Should Creating Videos Be Part of Every Job Now?

I recently had a very interesting conversation with the CEO of one of the biggest department store chains in the UK.

“My biggest problem,” he told me, “is feeding the damned social media.”

He was old. One does not become the CEO of one of the largest retail companies in the UK (or anywhere else in the world for that matter) at the age of 23, but he very much understood the importance of sites like TikTok or Instagram for attracting the much needed under 30 demographic, which represent not just the bulk of his shoppers, but also the future of his business.

Social media has become a critical part of our advertising landscape, he told me, but it’s so damned expensive.

A quick look at the company’s Instagram page told a lot. The videos were great. Very slick, very highly produced, beautifully shot. And, of course, they vanished in a day or two, or simply got buried and disappeared. Some sites, such as IGTV are in fact designed to vanish videos. That’s a lot of money for a relatively short hit. The videos were being produced by their ad agency. Good for the ad agency. Because for them it’s a business that never ends. If they shoot and produce an ad for TV, well, that one can run for months. If they take the same effort to shoot and produce a video for social media, it’s gone in a day or two. But you have to keep feeding the beast.

I have a different idea, I told him.

You have 72,000 employees, I told him. I think it’s a fair bet that all of those employees have a smart phone. I think it’s also a fair bet that almost all of those employees are already posting photos and probably even video to their own social media sites.

Suppose you were to ‘turn on’ your 72,000 employees to make videos for your stores as a part of their job? With relatively little effort, you could have a massive army of video content producers flooding social media with stories and videos about your business. That’s what I would call viral video.

The concept is new.

But the idea is in fact relatively old.

At the beginning of the 19th century, wars were fought by relatively small standing armies. Austria, for example, had a highly trained (and extremely well dressed) professional army of about 20,000 soldiers. When European nations went to war with each other, they marched out their toy soldier like armies and went at it.

Napoleon had a different idea.

He took the peasantry into his Grand Armee. This was unheard of. Peasants, farmers, craftsmen, blacksmiths — everyone was enlisted and given enough basic training over a few weeks.

Napoleon was a great general, but there were lots of great generals. But when he unleashed his army, Napoleon could field 200,000 men. That was a winning formula, and working with that one, he conquered most of Europe.

So this business, or any business, can do what Napoleon did. Field a massive army of iPhone armed social media warriors.

Your employees know your business, and more importantly, they are there. They have access. You can take your viewers into the stores, into the warehouse, with them on deliveries, into the factories where things are made, watching fresh produce as it arrives in real time. The possibilities are endless.

Has anyone ever been asked to produce videos as part of their job description before? Or course not. New technologies change job descriptions all the time.

When I started working there was a special ‘word processing room’ where one highly trained technician operated a massive machine called a Vydek. The thing was the size of a Volkswagen and it ran off 12 inch discs. The codes were so complicated, you had to go to Vydek school to work on it.

And what did it do?

Word processing. That’s it.

Today, everyone does their own word processing.

It’s part of any job.

As, generally, are spread sheets.

When computers first came to The BBC, Lisa, who was a manager there, was paid a £1,000 bonus for ‘computer training.’

Today, computer literacy is a given.

If, hypothetically, a company with 72,000 employees asked each employee to upload 3 videos a week (not exactly demanding), the company could flood social media with more than 200,000 videos every week.

Not all of them will be great, but a few will become ‘influencers’ on their own accord.

This, to me, is inevitable.

In the not too distant future, every employee will be making videos for their companies. After all, every employee wants their business to succeed. And this is the quick way to do it. All the pieces are already in place.