We’ve created some YouTube Shorts on promoting the value of techcomm. In this podcast episode, we talk about the process of creating the videos and the content in the videos.
Transcript
Hello and welcome again to the Cherryleaf Podcast. My name is Ellis Pratt. I’m one of the directors at Cherryleaf, and we’re a technical writing services and training company.
In addition to being one of the presenters on this podcast, I also listen to other podcasts. I was listening recently to Tom Johnson’s podcast. Like his blog, it’s called I’d Rather Be Writing. And he had an interesting episode with Keren Brown of ZoomInfo on the topic of communicating your value.
Now talking about how technical authors, technical writers, documentation managers can communicate their value and issues around the return on investments when it comes to technical documentation is something that we’ve talked about on this podcast. For example, episodes 113, 116 and 123.
Listening to Tom and Keren talking about different ways that you can communicate the value gave me some ideas. There’s certainly stuff in that podcast that was new, hadn’t been things that we talked about on this podcast or necessarily blogged about on our website. And the idea came to my head and that was it would be good to take some of these ideas and promote them, to share them with others, particularly documentation manager.
And it may because I was watching a number of YouTube shorts, I thought one way that that could be done would be to create some videos, some advice on how these ideas could be implemented and actioned. And that they would be a good topic for some short videos.
So in this podcast, what I want to do is talk about the process of making short videos, if you want to do something similar to that, and also the content in the videos. The video shorts that we created.
One question you might have, is why create a short form video? And the answer is that they are incredibly popular. TikTok is huge, particularly with people that are under the age of 30, and YouTube’s equivalent, which are called YouTube Shorts.
And according to Alphabet, the owners of YouTube and Google, there were 30 billion daily views in 2022. And you might be asking how short is a short video with TikTok. The videos can be between 30 seconds and three minutes long. For YouTube, the limitation is they have to be under 60 seconds long.
And we decided to start by creating some videos for YouTube, primarily on the basis that we have some familiarity with using YouTube and posting videos to YouTube. Tiktok is an unknown entity for us and we thought, let’s try with YouTube first, see how it goes and then maybe do more research on what would be of interest to an audience that watches TikTok videos. There’s a certain style to those types of videos on TikTok, and we didn’t want to be, I guess the equivalent of dad at the disco and get the tone and presentation wrong for that particular format.
An audience 60 seconds isn’t very long. It’s roughly 160 to 200 words, or say 10 lines on a page. The only deal with TikTok and with YouTube shorts is that you can create videos easily by using your smartphone and their apps on those phones on those devices. The idea is you don’t need any fancy equipment. And because they’re recorded on a smartphone, they’re nearly always in a long vertical format. They can be square, but typically they are in a format where they are longer than they are wider.
Why are they so popular? The belief is that the brevity of the videos makes them more entertaining. It is said that people have shorter attention spans them before, so they like the fact that the videos are condensed and just give the information in a short period of time. It also forces people to be more creative. Those limitations generate ideas for being more creative, to engage people more quickly, and also the apps have functionality for the audience to be interactive with the videos.
Although you can just hit record, look at the camera and talk. It probably makes sense to have a script so you don’t forget what you want to say. One option is to memorise that and just speak if you want, but probably the safest way is to have the text that you can look at as you’re talking, and that can be on a screen behind the camera. Another way is that there are teleprompter apps for smartphones. You can put your script onto that hit record, run your teleprompter app, and see the words as you’re speaking.
Now we didn’t use the apps, so I’m not sure if that functionality is in those apps like YouTube and TikTok as well. We did it a different way, which made our lives more complicated. I’ll come to that in a minute. You can use the apps to edit the video, chop out bits that you don’t want and you can then upload those videos to the sites. And there are other apps for smartphones like cap carts that you can also use to make the videos more interesting.
You can make the videos higher in quality by improving the audio element of that. Some people use external microphones, and you can get an external microphone that will plug into the bottom of an iPhone or Android, or do it via Bluetooth. And they cost about from £10 to £40 and upwards.
And you’ll see a lot of people on YouTube and on TikTok that have ring lights to soften the lighting around somebody. And you can pick them up from pound stores, not necessarily for £1, but you can get one from about £5 upwards.
