Archive for the ‘Video Rocks’ Category
Rough Rider
Wednesday, April 11th, 2012Wistia does it live with our first webinar
Friday, March 30th, 2012Yesterday, we held our first ever webinar! We’ve been thinking about this for a while, because the questions we get from people aren’t just about Wistia — they’re about the big picture of video marketing as a whole and how to think about it, as well as specifics of what works and what doesn’t. For our first topic, we decided on the obvious, Introduction to Video Marketing.
We invested a lot in our first webinar. We talked a lot about what to cover, made slides, and decided to shoot it more like a radio show than your typical pre-recorded webinar, setting up several cameras and doing the entire thing live (we didn’t reshoot anything). This may have been more risky, but we also hope it will allow us to get more out of it — letting it serve as a more permanent piece of content. We may gate this kind of content in the future, but for this one, we wanted to make the learning available to everyone, so we hope you get something out of it even if you didn’t attend.
We’re really happy with how this webinar went — 60% of those who registered actually attended, and people asked lots of good questions. We’re hoping that the behind-the-scenes approach we used will make this webinar more engaging, and we’ll share our results with you as we figure out how well this worked and talk more about our webinar process here as we refine it.
Here are some links and resources that we mentioned in the webinar:
How They Work: Care.com
Thursday, March 29th, 2012Developing great company culture isn’t all just fun and games. Here at Wistia, we’ve been working hard to create an environment that brings out the best in every member of our team. In order to keep improving our game, we’ve been visiting companies we respect to learn how they work and what makes their culture unique. We’ll be sharing everything we learn though our favorite medium (video!) in an experiment we’re calling How They Work.
For this installment, we visited Care.com, an online service that helps families find caregivers. They pride themselves on a transparent and fun culture, one that’s helped them double their venture-funded business every year. They’ve had to fight to be in the position that they’re in, working to achieve organic fun with more unstructured things and breaking down barriers.
Here are a few ways that Care.com has worked to create a rich company culture:
- One of the things that was important from the beginning was fun, but as the company became bigger, they couldn’t just create structured fun events for people — it didn’t solve the problems they wanted to solve. The more they allowed and focused on opportunities for organic fun, the more benefits they saw — more creativity and productivity, more willingness to take on their own problems, and more willingness to intermingle with other people on the team.
- Transparency is huge, and they hold an all-hands meeting on a weekly basis to help everyone connect their day-to-day job with the overall vision of the company and how the company is doing. They also switch around where people sit regularly to keep the team cross-pollinating. All of these things help the team make better decisions to get things done efficiently.
- As the culture grows, they focus on people who are new, having an informal gathering at least once a month to make sure everyone is infused into the culture — fun has to be owned by everybody. It’s important to people to get away from their computers once in a while and connect as people.
Why Video?: A Video.
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012What is a video? We weren’t so sure. Then we figured out that it’s a series of frames arranged to form a moving picture. Then our questions became more metaphysical, more advanced: why video? We went on a lengthy, complicated vision quest in search of the answer. I’d type more, but as it turns out, video sort of eliminates the need to do that.
Pics @Wistia
