Internal communicators need to think like TikTokers

It’s no secret that people enjoy their short-form videos. That includes employee audiences.

At Ragan’s Employee Communications and Culture Conference last month in Boston, Allison Murry, director of communications at Cisco, shared how her team reimagined its internal comms strategy to place more emphasis on short-form video.

“Why is it so easy for us to spend hours on our phones, but we struggle to get employees to take minutes with our content?” Murry said. “It’s not that employees don’t care. We’ve just been delivering and creating content differently than they consume outside of work.”

But Murry added a caveat. She said that employees don’t want overly polished videos and prefer content with a more human touch.

“Authenticity beats production value almost every time because employees prefer low-production, less-scripted content,” she said. “It should feel like FaceTime when you’re recording it, and it should feel like FaceTime when employees are watching it.”

To make that approach work in practice, Murry and her team built a network of internal content creators to generate authentic video stories across Cisco.