We make lots of videos, and we think we’re pretty good at it, but it’s not what we do for a living. That’s why we thought we’d bring in the big guns to teach us all a thing or two about how to make great videos. Amber Harloff of IlluminateThis (listed on Wistia’s 50Grove producer directory) creates simple, animated explanatory videos to clarify brands. To kick off this instructional video series, she’s created an awesome, brief video on how to perfect your video’s messaging!

Wistia: Why did you decide to make messaging the topic of this video?

Amber Harloff: I chose messaging because it’s really the starting piece that will define the direction of the video. It’s all about asking, what do you want your video to say? How do you want people to feel watching it? And what kind of action do you want them to take? The messaging will be a lot different between each of those scenarios.

W: What’s your personal process for honing in on a message?

AH: Listening first to what the client wants their video to say is a good place to start. Then, working an angle to present that in its most simplified form. You want to supply the viewer with enough information to make an educated decision, but not so much they totally tune you out. That is the delicate balance. In order for people to take action, you have to either solve a problem that they have, or spark an emotion that compels them to take action. Once we have determined what those key factors are, we start to think about concepts and how we can illustrate them. The script will form out of those concepts.

W: What do you think are some of the biggest hurdles people face with messaging?

AH: Usually the part where we talk about that balance of supplying just the right amount of information to the viewer. Often, people want to jam the most words into 2 minutes that they can get. This is not a good strategy. Fewer words, well-chosen, is a plan.

W: What are some particular tips you might give people for making their message more concise?

AH: Stick to one or two features of your product. Focus more on the value your product can bring to people’s lives — features will soon be outdated by others as they upgrade their services. However, if you can prove a value that adds to those features, that goes further. Keep it under 2 minutes for sure. 1) Outline problem; 2) Demonstrate how you will fix it; 3) Call to Action.

W: Why is video so powerful for conveying a message?

People remember more when they see and read something. They remember by association to color, images, or sequences of visual events. Also, by displaying it visually, you can make it humorous yet keep the messaging pretty buttoned down.

W: What suggestions would you have for people looking to work with an outside producer on a video?

AH: Just to make sure they understand what your goals are in producing the video. That you like their messaging “style,” and you feel communication with them will be easy.

W: What’s the most important advice you’d give to aspiring producers?

AH: I guess it would be to work to hone your skill as an artist. If you like working on messaging and concepts, take notice around you: what commercials or other videos are memorable to you? What makes you act upon seeing one? And if you can’t write, don’t be afraid to hire a great copywriter that can while you stick to the visual. I’ve definitely reached out to some good copywriters along the way that help me form the messaging into a better video that I could just myself.

WordPress can be a volatile place for web video. Javascript, Flash, and HTML5 elements — these are all things that historically have trouble making it from the post editor to the user’s screen. External scripts get stripped, inline scripts get mangled, HTML tags and attributes get removed. And this is all happening at multiple levels: in the editor itself and when the page is displayed.

Of course, there are some good reasons for this behavior, and I think it’s important to understand that many of these limitations are intentional. For example, external scripts and Flash are blocked by default to prevent common hacks like cross-site-scripting (XSS) attacks. IFrames can’t be transparent because, theoretically, a malicious iFrame could take over the entire page. Javascript is often mangled so that it can be validated as XHTML, but the WordPress parser is imperfect. And TinyMCE, the editor used by WordPress, has its own set of filtering rules!

In the past, our solution at Wistia was to provide an oEmbed link and a WordPress plugin to enable it. This worked well enough for a while, but it’s ultimately an imperfect solution. Our feeling at Wistia is that, if you need to use a plugin, then why shouldn’t any Wistia embed code work flawlessly?

To get the Wistia WordPress Plugin, go into the Plugins section of the WordPress admin panel, click “Add New,” and search for “Wistia.” You should get a result for “Wistia WordPress oEmbed Plugin” or “Wistia WordPress Plugin” — we’re trying to get the name changed. Click Install Automatically, activate it, and you’re done! Now any embed code generated from Wistia’s SuperEmbed Builder should work flawlessly in your WordPress posts. Paste it when you’re in HTML mode, then feel free to switch editing modes. The embed code might change slightly, but it should still work just fine!

This Monday, we made a pretty data-heavy post on video length. But for a couple of commenters, there was one major roadblock to fully immersing themselves in the actual content: in the video accompanying the post, our favorite video expert Ben did not seem to blink at all! This observation from commenter Leif made us laugh, but it also made us wonder: is Ben actually creepy, as we have suspected all along, or did Chris‘s editing just happen to omit Ben’s eyes’ natural attempts to keep themselves fresh and moist? As it turns out… this time we can mostly blame the editing. Below, a newly edited video from the shoot, wherein Ben blinks not once, not twice, but no less than twenty-five times.

