Web conferencing technology has made it ridiculously easy to record, archive, and publish audio/video presentations. This is not always a good thing.
The World Wide Web is an immensely flexible and powerful repository for materials designed for entertainment, persuasion, shopping, and information (to name just a few categories). Video presentations – when done right – can stand out from surrounding content. They can convey rich, compelling stories. They can influence and persuade viewers to adopt new attitudes or take actions. They can also frustrate and alienate the people you are trying to reach.
If your content is primarily factual reference information, I beg you to think carefully before embedding it in a video. It is infuriating to search for a single answer to a single question only to find that I need to load a video and scan through it linearly until the presenter finally gets around to talking about the thing I am interested in.
The worst offender is technical support or product help videos. This has grown wildly in popularity, particularly among presentation technology vendors who want to showcase the use of their own tools. A video tutorial for a first-timer getting familiar with the technology might make great sense. A video answer to an FAQ or knowledge base question about a single feature is almost always a waste of time. I can scan through a web page full of keywords and screen shots a lot faster than I can sit and plod through a video. Search tools for textual information are plentiful and easy to use. Search tools for content embedded in videos are clunky and less capable.
Pick your favorite cliché: “Horses for courses” or “The right tool for the right job” or “Don’t use a hammer to swat a fly.” They all mean the same thing... Consider the context in which your audience is likely to be looking for your information content.
If a storyline and video image offers advantages your audience couldn’t get from a static web page, by all means use it. But if you are just taking a set of written bullet points and putting them in a video because you think your technology is cool, you need to step back and concentrate on the content rather than the delivery medium. Make life easier for the people using your technology and they will appreciate your thoughtfulness and practical recognition of their priorities over your own.
