I am so excited about Microsoft Viva Amplify, and I want to share with you a few things to think about before you consider your own implementation of it or if you're just trying to get a better understanding of what Microsoft Viva Amplify is. It is now available for organizations to use and to improve not just how they communicate but how they learn from that communication. With the increased volume, variety, and velocity of communication, it's critical to have new tools.
We can't keep working the same way we have been, and in an organization today, it can be really difficult, and it may be a very fragmented journey when you're authoring across multiple places and multiple channels. And that's what Viva Amplify looks to solve. If we look at the value proposition of Viva Amplify, we can kind of break it down into three quick categories.
Category one is it gives us a place to organize and collaborate on our communication. That's what we call the communication campaign, the team space, and other things that are provisioned when we create a communication campaign. Not only that, but it also has some nice features where you can have things like objectives and writing guidance that we're going to use to make sure people are aligned when they're creating the publications and the content for the campaign.
It is also useful because it doesn't just organize the content, collaboration exercises with approvers and different processes, and scheduling publication models. It also enables us to publish across multiple channels. And that's the value proposition number two.
Today, you could do this, but you'd have to go and create that content in multiple places. Now you can create that content, preview it, and augment it all within a Viva Amplify experience, and then that gets distributed across Outlook teams, SharePoint and Viva Engage very shortly.
Now, this is a great set of experiences to help with the distribution of the publishing, but this brings us to value proposition number three, which is that when you create these publishing materials, you actually have richer reporting on the other end. When we look at reporting, it's fragmented. Right? SharePoint has page analytics.
When we publish a page, if you go to something like email, it has the different tools that we use today to monitor that. Or if you go to something like Microsoft Teams or Viva Engage, there's again a different set of tools that people might use to understand the reach and effectiveness of their messaging.
Many organizations aren't even using Microsoft Teams in this way. For many of them, this is a pure benefit of a new reporting capability they didn't have before. Why this is important is because when we create communication, what we're really trying to do is increase our reach, and amplify our reach. We're also trying to amplify how people consume our message so that it's coming across the right way. These are where the reporting can't just be views, how many eyes were on it. We need to see things like who's shared it, right? This is a really useful signal or sentiment or other type of analysis.
In fact, the fact that we can add organizational data and then be able to filter and refine based on department or location or level of the individual in the organization, those types of things are really, really powerful things that can enhance the reporting experience.
Now, all of that alone would be great, but the fact that we can do that from publication to the entire campaign and look at it holistically is a huge benefit because it saves time and helps us make observations and insights that we wouldn't be able to do if we were looking at this in a fragmented way. Now, that's exciting on its own.
The value proposition of Viva Amplify is really amazing, but getting started with it, you do need to think about your pilot, and you need to think about the licensing and cost implications for your pilot. Who should you do the pilot with, and what the timeline is now - I'll go into that in greater detail in a separate video but do understand that there are some governance implications, and there are definitely some best practices that we've learned from having piloted Viva Amplify with other customers successfully.
Now, it's also important to understand when you use something like Viva Amplify, what's happening is it's creating content in those places. If you create an Outlook message, it's an exchange. If you create a Sharepoint article or piece of content, a publication, you might publish it to multiple sites. It could live in multiple sites. The benefit here is you can click on the link that jumps straight to that article and then update it in those places.
There are lots of different ways that this could help with organizational aspects, but that does mean that we need to consider what happens when we create multiple teams, right? Each time you create a campaign, we're creating a team. Do you understand, as an organization how you're going to govern that? What are the implications of that for your organizational strategy around Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and of course communication compliance? These are things that are worth understanding.
I do want to surface this as a starting point. It is managed by Microsoft. It's using the same capabilities because it's in those same locations. But it does add a layer of understanding, which is another reason that it's really important to pilot first versus a broader rollout.
The last thing I wanted to talk about today around Viva Amplify is the way it works on the long-tail. Right now, the way organizations are most likely going to use it in these pilot use cases is they're going to use it to help communicate to leaders, lowercase L leaders, and capital L leaders in the organization about organizational updates, procedure changes, things like that, and then use those people sort of as a lens to communicate across the rest of the organization.
The main reason for that, which I'll go into in a Pilot video, is that basically, you need to keep the cost down because you have to buy a license for if you have Amplify, not just for those who are going to communicate, but those who you're targeting that communication to.
Now, the reason that I bring this up is because the long-tail, the long benefit of Viva Amplify and its legacy that you'll see years from now within your own organization is that it provides a way to think about our content and the way we distribute and create that content from a more central perspective instead of the various places that it might live today.
Most of us, unfortunately, have to go and create content within that project site, within that program location, within that cross-functional team, or within that department. Each time we're creating that content, we're thinking about those audiences, and we don't get to many of the places we wish we had time to publish content for.
Now, of course, Copilot and AI are changing the way we communicate, making it easier to produce more with less time, increasing the quality of that, and targeting it a little bit more effectively to people personalizing or changing it for audiences. That same benefit that we're seeing across organizations as AI becomes introduced in the communication flow is why Viva Amplify is so important in the long term.
The way we're going to organize things in a more optimal way is we're going to think of it as what we are trying to change? What are we trying to create alignment on? How are we trying to communicate this? And yes, today, we think of the communication mediums as things like emails and Teams messages and SharePoint pages and articles and news and things like that, and maybe some Viva Amplification posts and polls.
But over time, I think it's really important to understand that a Viva Goal in Viva Goals actually communicates a lot around alignment and around where we are with objectives, and there are many other learning objects if you have a learning reference, a bring your own learning experience in Viva Learning that helps align people.
We have so many forms, variations, and varieties of communication in organization, and we need an experience that can create a holistic set or a place where we can create that communication, craft it, craft it responsibly and effectively with others, manage it effectively, and of course distribute it to those other places so we can learn from that reach and improve that content and that content journey, that communication journey over time.
And that's what the long-tail value proposition of Viva Amplify is. I hope you're excited, not just about this sort of version one release that we have of Viva Amplify. I hope you're excited because you see the long-term potential and why we need something like this within your own organization.
I would really encourage you to get started with pilots, of course, responsibly managed and successful pilots. And then eventually, I do think everyone in an organization should be licensed, of course, under the Viva Suite, but especially under Viva Amplify, because we all communicate and we could all use better tools, not just for how we communicate, but learning from that communication and publishing that communication across multiple streams and across multiple formats.
Thank you so much for your time. I hope you're as excited as I am about how Viva Amplify can help with the incredible volume, variety, and velocity of communication we have today.
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