90% of what employees learn isn’t taught in formal training. It’s gleaned from conversations, observations, and simple trial and error — a process known as social learning. Until recently, businesses have struggled to facilitate social learning due in part to limitations of traditional enterprise social software. In recent years, however, advances in video technology and the emergence of enterprise video platforms have made company-wide social learning an attainable goal for businesses large and small. Today, video is helping organizations capture, preserve, and share their institutional knowledge, while at the same time speeding employee onboarding, improving corporate learning and increasing the pace of innovation. In this white paper, you’ll learn how your organization can successfully launch a social learning program. Included are 6 ideas for getting started, 3 ways to build a culture that embraces social learning, and 5 ways an enterprise video platform can help.

1. Social Learning
Program
“Can you show me how to do that?”
How To Build a
with Video
TM panopto.com
855-PANOPTO

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Panopto on a Page
At Panopto, we believe that video has the power to fundamentally transform the
way people share knowledge. So we build software for businesses and other
organizations that makes it easy for anyone to record, live stream, and share video.
Fortune 500 companies around the world use Panopto to stream live executive
broadcasts, create scalable online training videos, webcast launch events, and create
online sales and marketing presentations at the click of a button from any computer.
Panopto also makes it easy to find a specific moment in any video across an
entire library. With Smart Search, our industry-leading video search functionality,
employees can instantly fast forward to any word mentioned or shown onscreen
during a video. Forrester Research has called it “the best support for video search.”
Panopto was recognized by Gartner Research as a “Leader” in its most
recent Enterprise Video Content Management Magic Quadrant. Learn more at
http://panop.to/gartner-leader.
Want to try Panopto for yourself? Visit www.panopto.com today for a free 30-
day trial or to schedule a demonstration of our software.
Have 3 minutes? Click for a quick introduction to Panopto.

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Overview
You Don’t Need More Innovation. You Need Imitation.......................................4
Enterprise Social Software and the Untapped Video Opportunity.....................5
5 Ways An Enterprise Video Platform Facilitates Social Learning....................7
6 Ways to Use a Video Platform to Support Social Learning ......................... 11
3 Ways to Cultivate a Culture of Social Learning ............................................ 16
In 100 words: Why Panopto is the Right Choice for Social Learning ............. 18
Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 18

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You Don’t Need More Innovation.
You Need Imitation.
In 2011, a team of cognitive scientists at Indiana University conducted a series
of problem solving experiments. The goal of their research was to assess the
most efficient way for people to overcome complex problems.
What they found would challenge the way that many businesses think about
innovation. Specifically, people who simply observed and imitated others were
able to solve problems more effectively than those who attempted to innovate
individually. The study’s co-author, Thomas Wisdom, explained that “imitators
often make their own improvements to the original solution, and these can, in
turn, be adopted and improved upon by the originator and others.” In other words,
those waiting for a creative epiphany were passed by time and again by those
who were given a means to observe, imitate, and improve.
The research suggests that organizations in search of continuous improvement
and innovation should do so by fostering an environment of social learning. In a
business where any employee can easily observe and imitate those around them,
the company improves its ability to iteratively solve problems, incrementally
improve its products and processes, and differentiate itself from competitors.
Of course, at most organizations, social learning already happens to some
degree organically. A new front-line employee shadows a colleague, imitates
their behavior, and over time, finds a way to expedite the service. A business
“Imitators often make their own
improvements to the original solution, and
these can, in turn, be adopted and improved
upon by the originator and others.”
Thomas Wisdom
Indiana University

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analyst shares an Excel spreadsheet with a colleague who improves upon it by
writing a short macro. An account rep makes incremental improvements to an
existing sales pitch, resulting in higher prospect conversion.
For executives and employee development teams, the question then, is how
best to facilitate an environment in which social learning can easily proliferate.
Enterprise Social Software and
the Untapped Video Opportunity
For well over a decade, organizations have looked to technology to facilitate the
social sharing of knowledge. In 2001, Microsoft launched SharePoint, a product
that would become the most widely-used portal for sharing business information.
More recently, enterprise social software, including Jive, Yammer, and Chatter,
have sought to become the “Facebook” of corporate information sharing.
The promise of these apps to facilitate employee collaboration and productivity
has driven a boom in the category. Last year, businesses spent $4.77 billion
on enterprise social software, a number expected to nearly double by 2019
according to Markets and Markets Research.
Yet, for all their promise, up to Gartner Research reports 80% of social business
efforts are not expected to achieve their intended goals in 2015. In many
organizations, employees simply don’t use the software. Why? Analysts cite
lack of leadership and employee training as two of the primary culprits.
These reasons, however, overlook what is arguably an even more fundamental
problem with traditional enterprise social software. Enterprise social apps don’t
actually facilitate the kind of imitation that Indiana University researchers found
so critical to problem solving and innovation. The opportunity to observe and
imitate that comes from shadowing a more experienced colleague, attending
mentoring meetings, or watching a “brown bag” presentation simply can’t be
replicated in a text-based social feed.