Why did this warrant its own blog post? Well, the video is pretty funny. But also, making sure you blink in your talking-head videos is a small detail that can make a big difference in how the video is taken in by viewers. Commenter Shayne weighed in: ”make sure you blink when you’re on camera. It’s a common problem. Even newsreaders, when they start out, will need script inserts to remind them to blink. Thing is, if you don’t blink, you register subjectively as either a bit intense or a bit crazy.“ Good advice, Shayne — and even the pros can forget when they’re under camera pressure!

What other small gestures and mannerisms — whether added or omitted — have you found to make a big difference in your videos?

The short of it: Wistia is a made-up word. When Chris and Brendan were a pair of youngsters with starting their own business at the front of their minds, they began to register a stockpile of domain names — because why not? There were a couple of rules for naming that they abided by, aside from just brainstorming names that sounded cool: a business name should have one obvious spelling when it’s said out loud, and one obvious pronunciation when it’s read out loud. Okay, no name is perfect — there’ll always be those who write down or Google search or say Whistia or Wisteria or Wisita, but we’ve found that overall, Wistia does a pretty good job of fulfilling these two requirements.

In addition, they wanted to use a name that wasn’t an existing word – this way, they could create the entire brand for that particular word, not to mention it helps avoid the confusion we’d encounter in Google searches if the company were named “Burger King” or something. It also mattered a lot how the name sounded. Before Wistia’s inception, Chris and Brendan had been running Tropist, a portfolio site for filmmakers and artists of all kinds. That was a pretty decent name  – even if it’s already an English word, it’s not a commonly used one. They were constantly testing new names on people (like BigBasil.com, HappyGlad.com, and FameThrower.com!) but Wistia just felt fun to say. In addition, “Wist” is an archaic past tense of “wit,” so it’s related to knowledge. And video is all about conveying knowledge! The “-ia” is purely aesthetic.

Since the name was chosen, we’ve stumbled upon a couple of cool backstories that we could have totally lied about and pretended were on everyone’s minds the entire time. For example, when Brendan and his brother were making the big wooden sign that hangs by our entryway, they realized Wistia is an anagram for “I SAW IT.” But let’s get real here: the anagram below is obviously the real story behind “Wistia.”

Does Length Matter? Initially, this question might evoke thoughts only appropriate for your spam inbox. Obviously, we aren’t going to write a long post here on that meaning of that question — but we do find ourselves uniquely poised to answer the very same question about business video, with tons of data from business videos of every type at our disposal. The graphs below summarize literally millions of data points from the last couple years (since our last post about this topic in 2009).

The above graph (let’s call it Exhibit A, because it’s fun to feel like a detective) is the most consolidated display of the data, with one data point for each video length range, on the x-axis, with the average % viewed for videos of that length on the y-axis. Basically, it’s representative of the video engagement number within Wistia (so you could compare your number with the number for that length on this graph to see how well you’re doing compared to the average!). This graph tells us that shorter videos are better for getting people to watch the whole thing. After all, most business video is created to serve up a pre-packaged message, so the longer the video, the less people will watch. It’s also noticeable that after a certain point the engagement average flattens out — so there’s not a major difference in engagement for a 4-minute versus a 10-minute video.

On to Exhibit B, where the x-axis represents the percentage of a video viewed (think of each line as the average engagement graph for a video of that length range in Wistia, one of the bars of Exhibit A over time, with each line representing the average video for that bin, with the lengths normalized), and the y-axis represents audience engagement. In this case, you could compare the engagement graph line of your own video to the appropriate line of this graph to compare yourself to the average.

A possible takeaway from this graph would be to organize the content of your videos journalistically, placing the most important, essential information first, then following with supporting details. For longer videos, notice that the dropoff at the beginning is extremely steep; it seems that most viewers decide quickly whether or not to watch, and once that decision is made, they tend to stick around until the end of the video, when they detect that the video is wrapping up and another drop off occurs. For this reason, if you’re using a post-roll call-to-action, you might want to consider a harder stop to your video, rather than a meandering wrap-up — this will ensure that more viewers stick around to see your CTA.

Exhibit C takes things one step deeper: this is the raw data that went into creating the above graphs. Each frame in this animated graph represents one of the time ranges from the above graph. Each of the faded lines is the engagement graph for an actual video, while the average line for that video length is in orange. Again, the x-axis represents percent viewed and the y-axis represents audience engagement.

The interesting thing to notice here is the wide variation even for videos of the same length. The variation tends to be more wide at the beginning, tightening toward the end (again hinting that people decide whether or not to watch pretty quickly). There are definitely outliers, but all in all, longer videos see a tighter overall distribution, where it’s safe to say that if you’re doing 30% versus 25% engagement on average, for example, you’re doing pretty well.

The main takeaways from our first “Does Length Matter?” post still hold true: overall, shorter videos are more engaging than longer videos. You should strive to make your content as concise as possible to achieve the highest engagement. If your message is more complex, feel free to give it the time it deserves, but understand that a major chunk your audience won’t make it to the end of the video and consider front-loading your video with the most important information at the beginning.

