I’ve been very fortunate to work with great clients from nearly every industry over the years. Being able to walk through the halls of brands with a rich heritage and history is humbling, and helping them with their marketing challenges is a privilege. Working with such diverse brands, I’ve been able to see how they work — not just with agencies, but also with one another.

Now, when I use the term ‘collaboration,’ I focus primarily on the greater organizational structure — disparate teams spanning the course of a few floors, a building, a corporate campus, or even across the globe. There are silos all over, so what do we need to do to break down the walls and work with one another to provide a culture of learning and real collaboration?

It’s easy to see that each organization is truly different, leveraging suites of tools to ensure knowledge is shared and communication is easily facilitated. This still doesn’t substitute face time, but it is a way to help bridge a distance gap. When corporate-level tools aren’t available, things can run a little wild — allowing individual groups to use different toolsets and silo themselves further.

Why are teams creating their own bubbles, and why are companies letting it happen? I’ve always been a fan of cross-functional teams, which allow people to span alignments, clients and projects. Cross-functional teams meet, collaborate and help solve problems objectively — without consuming the client’s Kool-Aid.

So why is this important?

• Awareness of your own team: Understanding your own team’s strengths and weaknesses is paramount to streamlining process. Do you know how other teams or departments handle everyday tasks? You might soon realize the ways these have been done aren’t necessarily the best or most efficient.
• Combining of resources: Brainstorming to solve a common problem is all too familiar, but have you brainstormed with a member from other department? You’d be surprised by the wealth of knowledge members outside your own team have been exposed to, from solutions that simply didn’t work, to unique ways of working through challenges.
• Wearing down friction: Think of the inefficiencies generated from not knowing whom to turn to for specific problems, or recreating the wheel when others have created the same presentation, learning materials or documents for clients. That’s wasted time, and we know time is money.
• Understand the long-term vision: What’s the goal of the organization, and what’s the common vision running through all teams and departments? Break down silos between divisions, and work together to see this vision through. Every team has their specific goal, but working with other divisions might allow teams to meet, exceed or solve common problems in more strategic ways.
• Knowing what you don’t know, and learning from others: Ongoing education is so valuable for both you and the company, and not just learning through online portals. Take an opportunity to grow and appreciate other team structures, workloads and the experience of your coworkers. Volunteer to help brainstorm on a project you don’t work on. You’ll be surprised at what you can both contribute and learn.

Think about building relationships within your own company — walking over and discussing challenges with other teams face-to-face can make all the difference. Much is lost in translation over email. Ask colleagues in different departments about their challenges and learn from them. You might be able to help more than you realize.

Why aren’t you talking to your coworkers? was originally published in Digital | Social | Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the past few years, video has increasingly gained a foothold in the social media space — this is nothing new. One could argue that YouTube has been the social video powerhouse for over a decade, however now that mobile-first mentalities and higher network bandwidths are giving video a viable stage for the spotlight.

We’ve all seen it. We scroll down our feeds, and suddenly an unsolicited video automatically plays — left to our mercy to unmute — recommended by friends or from brands I follow. As the months pass, more videos surface between friends and family’s posts, ironically less from friends and family. In addition to brands moving videos onto these channels, those wildly popular meme-like catchy videos (that have long been successful on YouTube and Vine) have flooded the space.

Many marketers have speculated that Facebook is taking preference to organic video posts, in hopes to chip away at YouTube market share. I’ve also seen video performance far outshine other post types in paid awareness social campaigns across channels. Additionally, gone are the days where professional production houses have the market cornered on video creation. Influencers and independent shops with increasingly affordable technology have proven that great video doesn’t have to break the budget. These reasons alone could by why marketers are flocking to the format.

I’ll use this as a forum to state that a 30-second commercial doesn’t make for great social posts — what’s the dialogue you want to create? It’s also important to note that videos should always take shape of the audience and your role of the specific social channels — and also takes into consideration variables such as attention spans, audio and length. Could a two-minute video be cut into different versions to apply across Facebook, Twitter, Vine and Tumblr? Potentially, but would each of these vastly different audiences care about the same message? The landscape is becoming increasingly complex, and these questions are warranted.