For us, it wasn’t quick and easy. We got ourselves into some difficulties purely of our own making. The first thing to start off with is what we’re talking about, how to promote and communicate the value of technical authors isn’t the most interesting of content. Put that aside, what we have, because we create e-learning courses that we sell, we have audiovisual equipment already. We have cameras, we have microphones, we have Camtasia for editing, publishing videos. So we decided to use those. And as a consequence of our stupidity, we recorded it in landscape, not in portrait mode. And also, when we try to upload the videos, YouTube wouldn’t recognise them as Shorts, so we had to reformat the videos so that they were in the correct dimensions that are necessary for them to work as YouTube shorts.
Another issue was that 60 seconds in Camtasia seems to be different from what YouTube sees as 60 seconds. So we were finding that we had one second too many on the videos for Youtube’s liking and having to go back in and chop a second out. And when you’ve only got 60 seconds to speak, then finding that place to chop out a second can be challenging.
So what should have been a quick and painless exercise in creating a number of video, because it was our first time, we made a number of mistakes. It wasn’t quick and simple. It took a little bit longer than we expected.
If you’re thinking about creating some videos for TikTok or YouTube yourself, probably the best thing to do would be just to find a quiet room and record it on your smartphone and do it the way. Record these type of videos in the way they were intended to be done.
Before we get into the contents of the videos that we created, I should also mention that we posted the videos to other places in addition to YouTube. And that’s another option for you if you’re planning to create some video shorts.
In our situation, we posted it to LinkedIn and got a very good response there. For yourself, you could consider posting it to your internal intranet. If it’s publicly-facing information that you’re producing or making in these videos, you could post it to your company blog. Talk to the relevant people to get the appropriate permissions to do so. Or even user forums.
And in a way we are sharing the information on this podcast, because what I want to do now is go through the content of what’s in those videos.
The first one we have called internally “customer journey”. So here’s the script, and I’ll speak at a slower speed than in the YouTube video, because in this podcast I don’t need to restrict myself to just the 60 seconds.
Many business people imagine the journey from prospect to customer is that they discover information about your company. They look at your sales material like your website or brochures. And then they buy. But the truth is, for some products, that’s just not true, particularly products that are significant in cost and technical in nature.
Some customers or prospects instead look for technical information, such as your online help content in your knowledge base, to check that your product has the functionality that they need.
If you have better technical content help content than your competitors, if you can explain how you solve their problems, then that increases the chances that they’re likely to buy from you.
And if you want to test out whether this is true or not. Add a button to your help pages that say “Book a demo”, and see how many leads it generates.
So that was the first script and that was based on idea from the I’d Rather Be Writing Podcasts with Keren. And she suggested adding a “Book a demo” button to help pages.
Let’s move on to another video. And we call this one “Shout”.
Here’s another tip. If you’re running a tech pubs team, shout to the top.
By this I mean, speak at company and user events. Show videos of user interactions with your documentation.
And you can use tools like HotJar to do this, and create reports and data dashboards with graphs to show the value and benefits of document.
And if you’re not sure what to talk about at an event, here’s a tip. Talk about the company’s vision and stated goals, and explain how technical communication has a role in this, why it’s important and how it’s contributing.
And you can also cover how your documentation compares against others where it’s good. Great or needs improving? If you’re not sure how good you’re doing. You can get statistics from people like ZoomInfo, which has the Technical Content Benchmark Report and the Centre for Information Development Management, which has data industry benchmarks relating to technical publications.
So again, we are covering something that was in the I’d rather be writing podcast where Keren talked about ZoomInfo’s report on the Technical Content Benchmark Report. There is another one or a number of other reports that. Centre for Information Development Management, or CIDM, has. And it’s around this idea of thinking about the department as a business. How would it promote itself, understand what’s needed?
This video is similar to the one we’ve just gone through. We called it “Strategy”.
Another tip for people running a technical publications team: identify what are the business goals of your company and see how you can actually start evaluating documentation as it relates to that.
You can discover the performance indicators that lie either in some other business units within your organisation.
And you can watch videos of your CEO’s talking about their vision for the organisation, understand and explain how your teams work contribute to this.
