One of the most universal truths is that if you don’t talk about what you are doing, how will people know?
Everyone leads busy lives, we live in our own bubbles, and while we do generally try and be good humans and notice and recognise other people doing good things, it’s not always that easy to do.
That’s why I personally find things like twitter, reading Blogs and attending networking events or conferences useful, they give me a change to see what else is happening out there, who is doing what good things; they are opportunities to connect and share.
However that is predicated on the basic foundation of having things to share. One of the things I’ve found, upon joining Difrent, is that we are not that great on sharing the great stuff we are doing. Which is a shame, as we are doing some really great stuff!
Thankfully Rach and I are on the same page (perhaps unsurprisingly given we are both rather massive extraverts) so we’ve been having some good conversations within the SLT on what more we can do to develop better content and support our teams and people to be more confident in sharing what they are doing.
Last week we had @RachelleMoose from Strange Digital come in and deliver a two day workshop for us on content strategy, focusing on how we could use video better to tell Difrent’s story.
While I’ve always found the projects and culture video’s we developed at DWP Digital to be great, I’d never actually researched or seen any of the stats on why video is a good medium for sharing content from a business point of view. I knew I liked them, but I didn’t understand why there were useful! But the workshop taught me things like: videos generate 135% more traffic to a site than static content alone; and that 92% of people who watch a video on mobile devices, go on to share that video with others.
It was especially interesting from an accessibility angle, to consider how we make sure our content as accessible to everyone, not simply in terms of sticking subtitles on all our videos, but things like understanding that audio needs to be understood and edited to ensure it doesn’t clash with anyone speaking and how different formats work etc. For example, more than 85% of social videos are watched without sound, which helps explain why Closed Captions and Titles on videos are important.
I found the workshop a really good session to do as a Senior Leadership team, it really made us think about what messages we wanted to put out there, what we felt was the right way to tell our story and who we are as a company.
We also did some competitor analysis to see what other content is out there; what messages resonated with us, and what didn’t; as well as discussing the formats we liked as a group etc. I got to put post it notes on a wall, which is always the sign of a good day for me.
What I found especially beneficial, being new to the company, was asking some of our staff their thoughts on our culture and what they would like to see in the videos. Within Difrent we pride ourselves on encouraging and enabling everyone to be themselves and able to bring their whole selves to work; hearing from people how they felt Difrent embodies that was really encouraging.
I’m really looking forward to seeing the output of the videos once they are made, and really think they will help us within Difrent work in the open better, talk about our amazing people and show the great work we are delivering.
