Five Trends in Enterprise Video

Video is becoming a preferred vehicle through which enterprises communicate to their employees, partners, prospects, customers and more. In fact, according to Cisco, the sum of all forms of video will exceed 86% of global consumer traffic by 2016. And according to Gartner, the amount of video in the enterprise is increasing at rates varying from 50% to 200%, annually.

Why the trend? Messages can be presented in a way that is not possible with text or static imagery alone. According to research by h.engage, a company that runs employee programs, videos had an engagement range of 40% to 69%—the highest out of all the channels they studied, including newsletters and posters.

For enterprises, this represents an exciting opportunity to deliver information in a more engaging, mobile and "snackable" way. To learn more about the role of video in enterprises today and how the future of video for enterprise communication is perceived, we undertook a survey. Here's what we found:

Video for external communications ranks higher in importance than for internal communications in companies of all sizes. 62.4% of our survey respondents said that external video is important or most important for their external communications, versus 46.5% for internal communications. Employees from smaller companies were 1.7 times more likely to rank video as important or very important for external communications, versus internal. Video for internal use may seem like a luxury (and perhaps not a necessity) for smaller companies, so they are biased toward creating video that will help them market, sell and service.

Larger companies use video more frequently for internal communications than smaller organizations. A company with 2,000+ employees is about 40% more likely to rank video for internal communications as important or most important compared to a company with fewer than 2,000 employees. Larger companies are leading the way in using video for internal communications—and likely have a more urgent need for a cost-effective and easy way to communicate with employees that are likely not co-located and situated across time zones.

Getting To Video

The perceived barriers to using more video vary by role. Overall, respondents expressed that there continue to be barriers to using more video in their internal and external communications. Producing video is collectively the number-one barrier to using more video. So, while video has become easier to create and more ubiquitous given a "video camera in every pocket," it has not yet reached a complete commoditization status in the enterprise. Distributing, managing and monetizing video essentially tie for second place across all respondents. However, the primary and secondary barriers to using more video vary significantly when we looked at the barriers by role:

• Marketing's number-one challenge is producing video, followed by monetizing it.
• IT is most concerned with managing, then distributing and producing video.
• HR expresses an equal challenge around managing and distributing video, but lesser concerns about actually producing video.

Enterprises want to incorporate video into their content management system (CMS). More than three-quarters of respondents (77.8%) felt incorporating video into their CMS would be somewhat beneficial or definitely beneficial. Companies have invested time, money and resources into their CMS, and want to leverage this investment for other content types, video being a logical one. Typically CMSs aren't well equipped to handle video file formats, so this expressed need presents technological and infrastructure challenges that must be overcome. The largest companies (more than 10,000 employees) were nearly two times more likely to cite securing their video as a concern versus smaller companies. This may be due to the industries of companies that are typically found in that size bracket, as well as the complexities they face distributing video across an often geographically dispersed audience. One of the many benefits for a company that integrates its video assets into its CMS is that the access and authorization security protocols of its CMS are applied to and leveraged across the video library, addressing most common security concerns.

Larger companies are more likely than smaller companies to see video as the de facto means of communicating in the next five years. Is video a fad or the new reality? 44% of respondents somewhat or strongly agree that video will be the de facto form of communication in their organization in the next five years. Companies with 2,000+ employees tended to agree with this more as compared to companies with fewer than 2,000 employees, where the responses were more evenly distributed across the spectrum. As the demand for video within business grows and the barriers to creating it continue dropping, companies are facing an important choice: embrace the culture shift, or start falling behind companies that do. Best-in-class enterprises that use video exhibit the following traits:

They use video for multiple purposes. In fact, they use it for an average of 7.9 types of video as compared with less mature organizations who use video for an average of three types of purposes.

They make video easy to find. A video has little value if it can't be found. Mature video companies ensure their employees can locate the video content they need, when they need it.

They encourage their employees to create their own video. 60% of leading companies support employee-generated content, having worked through concerns around consistency and production quality to discover that at the end of the day, video is such an effective format for communicating ideas that the benefits of democratizing video within their organizations outweigh the risks.

They create a culture that values video content. Employees accept it as a natural way to communicate.

They create short, fun videos. This helps accommodate shortened attention spans, and encourages content that will be shared across the organization.

Video is the new document. Organizations that embrace it will find they can more effectively engage, inform and educate employees.