YouTube Let's Play and How Businesses Can Benefit

by Alex Roan on Jun 6, 2015

We can make training and information sharing in business cheaper, easier and more entertaining by learning from video game fans, and specifically how they use youtube. How many Linkedin'ers are familiar with 'Let's Play'? The term refers to online video; often on youtube, where a host plays through a video game often with their own commentary. All they need is desktop/console recording software, a mic and basic video editing software.

Let's Play is no small thing, it is a full time job for many gamers, with the top making lots of money. I can attest to some Let's Play videos being really entertaining. More so than the majority of TV. I think they work because:

• You experience the game; including storyline, strategy, visual, audio etc.
• You share in the players unique experience as they walkthrough the game
• With the right host, you find someone who's humour or conversation you enjoy listening
• Some have a community, so you can interact via forums, twitter, comments etc.

But one of the best things about Let's Play is the level of authenticity. The hosts are recording their normal play, and talking without rehearsal about games, life etc. I want to contrast that with training and information sharing in the business world. When I work with clients I sometimes have to do online diversity or compliance training. These are often very stuffy and awkward videos and interactive tests which are extremely dry and boring. Despite how bad these can be, they actually do cost a lot of money to produce. Most business also run time consuming and expensive classroom trainings on systems and processes often with accompanying armfuls of fairly dry documentation.

Why doesn't the corporate world utilise the Let's Play approach to training and information sharing? Let's take an example of a process in a bank: An employee in Equities takes a customer call over the telephone, check some pricing and books a trade. This is probably fairly lengthy and complicated and will involve classroom training on theory, and systems steps. However, the bank could just give employees the basic tools required to create their own videos. The more charismatic or entertaining videos will then become popular and be used as training or reference material. It would not be difficult to black out any sensitive data in post processing.

This could be taken further, key experts in your business could have their own 'youtube' like channels where they post short videos of any key processes they want to share with their immediate team or the wider organisation. One of the continuous improvement principles from the toyota way is 'go see'. It refers to how important it is that managers go to all levels of all operations in their business and see how things are working on a day to day basis. Having an internal youtube system and giving employees the ability to make VLOGS (video logs) of their day to day work would be a great way to give management more visibility of what happens in the operations on the ground in their organisation. Not a replacement for real life visits, but a quick and easy way to see some short videos of what is happening everywhere and getting the perspective of people from across the organisation. What do you think? Are businesses too slow to embrace new technology and shifts in the entertainment world?

note: the photo at the top of this article was taken in a store called Super Potato in Japan, it's a classic video game store. The photo shows rows of super nintendo games, that was my first real console when I was a teenager.