If you work in knowledge management, then you have spent at least some time thinking about how to embed videos into knowledge solutions. Marcia Ravner and Wayne Pruski at Quest Software have been experimenting with publishing of support videos within their knowledge base solutions. Recently at a KCS DeepDive Discussion, they shared tactical best practices with other members of the Consortium.
Here are some helpful hints that Marcia and Wayne shared:
- Create a KCS-specific process to create and publish videos externalized within the support solutions. This process probably will be different from the one that is used by marketing departments when publishing videos to corporate websites. Keep it simple and streamlined like the KCS article creation process to reduce the barriers to participation.
- Create your videos once and store all of them in a central repository. This central repository should be available 24X7 and allow users to easily locate the URL for each enabling them to quickly embed the video into a solution. This is especially helpful if you prefer to deliver the same videos through multiple access points (e.g, corporate website and/or YouTube).
- Keep videos 3-5 minutes long and break into logical modules if your content requires more time. Attention spans of listeners has grown short, and keeping the videos short and sweet ensures that they will listen through to the end of each video.
- If you have several video authors in the same location, provide a mobile cart equipped with everything needed to record videos and make it available for checkout. When video authors need to create a video, they can come and check out the cart with all the equipment set up to create a high quality video.
- For the video authors who work remotely, create a detailed list of all the items they need to create high quality videos. Tell them what to purchase, where to get it and how much it should cost. This reduces the time it takes for them to get the equipment and software they need.
- Encourage communication between video authors throughout your organization. Create a video authoring community forum to encourage knowledge sharing, troubleshooting and cross-LOB collaboration between all those who create video. Offer new video authors to this community as a resource to help them learn to create video quickly.
- Encourage the creation of video content by making it a regular discussion topic at team meetings. Review service requests for trends that indicate video content opportunities. Ask your support engineers where video content would help them resolve service requests faster.
For more information, please see the Video by Support, for Support document.