The English word “education” has two different Latin roots: educare and educere. Educare means to train, to mold, or to nourish. Educere means to lead out, to draw from, or to bring forth.¹ Both have been goals leading into this final chapter. We've sought to share years of experience, insight, and expertise from pioneering the personal video movement with and through our customers and team members. That's educare. As the dozens of people mentioned in this book and thousands more like them have already done, you must reflect and self-identify as a participant and practitioner. You must discover your own motivations and find your opportunities to get started or to go deeper. That's educere. Our highest goal is to equip and inspire you to rehumanize some of your digital communication with personal video messages. You'll be glad you did. We need to see you.

The technologies, tools, and platforms described throughout this book will continue to change. Internet speeds will increase, as will smartphone and webcam video quality. Will our recorded, moving images become holographic? Will we blend virtual or augmented reality with recorded video images of ourselves in some hybrid medium? Will predictive analytics improve to the point that we know exactly who to send videos to every morning to reach the right people with the right message at the right time? Probably. But the opportunity that's in front of you right now is the opportunity you've had since you started working professionally. And it's the same opportunity you'll have as the technology changes.

Video's value is in you, not in the technology. Personal videos are about people, not about video. Video is simply the means to the end. It's a medium. A tool. The end is a stronger relationship with people than existed before you clicked “Record,” “Stop,” and “Send.” Your opportunity is building trust and relationship with each person you work with to provide value and generate revenue.

What's happening is less a revolution and more a pendulum swing back from our over-reliance on typed-out text, automations, and other faceless, digital communication. We're moving back toward a more personal and human approach. This is why we call it rehumanizing, rather than humanizing. Video gives you a new/old way to sell and serve. It's a return to the way business was done for generations … face to face.

Since we started on this journey back in 2006, many people have completely missed this point. They see personal video as a technology play, sales gimmick, faddish novelty, or parlor trick. These are the people who send one or two videos, expect magic to happen, and quit when it doesn't. They're the people who see sales exclusively as manipulation rather than an equitable exchange of value. They're the people who see a potential customer for his or her transactional value, not as the source of 10 more customers.

Because you picked up this book in the first place and got this far, we expect you're not among them. Instead, you see the value of taking a warmer approach to leadership, sales, customer service, recruiting, teamwork, and all the other roles and functions you find yourself in that require better communication and trusting relationships. You see this as a way of being, not just something you're trying or doing. Or you at least see its promise.

MORE EFFECTIVE AND MORE SATISFYING WORK

In the opening chapter, you saw data collected from approximately 500 people comparing video email to traditional email. They reported more replies, more clicks, higher conversion, more referrals, and a greater ability to stay in touch. These are all great outcomes. They're compelling reasons to get going with video if you've not yet started or to double down if you've only dabbled. But the true value of this approach to business communication has not yet been established, even though most of us know it intuitively. That value is in human connection.

Remember Andrew Brodsky, PhD, the assistant professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin? We introduced him in Chapter 2. Andrew's research is primarily in organizational behavior and communication. As a doctoral candidate, he led a research project with a team at Harvard Business School exploring the dynamics of traditional email and video email within our community. While trying to come up with the right design to get at the themes he wanted to explore in the study, Andrew decided it would be useful to interview several of our customers. I sought the permission of several of our most prolific video users, then shared their contact information with him.

After he conducted several interviews, Andrew reported back some of his findings. He heard from the video users something we'd prepared him for: that the people you send videos to feel like they know you before they ever meet you and that the results achieved by getting face to face are better than results achieved by sending plain text. But Andrew also heard something from our customers that we'd not ever heard ourselves: that sending videos doesn't just make the recipient feel closer to the sender, it also makes the sender feel closer to the recipient. Of course!

Of course the dynamic goes both ways. Relationships go both ways. Connection is between two people. So even though it's an asynchronous, one-way medium, personal video isn't just a more effective way to work, it's also a more satisfying way to work. We're not just better face to face, we thrive face to face. Our highest purpose is to be in relationship with other people. One of our deepest needs is to connect with others. This qualitative feedback did not get tested or quantified in the study, but it's deeply interesting and important to us as we continue to explore and advance rehumanization with video.

We don't know how common this phenomenon is or how it works. We're not sure what it is about the practice that draws us closer to our recipients. We're not clear on why we're psychologically or emotionally drawn closer to people, even when we can't see them. We expect it's tied to soft-sounding concepts like vulnerability and authenticity. You're showing people who you really are. You're opening up, letting your guard down, and being honest with them. There's a vulnerability there and a fear of judgment, rejection, and shame. The honesty in truly being with someone in person or in video builds trust, which is the foundation of any satisfying relationship.