Here are some examples:Understand what your leaders of your support team care about or are being measured on, and explore and explain how you can contribute. And you can ask a chatbot like ChatGPT for suggestions.
If your company is looking to generate new leads, show how documentation contributes to those core goals.
And if your company sees APIs are strategic to the business, show how documentation improves adoption.
Another related to AI.
Tips for people running a technical publications team: get involved with any AI projects. For it to do its magic, AI needs accurate and clear information in its model.
Organisations are now using technologies like RAG, that’s retrieval augmented generation, to create chatbots that take the answers from the enterprise’s bodies of knowledge, the procedures the user guides, and so on.
If your organisation is building a chatbot, who can make sure the content it uses to provide the answers is correct? Well, the answer is technical writers. They can create and refine the documentation that powers your AI systems, because quality in leads to quality out. They have the skills to structure the guidelines, the brand language, the skills to take the content and make it into content you can use.
So get your technical writers involved in AI projects.
And the final one that I’ll go through relates to deflecting and saving money on support calls. It’s a topic we’ve talked about on our blog and on previous episodes in the past. It’s also something that was discussed on the I’d rather be writing.com podcast.
Here’s a tip for people running a TechPubs team: Look at the support call statistics.
Cases resolved through documentation cost significantly less than those that require a phone call or IT support.
Can you identify how documentation can help the support team answer tickets more effectively? You can use AI to analyse the call data to count how many questions relate to how to do something and other topics that are in your documentation.
Can you identify the number of deflected calls? Some support ticket systems suggest answers from the user documentation. With case deflection, users find answers themselves and that saves time and costs.
And can we look at the search terms that lead to people reading your documentation? Again, search relating to how to do something is probably about people answering questions that would otherwise lead to support call.
If you can quantify these, you can start to show the return on investment of documentation and prove the value of your documentation with data.
We did ask ChatGPT and Claude if they could create a script for these videos. It was quite useful in showing how little information can be covered in just 60 seconds. There’s a temptation to write lots of content for your script. By doing this, it was clear to say that you only had about 10 lines to work with, but the scripts themselves weren’t really appropriate.
And let me give you an illustration of that for the script that was suggested for the ROI of technical communication.
[Opening Scene]
Visual: Graphs and charts showing data analyticsNarrator: “Think documentation doesn’t impact business goals? Think again!”
[Cut to Text on Screen]
Text: “Measure Documentation Impact”Narrator: “Track traffic to your documentation portals and returning users. More visits often mean more sales.”
[Scene Transition]
Visual: CEO giving a presentation on company strategyNarrator: “Align your content with company goals. Listen to what your leaders prioritize.”
[Cut to Text on Screen]
Text: “Tie Content to Business Goals”Narrator: “Show how your documentation supports key business metrics like reducing support costs or generating leads.”
[Closing Scene]
Visual: Team analyzing data and celebrating successNarrator: “Prove the value of your documentation with data and drive business growth!”
[End with Call to Action]
Text: “Follow for more tips on leveraging tech content!”
The problem with that was tone. And also the need to create quite a lot of visuals to go into the video. What we did do was find some stock videos and insert a few of them into the videos that we created, but not after every sentence. That we said if you’re looking to create a script, then you might get some pointers from a chatbot. But you probably need to write it in your tone in your voice, and adapt it. If it does give you a script to make it appropriate to your situation.
And that’s all we really want to cover on this episode.
We’ve looked at where the shorts have a place. And TikTok has a place as a way of communicating information.
We’ve looked at the mechanism for how to create short videos. And in general, if you use the apps and use your smartphone, you can do them relatively quickly.
And we’ve looked at content and ideas for things that documentation managers and technical authors can do to improve the profile and the value and respect, I guess, of technical communicators within an organisation.
The videos are about helping technical communicators, documentation managers, in their career to be more successful.
We also provide a monthly free newsletter. You can go to our website and follow the links and you can subscribe to that. And in that newsletter we also provide links to other information that we think might be useful, might be interesting to technical communicators. If you’ll want to subscribe to the Cherryleaf newsletter, then that might interest you as. Well. The website for Cherryleaf is www.cherryleaf.com. And I would like to finally say thank you again for listening.
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