Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

What Makes Compelling Employee-Generated Video Content?

A few days ago I was asked the question What Makes Compelling Employee-Generated Video Content?

I won’t go into the circumstances of my being asked because I find them faintly embarrassing, but I have a lot of concern about the question, and what brought someone to ask it.

Consider the “magic pixie dust” proposition that is inherent in the question:

What Makes Compelling Employee-Generated Video Content?

Let’s say the answer is “naked dancing girls”, or “kittens”, or “puppies”; the former would hold maybe 40% of my friends and colleagues quite utterly rapt, whilst the latter have an enormous broad-spectrum appeal; but I am pretty sure that someone asking about “employee-generated content” would not approve of table-dancing as a “brand message”.

So I am going to rapidly generalise and posit that there is no “magic pixie dust” – no single thing that you drop into a podcast and SHAZAM! you get “Compelling Employee-Generated Video Content”.

Let’s step back from boobies and kittens and get to the “meta” instead: what about “humour”, “charm” and “sex” – maybe those work? Well, yes, they do – let’s be honest, a lot of the appeal of Rocketboom in the early days was down to all three – but empirically we see that all of them work, and therefore there is no distinct one of them that makes for “Compelling Employee-Generated Video Content”.

Further: there are very successful videobloggers nowadays who come across as unshaven, surly, grumpy bastards, and this to me implies that there are many diverse recipes for “Compelling Video Content”.

[No I am not going to link to the people I have in mind. “Land of litigation” and all that. 🙂 ]

We’ve thus eliminated both “subject matter” (eg: “kittens”, “zfs”) and “meta” (eg: “cuteness”, “niftyness”) as being sole determinants of “Compelling Employee-Generated Video Content”; it could be that there is more than one determinant – but that seems belied by asking such a simple question, one which demands a simple answer. If I’d been asked “What qualities contribute towards Compelling Employee-Generated Video Content?” – I would be marginally happier.

So having exhausted (I think?) all the ways to literally interpret the question and respond to it, I think I’m free to rewrite the question and respond to that; so…

Question: Who Makes Compelling Employee-Generated Video Content?

…and to me the answer is obvious:

Answer: Passionate Employees who aren’t following someone else’s recipe (“kittens. we need kitten videos. kitten branding.”) and who are free to create whatever they want.

…which led me to write the following rant:

[If you want to create a video …] it’s about knowing who your audience is, and what you want to say to them. It’s about whether you have really thought-out your “idea”; you don’t need a fantastic camera, you need a fantastic IDEA.

The rest will all flow from that; equipment is a matter of circumstance – good ideas are way harder to get.

By analogy: give me paper and a box of crayons, and I can produce workable art. It will be good artwork, done with crayons.

What makes it good? The artist, not the medium. What makes it good is what you want to convey. Your inner 10-year-old may get pissed that the result on paper is not as good as what is in your head, but nobody else knows that.[1] Don’t blame the crayons.

So: Lack of oil paints / a HD camera / a tripod – is not a problem. Your choice of equipment (or lack of it) may be forced upon you, but that’s not a big deal; you can even do amusing graphics in openoffice and stitch them together with… any number of tools, really.

Cameras and other toys are crayons. They are all just crayons.

Also: Viewer expectation is not a problem, as outlined above; and “critics”, well… you will never get away from them. Ignore them, or challenge them to do better than you did.

So: what’s your idea?

That is how I answer the questions of who, and how.

The final step – my final request – is to stop thinking of it as “Content” (those crayon drawings your kids made and which are stuck to the ‘fridge? Hint: they’re not “content”) – and to stop with the narrow focus on “employees”.

All along, the question should have been:

How do we encourage potential evangelists to talk about what they believe in, what they like and dislike about our products, and how do we give them a better platform to express themselves?

…but you have to get away from the hierarchical “command-and-control” mindset before you can think like that, and it’s a much longer journey than reading a single blog post of mine.

If you want more, leave a comment here.

—
[1] Readers of Richard Feynman will spot the inspiration for this line of thought.

⊞

Comments

11 responses to “What Makes Compelling Employee-Generated Video Content?”

  1. Robin Wilton

    Blimey, are they *still* after your pixie-dust?? I thought that thread had died a grateful death weeks ago.

    As you say, the question is not “how”. If the key word is ‘compelling’, then the question is “who for?”. Arguably, knowing your audience is more important than knowing what they want to hear… as long as you know what you want to say.

    Beyond that, there’s the issue which explains why I am not a multi-millionaire and people like Delia Smith and Simon Cowell are: they are experts in pandering to the tastes of the masses. If I wrote a cook-book, I wouldn’t be interested in writing “How to boil water without burning it”; I’d want to write “How to make the perfect crayfish souffle”. Unfortunately, there are millions more people who can’t boil water without burning it than there are people who want to make the perfect crayfish souffle. And that is why I am doomed never to reach the mass audience ;^)

    Reply
  2. Robin Wilton

    PS –

    “I have a lot of concern about the question, and what brought someone to ask it.”

    Do you remember why someone would want dried leaves, boiled in water?

    Reply
    1. alecm

      Two Adams references in one day. We’re doing well. 🙂

      Reply
  3. alecm

    Exactly, though as you know I already addressed the “whom are you addressing” question; I suppose I’ve been slack in this posting for assuming but not stating that the person with the passion and the idea probably has a very good idea of whom he is addressing… but I did elide that discussion entirely. Mea culpa.