As we shared in the opening of Chapter 3, satisfying relationships are the greatest predictor of human health and well being. This finding was reinforced by research drawing on data from four longitudinal studies like The Grant Study. A team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill blended social and biological perspectives and found that social isolation in teens creates the same risk of inflammation as not exercising. In older adults, social isolation creates the same risk of developing hypertension as having diabetes. Our social connections “get under our skin” and affect us physically. These researchers sought to understand how and why. The recommendation of one of the study's authors: “Do have a good and healthy diet, and exercise; but also try to have a good social life and connections with other people. Cultivate broad and somewhat deep, functional [relationships]. That's as important, if not more—and don't wait until you're old.”²

If this is starting to feel soft to you, that's in part the point. There's a dynamic at play that we'll continue to explore with the customers and community growing around personal videos. To give another set of language to the more effective/more satisfying dynamic, we'll look to the publisher of Forbes …

THE SOFT EDGE

“There have never been more ways to reach consumers than there are today. That's a fact. But it's also never been harder to connect deeply with consumers,” writes Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard in his book The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success.³ He goes on to establish that customer relationships are necessary precursors to transactions and valuable foundations for future repeat and referral business. Echoing Seth Godin in Permission Marketing, Karlgaard wraps in the escalation of relationship from prospect to customer to friend to fan. Deep connection is the key and video can help.

The premise of Karlgaard's book is that hard-edge skills like speed, cost, supply chain, logistics, and capital efficiency unfairly overshadow soft edge skills like trust, smarts, teamwork, story, and design. In his triangular model, hard and soft skills are equal sides built upon a strategic base of markets, customers, competitors, substitutes, and disrupters. In business, we tend to focus on what's easy to measure. It gives us a sense of control and accomplishment. As a result, the more easily measured hard edge gets more attention than the equally important soft edge.

In customer success, the hard edge is captured in ticket volume, first reply time, time to resolution, call counts, and call times. But the soft edge qualities of connection, satisfaction, and word-of-mouth affect all the hard-edge measures.

In inside sales, the hard edge is captured in appointments held, call counts, email counts, close rates, transaction value, pace to goal, and revenue. But the soft edge qualities of trust, rapport, storytelling, discovery, diagnosis, and prescription impact all the hard-edge measures.

With personal video in email, the hard edge is captured in reply rates, click rates, and conversion rates. But the soft edge qualities of trust, teamwork, and story are also in play. You understand intuitively that relationships matter, even though they're soft edge.

As you weigh the opportunity laid out over the course of these pages, don't lose sight of the inherent benefits of rehumanizing your communication and your business just because some of them can't yet be measured. Participating in this movement will require building new skills and new habits. Many have quit before they ever really got started. But the movement won't be stopped.

THE STATE OF THE MOVEMENT

With all this in mind, know that this movement is still very young. A few hundred thousand or perhaps half a million people are actively participating right now. But there are 60.6 million people working in a professional or managerial capacity in the United States alone.⁴ And 5.7 million Americans working in formal sales roles.⁵ Expand these numbers globally and you're immediately at hundreds of millions, with billions of potential practitioners behind them. Remember Daniel Pink's thesis in To Sell Is Human? Every working professional teaches, trains, or sells. If they don't sell products or services directly, they sell ideas and opportunities. They connect, influence, and persuade. They're each in the change business. And video helps them do all these things the way these things have been done best since our species has stood erect on two feet: face to face.

More people are participating every day, which creates a pull. But there's also a push behind this. Venture-backed, video-based companies that began with a focus on scripted, lit, produced, and edited marketing videos are uprooting and unmooring to move “down market” toward this simpler style. New startups are instantly adopting the language of trust, relationship, and humanization to try to get traction for me-too video tools. Every social network has been building and expanding video features for years now, including in their messaging toolsets.

On the hardware side, cameras remain a key battleground for smartphone manufacturers, as our phones have become the most popular camera system.⁶ The webcam market is projected to grow to $15.2B by 2021, more than quadruple its $3.4B in 2014.⁷ Sales revenue of Canon, a traditional camera, imaging, and camcorder manufacturer, peaked in 2007.⁸ Action camera leader GoPro's revenue peaked in 2015.⁹ Professional video and high-end equipment are still incredibly useful, but the trend favors simpler video.

As new, novel, or uncomfortable as your first 10 webcam or smartphone videos may feel, you're getting ahead of the curve. If you're in a competitive environment, then differentiating yourself and proving you work differently provides an immediate win. Even if you're not in a competitive environment, you're building trust, accelerating sales, and improving experience. You're reducing email reply chains or back-and-forth phone calls by being clear and complete in video messages. You're laying the groundwork for an internal culture that prefers to get face to face with all its stakeholders more often. We've seen entire sales teams build each other up and transition to a video-first culture together. We've seen internal communication improve organizational connection and engagement, especially across distributed locations and remote workers. This is all part of the personal video opportunity.

