A year ago, when I attended the 2013 Communications Directors’ Forum, the topic trending was the rise of the ‘hybrid communicator’ who understands the principles of both internal and external communications. As I reflect on this year’s forum, one of the main takeaways I have is that everyone was feeling ‘bold;’ feeling bold, to implement new strategies, take a few more calculated risks, embrace social media, refresh writing skills and harness the power of video.

During the event, I led workgroups with Steve Garratt from the Giggle Group on videos for internal communications. It’s a topic I’m passionate about, as working for Cisco, a leading IT company, we use video almost every minute, of every day. Focusing on the creation of video for internal communications, many of the attendees in the workgroups had the following top of mind: cost vs. benefit, complexity of video production, embracing employee-generated content, distribution of videos, creating globally relevant content and understanding animation. We covered a lot during the sessions, much more than I can share here, but these were the top takeaways:

Your initial brief is critical and will help you decide whether you are going down the right route to develop a video or not. A bad brief often means a bad video. Your brief is your opportunity to explore the objectives that you want to achieve. 

Really think about your measurement criteria. One of the best practices I heard about was a company that asked employees what words described the business before and after an engagement video went live.

Evaluate the cost per head of a video and decide whether that’s the best use of your budget. A £5,000 video for an audience of 200 employees is £25 per head and there may be other ways to engage your audience with that budget.

You need to build a campaign around a video to ensure that it is available on multiple platforms and promoted in many different ways. Most people need to hear a message three to five times before it resonates. Also, don’t underestimate English as a second language – I have seen employees carefully transcribing an English language video to ensure they understood the message.

Sixty-second videos are the new norm and the majority of people click away from a video 45 seconds in; For a 60 second video you only need around 120 words; don’t wait to deliver the punchline, communicate up front. To get to a decent 120-word script, a good starting point is to write up to 20 bullet points then edit, edit, edit and ideally remember to use the language used outside your organisation, not within it.

Ensure that your executives or spokespeople are video ready. If they are not, think about outof-the-box training, such as courses offered by RADA, to energise presentation and oration skills.

Keep abreast of the trends you see on social media, television and elsewhere for videos. The moment for Royal Academy of Arts hand-drawn strategy videos has probably passed. Animation is popular, but it’s estimated to cost around £5,000 on average for 30 seconds of high quality animation. It can make strategy approachable, clear and understandable, so it is sometimes undeniably worth the investment.

Leverage early-in-career talent to understand how you can self-create videos and promote them on social media. Or ask a video production agency if you can shadow them for a day.

Have fun, take a risk and give video a go! Finally, remember that every internal video can now be copied and filmed on camera phones and so do make sure you are confident that your internal messages translate externally too – so that you can communicate to all stakeholders transparently and consistently.

Emma Thompson is head of communications for the Middle East, Africa and Russia at Cisco