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It can only be replicated using a medium that was built to capture and replay
human activity — video.
Of course, video is already in widespread use for precisely this purpose in formal,
top-down corporate training programs. Learning and development (L&D) teams
routinely record job-specific training, courses in communication and soft skills,
and new hire onboarding videos for employees to watch on-demand.
By contrast, video hasn’t been historically used for employees to informally
record and share their knowledge with one another. Why? Capturing, producing,
and sharing video has traditionally been a complex process that required the use
of specialized AV hardware and a team of videographers, editors, and producers.
In the last five years, however, two advances in technology have torn down these
barriers to adoption, and have made video the ideal technology for building a
social learning program.
First, advances in consumer video hardware, such as smartphone cameras and
webcams, have made it possible for anyone to capture cinema-quality video
from their desks, around the office, or in the field.
Even useful information can be overlooked when shared in a wall of text.
Video makes information easier and more engaging to digest.

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Second, a new category of business software is making it possible for
organizations to create a searchable hub of social learning videos built for the
explicit purpose of observation, imitation, and improvement. The category of
software is called “enterprise video platforms.”
5 Ways An Enterprise
Video Platform Facilitates
Organizational Social Learning
An enterprise video platform (EVP) consists of software that can either be hosted
in the cloud or deployed on-premises. At its core is a content management
system (CMS) built for the unique needs of managing video. Integrated with
this “video CMS” is a set of five critical capabilities that, together, provide the
technology foundation for a social learning program: (1) capturing video, (2)
sharing video content from a secure repository, (3) converting video files for
playback on any device, (4) searching the content contained within video, and
(5) integrating video with existing corporate software.
1 | Record any content from any device
The success of any social learning program is determined by how easily
employees can share what they know. For a social learning program rooted in
video, this means that employees need the ability to easily:
• Record anything, from any location, using any camera or other device
they may have
• Make their recordings available to co-workers in an easily-discoverable
location
Enterprise video platforms facilitate this through the use of integrated recording
apps. Typically, these video capture apps run natively on Windows, Mac,

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Android, and iOS devices. They enable employees to record high definition video
of anything they want to present or demonstrate, and in the case of Windows
and Mac apps, to also record the content of their computer screens along with
peripheral devices.
Once a video has been captured, the apps connect to the organization’s video
CMS and automatically upload the recording. This step is critical because it
ensures that all employee-generated video content is centralized in a single,
easily-discoverable repository, rather than scattered across multiple hard drives,
file shares, and portals, where it will be difficult for others to find.
2 | Share videos using a centralized
“Corporate YouTube”
Once employee-generated video has been uploaded to the video CMS, employees
need an intuitive way to access it. Enterprise video platforms accomplish this
by including a YouTube-like video portal that employees can access from any
laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
This “corporate YouTube” provides employees with access to video content using
their existing network credentials.This eliminates the need for workers to remember
a separate login ID and password to access and manage their videos. And it
eliminates the need for IT administrators to manage multiple lists of credentials.
The corporate YouTube also makes it easy for employees to share their videos with
co-workers. By default, all videos are private, viewable only by the employee. When
an employee is ready to share their video, they may do with specific individuals,
specific groups, or the entire company. Employees can also make their videos
“unlisted”, in which only those with the direct URL can watch the videos.
3 | Integrate video where employees already
communicate
Although it’s important for social learning video content to be stored in a central
repository where it can be formatted and indexed for search, it should be
accessible through a range of existing corporate apps and portals. This ensures

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that the “corporate YouTube” doesn’t become yet another silo of information,
and instead, becomes a way to syndicate videos to the places where employees
already communicate.
Enterprise video platforms accomplish this by integrating with corporate
learning management systems like Cornerstone and Saba, content management
systems like SharePoint, enterprise social software like Jive, and CRM systems
like Salesforce. Typically, EVPs enable employees to share individual videos and
playlists through these sites. They also often include a capability called “search
federation”, in which video search results can be included as part of the overall
search results produced by an organization’s LMS, CMS, or CRM system.
4 | Convert videos and stream them to
any device
When employees attempt to watch social learning videos, they may be accessing
them from their Windows desktop PC, their Android tablet, or their iPhone. They
may be watching from corporate headquarters, over a public WiFi network in their
Video shouldn’t be an information silo.
Smart video should be easy to find anywhere it’s relevant.