So what does this mean as we look forward?

Will videos overcrowd our feeds (and ultimately our patience)? I’m sure it’s a possibility. We use the term “thumb-stopping,” but what does that really mean in a crowded video space? This medium is becoming gradually dynamic, and won’t necessarily map back to how we’ve always consumed it.

Here are four potential opportunities making headway:

• 360° Video (Facebook, YouTube): Filmed with a camera system that records all 360 degrees of a scene around the camera, viewers have the ability to pan around the video and watch the video from any angle they choose. Here’s an article on how several brands are using this technology.
• Livestreaming (Facebook, Periscope, Meerkat, UStream, Livestream): Livestreaming has been in the mix for quite some time, but many haven’t considered it social media. Livestreaming allows users to be part of an event, an unveiling, a Q&A or demonstration, without the big production costs (a laptop with a camera, or just a cell phone). Though there are mainstream networks on the landscape currently, Facebook is quickly allowing verified users to broadcast live on the channel.
• Immersive Ads (Facebook — and still in infancy): If you’ve seen Facebook’s new Instant Articles feature, this is similar — although an instant, rich way of interacting with promotional content — allowing users to engage with individual pieces and videos within the experience.
• Virtual Reality (on the distant horizon — but on the horizon): With Facebook purchasing Oculus, an up-and-coming VR company, it’s without saying the company is trying to figure out how virtual reality fits as a social experience. It’s worth asking the questions now if VR has a place within the digital ecosystem.

Remember, video is great and should be leveraged. Think about what your target will genuinely be interested in, and the conversation you want to create. In an increasingly crowded space, simple video syndication from a YouTube channel is no longer the norm. With different ways to use video, it’s time to think about this content form differently, and it’s important to ensure a long-term vision for how video fits within your brand’s social ecosystem.

How are you leveraging video as part of your brand strategy? I’m looking forward to revisiting this post in a few months with new updates and technologies dotting the landscape!

Do you invite strangers over for dinner? ← P R E V I O U S

Why it’s really (REALLY) time to think about video on social media differently. was originally published in Digital | Social | Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When it comes to content marketing, I often use a metaphor to relay a simple message to my colleagues, “Do you invite strangers over for dinner?”

From the dawn of advertising, we’ve been doing this. We’ve invited in the brands that have blanketed us with TV, newspaper and radio messages that might make sense to us — the target demographic which defined us in remarkably broad strokes. To put into perspective, being a male 25–34 interested in technology and living in Chicago still puts me in a very large bin of people — many of which are nothing like me.

Truth be told, marketers have more information about me than I could ever realize. Between my web searches and surfing behavior, my social data that I make public (or share through social logins), my shopping and purchase behavior, how I interact with email along with hundreds of other digital touch-points, it’s fascinating to think that marketers probably know me better than I know myself — and with good certainty can actually predict my purchases or digital moves.

Whether we know it or not, we opt into this communications — and it’s merely a matter of connecting the dots. As a marketer, this can be as easy or hard as we choose to make it — but that will come in a separate post. The fact is we have this data, and can get very specific on the communications we push to our consumers.

When we have this information, why would we treat customers as part of a much broader audience when we have the chance to talk to them in unique, personalized ways? Liken it to having a conversation with someone at a dinner party, versus standing on the stool in the corner and shouting at everyone. The goal is a genuine dialogue and connection.

Oftentimes, the challenges are time, resources and process streamlining. Though the first hurdle is changing the marketing mindset to know what we can do. The most dangerous statement in marketing is “that’s the way it’s always been done,” so how can we be a change agent within the organization? It typically just takes people asking the right questions.

So when I say to my colleagues, “Do you invite strangers over for dinner,” I’m hoping it clicks — the fact that as advertisers with data, we’re given the opportunity to take users out of the large bin, and market to them as an individual. As a consumer, I’d rather have dinner with someone who knows me, rather than someone who sees me as one of many.

N E X T → Will Video Saturate Social Media in 2016?

Do you invite strangers over for dinner? was originally published in Digital | Social | Innovation on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.