This was an especially fun installment of How They Work for us because we’ve been big fans of Clover Food Lab for a while — they even catered our holiday party! If you’re not tempted by those butternut squash fritters, you might not be human. Even if you’re not someone who works with food, Clover’s an interesting case study — they’re building a different kind of food business, one whose business model feels much more like a tech company. In many ways, they leverage technology to return to the way things used to be.

Clover's food is all vegetarian, but their message isn't at all preachy, and their healthier take on fast food is appealing to all, ranging from the BBQ seitan, which feels a bit like a hippie-friendly McRib, to the chickpea fritter, which is essentially a falafel on crack. They don't use freezers at all, so you know everything they're serving up is completely fresh. They also keep their menu local and develop close relationships with farmers.

Because of their local and seasonal menu approach, they've devised a way to make their menu completely flexible, incorporating whiteboards and screens to accomodate quick changes. Their menu in the Boston area stays fairly consistent between locations, but as Clover expands, this will be an important feature. Clover doesn't want people to come for a certain sandwich, they want people to come because of Clover's unique approach to sandwiches. They're also huge advocates of testing items and tracking what people buy to make their menu the best it can be. Because there's a low cost to letting people try their product (much like with a tech product), they do so frequently, and often unsolicited -- they're in it for the long term, and they're okay with making some mistakes along the way. And something seems to be working -- they've grown from 10 to 440 employees in the past year.

Clover currently has five food trucks and two restaurant locations in the Boston area. We hope to see more of Clover popping up in our favorite neighborhoods soon! How about Davis Square?

Chinese New Year is the world’s biggest annual human migration, and with Blank Label doing its manufacturing in China, it’s our biggest annual production headache. Blank Label is an online custom dress shirt maker, and for two weeks each year around January and February, our tailors take two weeks off to travel home and spend time with families. In previous years, we’ve tried communicating the break with homepage browser pop-ups, banners around the site, support email auto-reponders, all of which generally cause confusion about why we’re delaying our customers’ orders.

In addition, during the break, our sales always freeze up. People get turned off and just don’t order during the period. We’ve had three years to try different communication tactics and just hadn’t found a good way to communicate why people should be okay with their order being two weeks late. Late last year, we were introduced to Wistia, and the power of communicating a message online with video. Immediately I understood why Wistia was better for business than YouTube, for us most notably. At the end of YouTube videos we posted, it would show related video from competitors. But it wasn’t until I saw some profiles of businesses Wistia had done that I understood that Wistia wasn’t just useful for screencasts, but that it could really communicate a story or message in a simple, engaging, brand-elevated manner.

This year we tried something different. We placed a banner on our homepage with a clear hyperlink that showed a pop-over lightbox video (with code simply copy-and-pasted from Wistia’s new SuperEmbed). We’ve received dozen of compliments on the video, our orders have held steady through out break, and it’s saved our customer service champions so much time explaining to people why their orders might be late. We’re now looking to add video to other important elements of the site including Returns, How It Works, and launches of new products. With the power of a SLR camera, some light video editing and Wistia’s SuperEmbed, we’ve been able to turn a customer and service frustration into a sales and branding win.

Do you have a frequently asked question or highly visited part of your site you think can be better served with video?

Your newest video just entered the wild, and you couldn't be prouder. Then, just when the tale seems to be reaching its happy end, you realize you've made a horrible oversight and something major is off. There's no getting around it: you need to replace the video, stat, but the one person with access to the page where the video is embedded is nowhere to be found, and you're racking up views by the hundreds who think your company is named "Wisti" or "Wisteria" or "Bratwurstia" instead of "Wistia".

With our Replaceable Video tool, launched today, you'll never have to worry about this scenario again. With one click, you can upload a new file in the place of any video in your account, and it will be replaced everywhere: in all of your embeds and in the Wistia app. It works with all SuperEmbeds and in all legacy embeds except the legacy HTML embed. As we're encoding the web-viewable versions of your new video, the old version will stay visible. As soon as those encodes are complete, your video will be automatically, seamlessly updated in all locations, with a new thumbnail and everything. So go ahead, run wild, be free and make mistakes. We've entered no regrets mode.

A Brief History of Embeds

We started with a dream. A dream of a terrifying Frankenstein embed that was actually more of a nightmare — it turns out the idea of combining all of the embed types below into one freak being wasn’t so plausible IRL. We then moved on to IFrames, but SEO was sort of inconsistent. In the end, it made the most sense to offer multiple embed options for different situations and priorities.

IFrame Embeds

IFrames are sometimes the subject of unwarranted flack, with the mere word “frame” sending shivers of fear down the spines of those for whom it hearkens back to the illustrious frames of 1998 that basically served as a poor man’s server side include. Now that most websites are built in dynamic languages, frames are obsolete. However, that “I” makes all the difference, and IFrames are actually a super different and super useful tool that serves a completely different purpose.

The main utility of IFrames is that they can be used to serve up third party content with third party updates and control without interfering with the HTML, CSS, or Javascript of the parent page. CMSes that can strip code from embeds are no longer a problem because our code is isolated from the code of the parent page, so plug-ins can be executed even on pages where code might otherwise be garbled in some way. The third party control factor also allows for easy changes to video thumbnails, etc. without having to re-embed the video. We had to jump through some hoops to make them cross-compatible, but we don’t back down in the face of a challenge.

