As consumer video sharing has become ubiquitous, more of the companies serving that market think that merely a pricing page and a “business service” label can cut it. Over the past two years we’ve found that the serving of the video is a small piece of providing a complete solution. Here are the key things to look for when evaluating a business solution.

Showcasing the ROI
As Lord Kelvin said, “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.” Learning how your viewers are watching your video is critical to understanding its impact. Once you know who watched it you can start to correlate viewing sessions to purchases, sign-ups or whatever other metric you use to define success.

Customer Service is King
Customer service is non existent on consumer video sites. It makes sense, they’re giving their service away for free in exchange for ad dollars. It’s a model that doesn’t allow for people on the phone answering your questions, they could never afford such a luxury.

When you buy a business-class product, you should expect business-class service. That means that when you have a question, problem, or flat out emergency there is always someone there to help you via phone or email. It also means solving proactive problems like helping you optimize the quality of your video encoding to ensure proper deliver and quality for your use case.

Controlled Distribution
Almost everyone is familiar with the concept of putting video on your website to help engage visitors at a higher level. But business content is not always created with a public distribution in mind. If you have video with proprietary information or intended for a select audience, you need to look for a solution that allows you the flexibility to work privately and publicly. Putting your video on a consumer site and hoping nobody sees it is no longer a safe way to control the distribution of your videos.

We use Twitter in two distinct ways to help generate or close sales. The outbound approach and the inbound approach. Each method is tailored towards different audiences, but both have helped us close more deals.

The Outbound Method

Reaching out to people we’ve never met before to help them with their problems and hopefully inform them about our solution.

1. Find and monitor keywords for twitter search. — Started by looking at what keywords are working for you in your SEM and SEO efforts. We have created persistent searches by using tweetdeck, but you can also now setup searching like this at twitter.com.

2. Reach out to people with @replies. — A common occurrence on Twitter is for someone to ask their followers for recommendations. Quickly reaching out to someone with an @reply, can be a really helpful to start a conversation.

3. Try to help someone actually solve their problem. — Be upfront and genuine. A hard pitch will not work here and will also result in turning your followers off. Helping someone better understand the space or even find a complimentary solution to your own not only helps you to gain credibility and eventually a sale, but it’s also a great way to help keep the rest of your followers educated about your company.

The Inbound Method

Most people think about using Twitter to drive inbound interest by sharing links to product updates, blogs, testimonials and press activity. We of course post these types of tweets ourselves but there are a few other tricks we keep in our bag.

1. Solve customer service issues for prospects and customers. — Sometimes it can feel natural to keep issues hidden from the public, but there is no better form of branding than showing of your amazing customer service. Letting customers and prospects know that you’re aware of their issues and working on them is always powerful.

2. Track your audience reactions. — Figuring out why people have decided to follow you is critical to aligning the content you share and create with your audience. We use track our followers in two ways, by measuring click throughs using url-shorteners like tr.im and bit.ly and by monitoring their engagement with the video on our site. With tr.im we can get a quick sense of what percent our followers are paying attention and how fast they click through. We’ll also track how far into the videos people watch and when they leave. We use our own video analytics as it is the best way for us to gauge their interest. Tracking our audience’s reaction helps us to be more concise.

If you want to see us in action, you can follow me at @csavage and @wistia here.

What is Clicky?

Clicky (http://getclicky.com) is an online web analytics tool. It is similar to Google Analytics in that it provides statistics on who is visiting your website and what they are doing. All you have to do to use it is get a tiny snippit of javascript, paste it into your webpage HTML, and watch the data roll in. While Wistia uses both Google Analytics and Clicky, we have found Clicky to be absolutely indispensible in recent months.

What is special about Clicky?

As we started using Clicky, it became very clear that Clicky allowed us to close many of the information gaps left by Google Analytics (GA). Yes, GA looks pretty, but it doesn’t quite do everything our business needs. Some examples of areas where Clicky wins, hands down:

• Search terms for Google Adwords clicks – GA does not provide the actual search phrase used for Google Adwords clickthroughs. It only provides the keywords matched in your campaign. Clicky, on the other hand, provides the entire search phrase. This gives you more insight into what your users are actually searching for.

  For example, if I had an Adwords campaign against the keywords “training video” and a user clicked through, GA would show me that the user clicked through on “training video”. On the other hand, Clicky would show me that the user actually searched for something more specific, such as “potty training video”. Clicky gives you the data you need to refine and optimize your ad campaigns.

• Full clickpath data - While GA allows you to slice and dice visitors and sessions many different ways, it is extremely difficult (and in some cases impossible) to tell exactly what actions a particular user took. Clicky makes this easy by providing the full clickpath of every user from entry to exit. Thanks Clicky!
• Real time – GA data always lags by at least several hours. Clicky provides its data in real time. From my own experience, it is usually less than 5 seconds from someone visiting a page on our site until that data shows up in our Clicky account. While it doesn’t sounds like that big of a deal, it is great information to have if someone calls or emails as it allows us to provide better customer service.

While we have by no means stopped using Google Analytics, we certainly rely on it much less than we used to. We now depend on Clicky to give us the detailed and timely data we need to optimize our web site.

Ask and you shall receive. Wistia now supports all Office 2007 documents. Documents will be converted, just as all older formats were, to a web viewable flash object that you can incorporate into your projects. As with all viewable documents you’ll be able to attach comments to specific pages or to the document as a whole.

People often ask us why we support other formats beside video. The answer is simple, being able to share different types of files makes video more valuable. You might want to make the slides available for your video presentation or provide technical specification documents to support your product overview video. The best experience, in our opinion, is to make all of these options available so that video and its supporting content can be mixed and matched depending on the situation.

We are always working on providing richer support for an increasing number of formats and file types. And don’t worry, if we haven’t gotten to the format you’re hankering for, you can still use Wistia to upload and share it.

Recently I’ve noticed a trend with many of our new customers. They’re signing up for Wistia in order to incorporate video into their sales processes. They’re recording screencasts, interviews, or passing along press coverage in order to to better engage prospects and gauge their interest.

This is the workflow:

1. Create a project and invite contacts
2. Check stats to gauge their interest
3. Answer questions and/or add other content
4. ‘Rinse and repeat’ as needed

It’s a simple yet powerful process.
In person, it would be incredibly rude for someone to get up and leave a presentation mid-way through. But on their own time, at their own computers, they simply WON’T pay attention to you if they’re disinterested.

This solution allows you to approach more prospects at the same time and then focus on only those who are truly interested.

If your prospects had the viewing patterns below, who would you call?

Over the last couple of months we’ve had an ongoing debate about the various privacy options most useful to our customers sharing videos. These discussions always end up circling around the Wistia privacy spectrum.

Some of our customers use just one of these forms of privacy, but recently we’ve noticed that more customers are using multiple options to create more complete solutions for their businesses.

The four levels of the Wistia privacy spectrum are as follows:

• Public – In the Wistia world, public video sharing is made up of embeds designed to attract an initial audience and draw them into a deeper conversation. Embeds are placed on a company site or promoted to draw more users into converting.
• Tracked Users – A link is set up so that anyone can view prepared content. Tracking is on a per user basis but these users are anonymous. The goal of this is often to convert viewers to a named user account.
• Whitelist Registration – Each user has a unique account but standard activation is not required. Users can be invited in by a unique link or they can register themselves. Typically, there is an expectation that not all users will actually enter the system.
• Named Users – Each viewer in the system is defined by a unique email address. Video engagement tracking to and timecoded commenting by specific, named users have been strong value-adds for our customers. With this privacy option, users are invited organically as part of other business processes.

We have seen that by combining different elements of the privacy spectrum, our customers have been able to create a more complete solution for their businesses. You can use a few video embeds (public) on your site to give visitors a taste, then let them convert if they want to see more. Those visitors then become named users in Wistia and the value of each interaction systematically increases.

We have a rule at Wistia: never automate too early. It’s really easy, especially as a small business, to think that automating a new process will bring instant success.

Proper automation results in enhanced leverage from every team member, provides better margins and is often a catalyst to running a profitable business. Despite the obvious benefits, however, it’s easy to ignore the disadvantages of automation.

• You won’t hear anything – Automating too early means you’ll miss the conversations and responses you get from interacting with a customer over the phone or in person. For example, from our experience, there have been features that we believed would be great, but after presenting them to customers we realized that these elements would actually detract value by confusing a straightforward process. Without the benefit of this constructive criticism, we would have been turning off potential customers in the future without realizing it.
• You’ll act on the wrong metrics – Monitoring and responding to your business metrics is crucial to reduce risk and grow your business, but early automation can often provide misleading feedback. The obfuscation of metrics is a necessary evil of automation so you need to be confident in your assumptions when starting to hide information.
• You’ll set the wrong limitations – This is especially important when dealing with a new market or a new approach to an old market. Aligning the limitations of your product or pricing with expectations of your customers is crucial to establishing a seamless sales relationship.

Automation is a never-ending cycle. There’s always more that can be done to improve leverage, but having confidence in the assumptions of your business is crucial to acting with purpose.