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hotel, or over a 4G phone connection. The wide range of devices that employees
use, and the variations in internet connection quality place technical demands
on a video-based social learning solution.
Enterprise video platforms address these challenges through the use of
transcoding and modern streaming technology.
Transcoding is a process by which EVPs automatically convert video files into
formats that are compatible with any laptop, tablet or smartphone. For example,
say an employee uploads a Flash video (.FLV file) to their organization’s video
platform. Although the Flash video is incompatible with iPhones and iPads, the
EVP automatically converts it into a format that can be viewed on any iOS device.
Once a video has been transcoded into a universally-compatible format, the
EVP uses modern streaming protocols to deliver optimal playback to any
location while managing network bandwidth availability. The details of modern
streaming are discussed further in the white paper, Modern Video Streaming in
the Enterprise: Protocols, Caching and WAN Optimization.
5 | Search across the video repository and
deeply within video content
Historically, the single greatest barrier to using video as a means to share
information has been in the near-impossibility of searching recorded content.
Even when done diligently, manually-entered titles, descriptions, and tags often
aren’t enough for employees find a video they’re looking for. And even if a video
is successfully found, employees are still forced to hunt-and-peck through the
video timeline to find the specific two minutes of information they’re looking for.
The success of video-based social learning hinges on employees’ ability to
quickly search across an entire video library, and then fast-forward to a precise
moment in the right video. Video platforms address this need by indexing every
word spoken and every word shown on-screen in every video. This means that,
for the first time, video content can be referenced and searched as easily as
documents or email.

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6 Ways to Use a Video Platform
for Social Learning
An enterprise video platform provides the technology foundation for a social
learning program.
Once the EVP is deployed, the next step is to build a set of social learning
initiatives that give employees guidance on the types of videos that will be
helpful for their colleagues.
Below are six such initiatives that help employees get to know each other, identify
subject matter experts, and share their expertise so that coworkers can observe,
iterate, and improve.
Want to learn more about how an enterprise video platform manages recordings?
Click for a brief explainer video.

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1 | Introduce employees to one another
Employee introduction videos are a great way to help new hires feel like a part of
the team. With a simple slide presentation and webcam video, employees can
record a brief overview that can then be distributed throughout the department.
Of course, the value of the videos extends well beyond that of a digital name
tag. Intro recordings help existing and new employees identify subject matter
experts and understand who works on what. With a workforce that is increasingly
distributed across multiple geographic locations, video intros help all your team
members find out who they can go to when they have a question.
2 | Demonstrate job-specific functions
In most organizations, formal L&D efforts can’t scale to teach the specifics
of every job across the company. In the past, the best solution was in middle
management. Effective managers could pass on the techniques and best
practices they’d seen work before. As coaches, they could respond to individual
team members’ needs and help them with a tip or a pointer to additional
Video is a great way to help team members get to know each other.
Click for a sample “getting to know you” video.

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resources. Of course, truly great managers are hard to find — and hard to keep.
And for larger organizations, that difficulty often translates into inconsistent
performance between teams and employees.
A social learning program rooted in video helps teams share role-specific
knowledge in a peer-to-peer manner without the time and cost associated with
in-person, real-time interactions. For many knowledge workers, webcam and
screen recording video can be enough to describe a wide variety of business
functions. For technicians in a laboratory or building maintenance managers
training new hires, mobile video recorded on a smartphone can provide the
same benefit.
3 | Explain new product and process
developments
Most organizations are constantly updating their products and processes. To
ensure that everyone is working from the same page, teams dedicate substantial
time and energy to continually documenting what’s new.
Video makes technical documentation and knowledge sharing easy.
Click for a sample SME process explanation video.

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As scrum and agile philosophies continue to shorten product launch cycles, the
“explainer video” can be a powerful social learning tool for documenting progress
and sharing it with people throughout the company. Asking project leads to
record a short explanation of each new product feature or process change will
create an essential map for other teams to understand what’s changed and why.
It also provides a useful reference guide for the team’s own new employees as
they onboard and get up to speed.
As an added advantage, recording these videos often takes less time than
cataloging the updates in emails, formal change logs, and other documents.
4 | Help people navigate workplace policies
and procedures
In virtually every company, employees need to understand a set of workplace
policies and processes in order to do their job. These seemingly little details
can still steal hours of productivity, especially as the confused seek help from
their colleagues. Every organization’s list of issues will be unique, but common
policies include:
• Coding expenses for reimbursement
• Determining which project components fall under data retention policies
• Ensuring legal compliance for firm communications
• Problem reporting to engineering, IT, or HR
Organizations often try to provide answers to these ahead of time as formal
training courses and documentation, but the breadth and specificity of potential
questions make it almost impossible to eliminate blind spots. Through the use
of short, specific, employee-generated videos, businesses can fill in the gaps
and provide their workforce with “just in time” learning for workplace policies
and procedures.