And if you're wondering about the effects of ages and generations on video recording and sending, our current customers run the full range of the workforce, from young 20-somethings through people beyond retirement age who continue to work because they find it fulfilling. Some use it to connect with younger consumers. Others report that their most favorable responses come from their older clients. Ultimately, as a new/old way to sell and serve, this is about people connecting with people, not about specific ages or generations. If you have something valuable to share with another person and video is a good medium for that message, the different ages of you and your recipient are not especially relevant.

On the sending side and consistent with broader cultural trends, younger people seem to be more comfortable appearing in photos and videos. But millennials also tend to strive for perfection, more so than previous generations, according to a study by the American Psychological Association.¹⁰ Depression and anxiety are the result of heightened self-expectations and desire for control. The image-based nature of Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook is deeply intertwined in this problem.

“Social media drives this pressure to present the coolest version of themselves, otherwise known as the ‘Instagram effect' … Teens will openly admit to taking countless photos in an attempt to get the best shot,” write Jeff Fromm and Angela Read in their book Marketing to Gen Z, whom they call the Pivotal generation.¹¹ Because of this, younger people may struggle with getting comfortable on camera, just as everyone else does.

But this generation does prefer that you get comfortable on camera. “Because clever marketing tricks and gimmicks don't fool Pivotals, building authentic relationships with them is key,” Fromm and Read write. These younger consumers and workers expect personalized messages, as well as honesty, empathy, and even friendship. We all crave relationships and authenticity; as technology evolves and proliferates, our deep need for human connection remains. It makes sense, then, that digital natives crave authenticity as much or more than older generations.

By getting started, building new skills, and creating new habits today, you're setting yourself up for a more effective and more satisfying work experience for years to come. If you're 20 years or more into your career, you may not recognize how much you know about connecting, communicating, and converting. It's time to transfer the experience and expertise you may be taking for granted into a medium that puts you in an even better position to succeed. Before it becomes more common and before more consumers demand it. Though you may struggle to get confident on camera, you've got a wealth of knowledge, expertise, and insights to offer. And you'll do it better in video.

If you're just getting started or just coming up in your career, you'll find that a more personal approach starts more conversations and opens more doors, especially if it's got curiosity and sincerity woven in. Don't shoot for perfection. Don't re-record. Just be yourself.

MEASURING MORE THAN OPENS, PLAYS, AND REPLIES

In our view, the tracking and analytics behind this video movement remain as nascent as the movement itself. As we've established, tracking provides significant value to you as you record, send, and follow up. You need to know who's opening your emails, when someone is playing your video, and how often you receive replies. But there's so much further to go in discovering what's really working best and following its evolution over the years to come. When Andrew Brodsky engaged us as a doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School, part of his interest was in the dearth of research in this area of business communication. We've got much to learn.

Each and every video itself is full of data that have not yet been unpacked. For example, how do the following factors affect play rates, play to completion rates, reply rates, and other measures?

• Video length of different types of videos
• Pace of speech
• Number, duration, and timing of pauses
• Specific words or phrases spoken
• Frequency and duration of smiles
• Frequency and duration of eye contact
• Range of facial expressions of emotion
• Framing and size of the subject's head and shoulders
• Ability to see hands and hand gestures
• Frequency and range of hand gestures
• Placement of face during screen recording
• Recording inside versus recording outside
• Recording in a cubicle versus an office versus a common area
• Recording while seated versus while standing
• Gender and age of the subject versus gender and age of recipient(s)
• Formality of the subject's attire
• Number of speakers in the video
• Frequency of video sends to a specific recipient

Measuring these factors and their effects across millions of videos in real time requires that we build and train systems to read them properly. Twice during a BombBomb Hack Week, when our software development team members work on whatever they want, developers have taken on facial recognition, smiles, emotion, gender, age, and other qualities. We've not yet moved this work beyond experimentation. They're neither widely deployed, nor functionally applicable to your day-to-day video use. But the potential is there.

The goal is to move beyond “Here's what happened” and a bit of “Here's what to do about it” to deeper prescription by specific use case. Imagine: when you need to apologize, here are five specific recommendations for your pace, tone, and body language—and a couple of phrases you might want to use, as well as one you'll definitely want to avoid. As more people put this video philosophy into practice, more attention and resources will be paid by organizations of all kinds—from business to academia—to the data available in a growing sample of videos.

YOUR NEXT STEPS

Yesterday was the best day to start replacing some of your text-based messages with personal videos. Today is the next best day to get in the practice, to get comfortable and confident, to get early wins, and to get ahead of the curve. Rehumanizing your business is more effective and more satisfying for you, your team members, and your customers.

REHUMANIZE YOUR COMMUNICATION AND YOUR BUSINESS

The foundation is laid. The opportunity is clear. The time is now. Stop hiding behind plain, typed-out text and start getting face to face with more people more often. Encourage and equip your team to do the same. To build trust, relationships, and success with greater speed and satisfaction, add some video to your day-to-day communication. Because we need and want to see you. And because you'll love the results.