Employee-led content and COVID-19 at Vodafone

With 1/3 of the world population homebound, businesses had to rethink the way they engage with their people, both internally and externally. And as always, communication is key. At Seenit we believe that the two main ingredients for impactful and effective comms are: Video and People 🎬👫

We’re all part of the Storytelling Generation and right now the world is being documented like never before through smartphones with people-powered video content. This is why we hosted a webinar about how to create authentic and trusted employee-led content at scale. 🤳

Our special guest speakers were Jona Gjini, Global Employer Brand Lead at Vodafone and Jennie Carter, Employer Brand Creative at Vodafone.

Our friends at Vodafone have been communicating people-first long before Covid-19 has forced us to fundamentally change the ways we work and live, so there is a great deal we can learn from them on how they’re creating and sharing employee-led content with their people all around the world.

In case you missed the webinar, here are the top 3 takeaways from Jona, Jennie, and Emily:

1. There needs to be a focus on creating authentic and relatable content during a crisis as it is essential to building trust (as referenced in the Edelman Trust Report). Lots of companies including Vodafone stated that during lockdown one of the trends was authenticity. People want to see your true colours and the employees’ real life stories. They also expect a sense of commitment from you and do not expect to simply forget about the current situation. Trust is important when you create content for large audiences and this is what Vodafone built - the company was one of the first ones which created content related to Covid-19 and encouraged its people to stay safe. That’s amazing!

1. It is important to be agile with your communications so you can be reactive and timely with your stories. Speed is for sure a key element when you produce content. You always need to take advantage of the opportunity and act fast. There are trends which come and go in days or weeks and you don’t want to miss the chance to create content. A good example is the “Stay connected” video of Vodafone, which shows the work’s perspective at the company right now, from home. When they created the video, the team was really persuasive and they tried to convince people to upload videos or at least to spread the word and encourage others to do it. They had more than 100 uploads and they managed to obtain the final product in only 2 weeks.

1. It’s all about the people and teamwork! Collaboration is key across departments and geographies - we are all in this together and cannot get through it alone. Try to always encourage each other and understand every situation. We are currently experiencing a global crisis, so don’t expect from your employees to be perfect. We need to be optimistic and to see light at the end of the tunnel. Vodafone is an international company, they have offices all around the world and they were keen to support each other during the lockdown. Now that everyone is working from home is probably harder to receive content from your employees or co-workers. Jona and Jennie mentioned that Seenit help them to create a sense of community and teamwork, because it was easier for everyone to upload content on our platform. We are very happy to be part of this!

👉 You can watch the whole webinar recording on-demand and learn about the challenges and learnings faced while working from home.

And here you can have a look at the amazing “Stay connected” video created by Vodafone with the Seenit platform: