Want to reflect the diverse nature of your business and the breadth of talent within it? Are you global in reach but want to be able to show that you are a people-first company?
Then you should embrace collaborative content as a means of showing these sides of your company. Collaborative content is just what it sounds like: multiple people working together on a single piece of content for your brand.
It can involve people from within your organisation, outside influencers, or even competitors, in some cases. It can be mastered with user-generated content (UGC), providing an alternative to big budget productions. By using smartphones your talented members of staff can capture the moment in a way never previously possible – and enable collaboration on a global scale.
UGC allows you to shoot videos across a number of locations or even countries. Wherever it is, it’s still possible to have the final product compiled and passed through compliance on the very same day.
Here are five ways to engage your dispersed workforce to create collaborative content that sings.
1. Employee perspectives. If you’re interested in showing off the strength and communal nature of your brand, you could invite your employees to share their individual perspectives in a single clip. For example, you could ask your team members to share ‘day in the life’ snapshots of what they do for the organisation as a whole. Use this type of content sparingly, as it may not have as much value for the end user as things like original research or interviews.
2. Interviews and panels. Brief staff members to interview an industry influencer who is well-known in their region or sphere of expertise. By briefing a number of different staff members to do this, you can edit together the interviews, or alternatively create a series of interviews to fuel your external and internal comms channels. Chances are that your interviewee will want to share it with their fans, so make sure someone with significant social clout is picked.
3. Linking clips. Create a series of video clips in which there is a linking element to each one, thus allowing each creator to pass the torch to the next to create a video that follows on, thematically. This will show off the diverse nature of your organisation, while hopefully retaining the social traffic of viewers along the way. You also won’t have to worry about stepping on one another’s toes in the creation process.
4. Training videos. From running payroll to using the latest in-house SaaS software, training videos are an important internal comms tool to help new starters get up to speed in almost every part of your daily operations. There is the potential for these to be unengaging, so why not add some humanity and fun by recruiting staff members to record these videos collaboratively across numerous office locations.
5. Case studies. Consider ways in which your members of staff can partner up with their clients to create an in-depth video case study. In this way, you can cross-promote their brand in your work and simultaneously show off what your brand can do.
And finally..
It’s important to keep full control over what is made public whilst at the same time empowering your staff or clients to run a little wild with their creativity. The choice should be yours to see what fits and what should be left in on the cutting room floor.
And just because you’re handing over the reins to your employees, that does not mean that you have to let your brand compliance slip. Ensure you stand out from the crowd with professionally produced, fully on-brand animated intros and outros, and lower thirds on all shared content to ensure continuity across all communications. These can easily be created well in advance of any shot footage.
And there’s one other important point to remember. User-generated content is great at enabling brands to be relevant and timely, providing the immediacy of grabbing the moment and gaining much-needed authenticity. But don’t let the quality of your video clips let your brand down. There are three ways in which UGC can do this: stability, light and sound.
Always try to be as stable as you can; control as far as is possible your shooting environment; light your subject well; and elevate the audio to get better quality of sound. If you get all of that right, your collaborative content will shine.
And finally, make it fun, make it engaging or make it memorable. We should always be asking ourselves: Will be liked and shared? What do you tend to pass on to your connections? Is your video content: Relevant? Engaging? Rewarding? Memorable? If it is, it is more likely to be shared!
About the Author
Alex Hughes is the CEO and Co-founder of video editing platform Binumi Pro. Binumi Pro is a platform and App that allows you to shoot, moderate and share professionally edited video using your smartphone; and Totem, an online virtual hybrid events platform with networking at its heart.