    Actually I do have all of Delia’s “how to boil an egg” books, but that’s to backfill the stuff I never learned from my parents. Mass-market material oft has its uses… 🙂

    Reply
  4. Carolyn A. Colborn

    As always, you are not disappointing me in your response to the (almost) never answered question, “what do you see in your crystal ball?”

    Okay, you colour my world!
    :^)
    cc

    Reply
  5. Laurent

    I like it… looking forward to it. Common-sense is not always very common for some folks…

    There is a lot of boring EGVs out there (from various companies) just because the tools are available, or there’s a mandate to make something happen just because it’s *cool*, or someone else does it better than you and you try to play catch-up. Whatever the case is… if you’re going to do an EGV as an employee, you need to do it for the right reasons: your passion, your creativity and a great idea for a specific audience you fully understand.

    “How do we encourage potential evangelists to talk about what they believe in, what they like and dislike about our products, and how do we give them a better platform to express themselves?”

    that’s great stuff Alec 🙂

    … now, how far do we want to separate the individual and the company/Brand they are representing? Should we restrict employees within closely set of rules in what/how they should do EGV? or should we throw a company’s Brand out of the window?

    I believe these two extremes need to meet somewhere if a company wants an EGV campaign to be successful.

    A company’s EGV initiative would probably need to be based on a business need: either attracting/recruiting talent, driving transparency, being recognized as thought leaders, increasing # of customers, selling more, etc… whatever appropriate and measurable goal is behind it.

    Reply
  6. alecm

    I like it, looking forward to it. Common-sense is not always very common for some folks,

    So it seems…

    There is a lot of boring EGVs out there (from various companies) just because the tools are available,

    Yes indeed, and as we know, boring content erodes the limited amount of space available on the internet; for instance there is an area of the Internet the size of Wyoming that is dedicated to videos of skateboarding dogs and cats who are stuck in trees – if only it could be deleted there would be so much more space for compelling employee-generated content.

    or there’s a mandate to make something happen just because it’s *cool*

    …like *compelling* employee-generated content? As opposed to non-compelling, of course..

    or someone else does it better than you and you try to play catch-up.

    Yes, it is, of course, a race. A race for BRAINZ and EYEBALLZ!!!

    Whatever the case is, if you’re going to do an EGV as an employee, you need to do it for the right reasons: your passion, your creativity and a great idea for a specific audience you fully understand.

    How would one do an EGV (Employee Generated Video) as a non-employee? Or wasn’t that the thrust of my main posting?

    ,”How do we encourage potential evangelists to talk about what they believe in, what they like and dislike about our products, and how do we give them a better platform to express themselves?,”

    that’s great stuff Alec 🙂

    Actually, you know, I believe it, too?

    now, how far do we want to separate the individual and the company/Brand they are representing?

    It’s called “disclosure”, it’s considered good practice.

    Should we restrict employees within closely set of rules in what/how they should do EGV?

    Like Sun does on blogs.sun.com, for instance? Like that’s *heavily* regulated.

    or should we throw a company’s Brand out of the window?

    Ah; this is one of those “let’s solve world hunger, either we feed everyone *or* we kill every human being on the planet so that it’s never a problem ever again” – arguments.

    That’s bullshit, Laurent. I just don’t know if you know it.

    I believe these two extremes need to meet somewhere if a company wants an EGV campaign to be successful.

    Campaign? A campaign is what you *pay* for, dude.

    What you ought to be doing is founding a religion. See Steve Jobs, or maybe Obama.

    A company’s EGV initiative would probably need to be based on a business need: either attracting/recruiting talent, driving transparency, being recognized as thought leaders, increasing # of customers, selling more, etc; whatever appropriate and measurable goal is behind it.

    My favourite metaphor of the moment is “cat versus dog” – you point at something and a cat will typically look at your finger, the dog will look at what you are pointing.

    The dog is smarter, it can see the abstract. Dog organisations will look at the success of a phenomenon and see (a) where it is going, and (b) how to get aboard. They jump on the rolling skateboard and ride it because it is fun, and because is going someplace.

    Cat organisations see the rolling skateboard and either (a) run in fear or (b) fight it and stop it because that’s what they do. Things that move get killed, and then played with by batting them around under the cat’s own control.

    You mention “attracting/recruiting talent” – how is that meant to be passionate, except motivated by money? How is that going to be honest, and therefore capable of retaining value after the “transparency” you desire?

    You’re living in a cat organisation and collectively reacting like a cat.

    And why would one want to “measure” tha value of something that is out of one’s control? Ah, wait… I’ve just answered my own question, haven’t I?

    Get your goals fixed.

    Being goaled on someone else’s work is never a happy state, especially when they are out of your reporting line. In what way is it EITHER measurable OR appropriate? Instead it makes you try to control them, and thereby kill them. You stop their skateboard and that’s not nice.

    Reply
  7. Carolyn A. Colborn

    Alec, I’m almost speachless, but the cats haven’t got my tongue.
    I couldn’t have said it any better.
    cc

    Reply
  8. Chris Gerhard

    No Alec, the solution is technology.

    Film all your employees in front of blue screens and then, and this is the clever bit, when the video is displayed you can customise the background for the viewer. So obviously most people would get shown endless pictures from the Camapagnolo catalog but some weird people would get kittens or puppies.

    The message from the employee may get lost a bit but the ratings would be high!

    🙂

    Reply
  9. alecm

    …and thus we are back to the naked dancing girls, but I especially like the bluescreen concept 🙂

    Reply
  10. dropsafe / Producer, Consumer, Community Member?

    […] might even try rebranding these video bloggers as “Employee-Generated Video Content Producers” in order to bring them into line and your […]

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