If you’re doing something basic without a ton of bells and whistles or embedding video in a third-party CMS, IFrames are the way to go.

API Embeds

Our IFrame embed is a wrapper around our API embed. The advantage to having the API embed outside of an IFrame is that you can use your own Javascript on the parent page to touch it. While IFrames are great for preventing interferences, they do have some annoying qualities (for example, the mouse event for a hover isn’t detected on the parent page). API embeds allow us to do more advanced things with embeds and add hidden features for customers — it’s easy to build new things around the API embeds.

If you need to add extraordinary features to your video embeds, API embeds are for you.

SEO Embeds

SEO embeds use old object tags so they’re crawlable by those creepy search engine robots that make you Internet famous. SEO is inconsistent with IFrames; Google’s official stance is that they don’t crawl IFrames, although sometimes things like an image still or link might sneak their way in. These also use noscript tags to make sure transcripts are visible to everyone. However, they lack the universal compatibility of IFrames.

If SEO is a priority then use SEO embeds.

Popover Embeds

The obvious benefit to popover embeds is that they free up page real estate while allowing those who want to view your video to view it at a resolution that doesn’t require a magnifying glass. That aside, since they use an IFrame, they also basically share all of the other benefits of IFrame embeds.

If you don’t have a lot of space for a video on your page, use popovers.

The new Player API places a new layer of abstraction on top of the player, creating a true Wistia API that eliminates the annoying little details that used to catch people up (for instance, you couldn’t instantaneously issue commands to the Javascript API, you had to wait for it to initiate). With the new API:

• No more polling the video! The unified API supports video events like play/pause/ended/timechange on both Flash and HTML5.
• You don’t have to worry about what’s going on under the hood, just tell the player what to do and we’ll take care of the rest!

We’re excited to have a Unified Flash/HTML5 interface and we think it’ll make everyone’s lives a whole lot easier. To learn more, read the new Player API documentation. Combined with our recent new customizable player, Matador,  and SuperEmbeds that make customization even easier, you have more control over your videos than ever.

Every year (since 2005), I edit a short “year in review” video for my wife Courtney for Christmas. Nothing special, just some quirky music with pictures and video clips from whatever we did that year. I consider it to be the most important project I work on all year. No matter how many other projects I find myself trying to wrap up by the year’s end, I always love finding time to do at least this one very important project.

I followed the same video sharing progression I use for CRLVIDEO after I completed (and gifted) this year’s 2011 Christmas video. I sent out a few emails, tweeted it, and posted it on my (and Courtney’s) Facebook walls. Like the analytics junkie that I am, I checked my Wistia stats on the video a few days after.

I was shocked by the numbers. An extremely personal video. Made up of personal memories. Featuring pictures and video of only my wife and me. Garnered a metric of 91% engagement across everyone who watched the video. Umm...what? We’re not talking about a 10 second video here. This was a 3 minute and 10 second video... one of the longest I’ve created in over 2 years. 67 people watched an average of 91% of the video. 91% of every vomit-inducing, sappy, love-drenched frame.

With this video, I reached a new milestone. The 2011 Christmas video became the most engaging video of all of the videos I host on Wistia. Why? I don’t think it’s because it’s my best video. I think it’s because the video offers a privileged look inside our lives. We’re not living any differently than a lot of other of our friends. It’s the sheer curiosity and downright creepiness of everyone in our Facebook network that led each person to click play and watch all the way through.

Not creepy enough for you yet? Check out the spike in the aggregate graph at around 2:15. People re-watching this section like woah. Why? Because it had a joke picture of a joke gift from two of our closest friends that fake alluded to Courtney being pregnant. Guess that explains the e-mails from people we haven’t talked to since high school asking when the baby is due and if we know what she’s having!

There are a few lessons I learned here:

• Facebook is a creepy yet intriguing means to share your work.
• Facebook can easily fake people out and make em’ think your wife has a bun in the oven! (p.s.: She doesn’t.)
• Analytics don’t lie (and can sometimes creep you out).
• It's okay to make video personal -- relatable techniques can keep viewers engaged!

We’ve all been there: you play a video that really grasps at the core of your soul, but nothing is infinite so, eventually, it ends. You’re faced with a blank screen or something equally unreassuring and your soul is propelled into an existential void, never to return to reality. Well, we have good news for you: it doesn’t have to end this way.

When designing a webpage or an email blast we’ve all been coached by the marketing gurus to include a call to action to help guide the behavior of our audience. How come we don’t do the same thing with video?

For the most part, people don’t add CTAs to video because it used to be technically difficult to pull off. Do you add an image to the end of the video? How do you make it an active link? Can you even control what happens at the end of the video (like with YouTube, where the end of the video is outside the scope of what you can customize)?

As a result, most people settle for a simple fade to black or company logo. Heck, we’ve been guilty of that practice ourselves, mostly because its the easiest thing to do. But all of us have been missing a big opportunity to help influence our audience’s next action. Where can you direct users with a call to action?