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5 | Record meetings — for review or preview
Love them or loathe them, meetings are how most organizations provide
important updates and make decisions day to day. Yet too many businesses
treat meetings as ephemeral. Employees unable to attend miss the valuable
points of discussion and rationale for key decisions.
Here, businesses can learn from universities, who now commonly record
classroom sessions for students to review as study aids. Following this model,
businesses can easily use the webcams built into company laptops, or the video
hardware installed in conference rooms, to document meetings and make them
available for on-demand review.
Alternatively, many organizations are embracing a new meeting structure
called the “flipped meeting” that uses video to make scheduled facetime more
productive. By recording and sharing a video of their presentation ahead of time,
meeting owners can focus the meeting on conversation, debate and decision
making. Those pre-meeting materials then become a useful record of the project
for current and future team members alike.
Recording meetings can also be a quick win when combined with one of the
more established forms of social learning: the brown bag. Whenever employees
feel that they have something worth sharing, why not record it? The benefits
will extend well beyond those employees that had the luxury of attending the in-
person session.
6 | Preserving expertise at “Two Weeks’ Notice”
Social learning also protects against one of the biggest detriments to
productivity: employee turnover. Just as video onboarding helps new employees
get up-to-speed efficiently, video-based knowledge capture helps ensure that
the individual expertise isn’t lost when career or life changes take an employee
away from their position or company.
Especially when the departure is unexpected, video can be an efficient way for
outgoing employees to share what they know in full detail. And if the position
is complex, the visual nature of video can help a replacement follow along. For

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companies that have not yet invested in social learning as a practice, recording
a “two weeks’ notice” video may need to become a new part of the exit process.
For companies that have a culture and infrastructure to support social learning
throughout the course of employment, however, many find that the outgoing
employee’s accumulated knowledge is already available — and often, already
serving to help others across the firm.
3 Ways to Cultivate a Culture
of Social Learning
Once the video platform has been deployed and the learning initiatives have
been identified, the final, and arguably most critical, step in a social learning
program is to build a culture that encourages employees to share what they
know. Knowledge sharing with video will be new to most employees. As a result,
they’ll need leadership by example and permission to experiment. Below are
three specific tips for building a culture of social learning.
Video preserves your employees’ expertise - even when they aren’t available.
Click for a sample institutional knowledge sharing video.

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1 | Get leadership to lead the way in
social learning
One of the fastest ways to get people on board any initiative is to have company
leaders on board too. And what better way to let employees know than to have
the executives record and share their own videos? While keystone events like
product launches and shareholder meetings are excellent opportunities to share
executive facetime with employees, so too are informal moments, recorded
right from their office. These recordings can also do wonders for organizational
transparency, enabling leaders to share as appropriate the logic that underpins
the corporate strategy and the data that comprises the quarterly numbers.
2 | Minimize hurdles for content producers
While some companies pursue social learning with tight approval workflows in
place, most find that empowering employees to make smart decisions about
what they post is an effective policy that will generate better response for the
program. Armed with a few common sense guidelines and a handful of examples,
the vast majority of employees will self-regulate. After all, no one wants to look
foolish or violate company policy. Short approval cycles can always be instituted
where necessary.
3 | Focus on content, not production value
Social learning videos need not look like they were produced in Hollywood.
Having an enthusiastic presenter coming through with clear audio is more than
enough to get started, and people will improve with practice. Most companies
don’t want departments spending money for high-end cameras on every desk, or
on payroll required for an employee to refine a video until aesthetically perfect.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

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In 100 words: Panopto’s Video
Platform is the Right Choice to
Facilitate Social Learning
With straightforward recording software that runs on any PC, Mac, or mobile
device, and a web-based video library that automatically takes care of everything
from uploading to transcoding to indexing, Panopto enables employees to share
and search social learning video — and empowers learning and development
professionals to curate the most informative and engaging into a comprehensive
library of institutional knowledge.
Named a “Leader” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Video Content
Management and commended by Forrester for “the best support for video search,”
Panopto makes it easy for your employees to record anything and find everything.
Conclusion
To date, social learning has been a largely untapped resource for corporate
learning and development. But with the advent of straightforward tools for video
creation and sharing, that’s all changing. L&D professionals finally have a way to
capture and curate deep knowledge across a wide range of subjects.
Social learning empowers employees to think about learning in a whole new
way - to share what they know and to learn from their peers on a regular basis.
Naturally organized into relevant topics, searchable via an enterprise video
platform, and accessible on-demand to support interval reinforcement, social
learning video helps employees learn exactly the what they need, exactly when
they need it.