to communications.
Struu, the video community engine, will be launched first as an iOS and web application by the end of Q1 2019.
Subsicribe to our mailing list here.
By Eero Alasuutari
CCO, Struu
