You’ve probably heard the User-Generated Content (UGC) buzzword before, but have you ever thought about how user-generated video could work for your business to drive change, specifically in your training programs?
It’s no secret campaigns like Coca Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign have been extremely successful. After all, if you have a more unique name (or even if you don’t), how exciting was it to see a Coke product with your name on it? Makes you want to share this excitement in the way we all do nowadays, right? Via pictures and video posted on social media.
The same concept can be used in a business setting. No, I’m not talking about getting your employees to post themselves doing fun things at work on social media. Instead, take that same idea of creating user-generated content and apply it to a business setting in order to drive change in user training adoption, completion rates, and more inside of your LMS (if it has video submission capabilities).
Here are six ways user-generated video content can drive those changes…
1. It Gets Your Employees/Users Involved
One of the biggest challenges with training can be user adoption. In fact, in a Software Advice report, 41% of companies found low user adoption to be a challenge.
So how do you combat this? One way is to get your employees (or users) more involved. Let them pilot their own learning and share what they think is relevant and interesting via video submissions.
I’m sure it’s not a large feat to think back to a time when you came across a useful tutorial or interesting video on YouTube that helped you complete a task or learn something new. The same is true of your users and giving them the ability to share those kinds of videos with their peers can lead to better LMS adoption and usage.
2. Gives Them a Feeling of Empowerment
Similarly, this ability to submit not only links to videos they found online but also videos they may have filmed themselves using their phone, can be quite empowering for your users.
True user-generated video content would come more in the form of your users filming something themselves and sharing it. Imagine giving your users the chance to record short videos about particular work-related or training-specific tasks and sharing it via the LMS. Now, imagine other users found it extremely helpful and gave it a ‘like.’ I’m pretty sure that original submitter likes seeing how much his/her video has helped others and gets a little smile or chest-puffed feeling going on. It may even prompt others to do the same, therefore building up your company’s content library.
3. A Wealth of Unique Content
As I mentioned before, by allowing users to film and submit their own videos, you can quickly build up a video content library of tasks specific to your organization and its processes, products, and more.
You could even build this content-creation into your training strategy to do multiple things at once: get your users involved in the content creation process (thereby empowering them), which in turn builds out your library of highly-specific training videos. Have video creation brainstorming sessions as part of whatever weekly, monthly meetings you may have.
4. Content Will Be Short and Easy to Consume
Most of us don’t want to sit through hours and hours of training, especially if we’re looking for specific how-to’s or more of a get-in-get-out type of training. As such, I highly doubt most of your users will be sharing hour-long speeches they found on YouTube, or even film themselves giving a 45-minute long demonstration of how to do a single task (unless it truly takes that long).
Videos are likely to be shorter and consumed quickly as that’s how most of us prefer to consume content on our own. Certain training courses may include longer videos as they tend to cover a variety of topics or multiple pieces of one topic, but standalone user-generated video content will likely be short and to the point.
5. Video Training As They Need It, When They Need It
Just like with any question we might have in a normal, everyday setting, your employees or users will have questions specific to job functions, processes, or any other number of inquiries that they’ll want answers to.
In this way, the user-generated video content provides them with access to training when they need it. This is especially true if you know what questions are frequently asked and/or can anticipate what questions they’re likely to ask.
This is a two-fold approach as it’s also likely to boost user adoption if they can search internally for answers to their questions and find the content when they need it instead of having to wait for an answer.
6. Upload Recorded Assessments to the LMS
The previous five examples have been more abstract in how they can drive change, but this one is something that can be added to your training program (if applicable) and will most assuredly change how your business conducts its training.
Certain LMSs (like ours) have the ability to complement on-the-job-training (OJT) via built-in features like checklists and assessments. Imagine, though, if you could actually have your employee or user record him- or herself performing a task and then upload it into the LMS for a manager or supervisor to watch and approve.
This creates a wealth of new possibilities for those companies where the workforce/user base and management may not exist in the same location, scheduling time for assessments is difficult, etc. These video assessments can help speed up the approval process, as well as save time and money.
Consuming content through video is such a normal way of life for most people nowadays that it only makes sense to incorporate aspects of it into training programs. User-generated video content not only brings companies’ training into the modern day, but can be used to drive significant (and highly beneficial) change.
Click on the link to see how you can do all of this and more with eSSential’s Video Management functionality!
Katie Leahy(https://elogiclearning.com/)