If you’re thirsty for more, we’re hosting a webinar on video length on Thursday, May 17!

But for now, let’s ignore the comparisons between the two and focus on this question: can YouTube be used in conjunction with a pro-hosting solution as part of a broad video marketing strategy?

Find the results of our own Youtube experiment over on the SEOMoz blog!

Late last year, Chris and I decided we needed to build an on-boarding video series for our customers and trialers. Inspired by great projects like Hootsuite University, we set out to make something we called “Zero to Hero.” It was ambitious, time-consuming, and ultimately a production nightmare. It took us a few months to recover, but in February we had re-grouped and were raring to try something new.

Why Project Randor?

Wistia had recently started using Asana, and identified their on-boarding videos as THE reason we stuck with it. Armed with knowledge of what definitely didn’t work in the first go-round, we set out to conquer the on-boarding video problem. With “Zero to Hero” connected with too many bad memories, we chose a new codename: PROJECT RANDOR. Randor is the king from the awesome He-Man series, and he gave He-Man his powers. It was perfect – our videos would give customers the power!!

Lessons Learned

Scripting!!!

It was absolutely key to have a script, both for the live-action bumpers and screencast sections. It took less than two hours to finalize the bumpers script – Chris and I tend to have pretty lively banter anyway. Having that script saved us hours of discussing what we should say once the camera started rolling. For the screencasts, it took longer to get the script right, but it was still totally worth it. We based it on the way we lead customers through the product today (by phone and email).

Know Your Talent

Chris Lavigne had great foresight in shooting takes from multiple angles. Chris and I aren’t accomplished actors, so mistakes were definitely the norm. The multi-cam shoot allowed him to cut out our mistakes. It also kept the live-action bumpers lively and engaging.

Jazz It Up

Having fun, as strange as that sounds, was a big takeaway for us. Had we tried to take the series too seriously, it would have been boring to shoot, and definitely boring to watch. We mixed in camera tricks and props, from hot espressos to Ben, to break up the content and keep it fun. Sometimes Chris left the camera running, even after a mistake, and the results were some of our favorites (i.e. ‘business-type fun’).

Make Content Accessible and Useful

We added a drawer to the footer of the app that would open by default for folks in a trial (and cookie if they closed it). One of the things we didn’t like about other on-boarding videos was that they prevented you from taking action while watching! So we embedded the actual video in our documentation, and sent the viewer there if they selected it. In this way, they could watch the video and take action in their accounts simultaneously.

Results

So now to the fun part – the results! The videos have only been ‘live’ for a few weeks, but the early results look good. 30% percent of new trialers are watching at least one of the videos, and nearly half who watch a video continue on to a second one.

Watchers are also using their accounts more (good for them and for us!). Accounts that watch a Randor video are 80% more likely to complete a ‘workflow’ (uploading, embedding, checking stats) than their counterparts. Anecdotally, reception has been very positive, and support has noticed a decrease in “Wistia Basics”-level questions.

What about new customers? Conversion rates for trialers who have watched Randor videos is higher than those that have not. In short… these videos have been very good for business.

What’s Next?

Next for us is to add some content to the Randor series. We’d like to do a video on “Private Video Sharing,” a workflow we didn’t cover in the first go-round. I’d also like to experiment with the order of the videos as they are presented. The first video, “Wistia Basics,” is watched a full 3x more than the final video, “Understanding Analytics.” It will be interesting to see if those accounts that got the basics down will go back for the analytics video once they have some stats.

So What Does the Finished Product Look Like?

Here’s a taste of Randor greatness, “Promoting Your Video With Wistia”

We’re huge fans of measuring everything about your web video, but analytics are pointless unless you know how to read them to better understand how well your video is working and, more importantly, how to improve upon it. While we know you’re all (almost too) smart and capable of reading your analytics, we thought it might be nice to include periodic examples on our blog, adorably entitled Stats Snacks, of how we and others have personally used analytics to improve our video (or maybe even where we’ve messed up, even though we totally don’t mess up at all, ever).

In this particular morsel, which some of you might recognize from a recent webinar, we started with a customer testimonial from our friends at Litmus, an awesome email campaign testing and tracking application. In the first iteration of the video, we asked for them to provide the context of who they are and tell their story, then talk about how they use Wistia.

The analytics for that particular video are the browner portion of the graph below. You can see a pretty big drop off at the end of the video, when we were wrapping it up, showing our logo and pitching Wistia. Overall the engagement was okay for a 1:30 video, but on the lower side. We decided we wanted to mix it up; because we’d shot testimonials with different companies, we re-edited the video so that instead of being a testimonial from Litmus, it was interviews with four to five different companies, interviewing them about why they would pay for video hosting. The graphs look pretty similar — there’s still a drop off at the end, but it turned out the second video (featured lower in this post) was significantly more engaging than the first.

Instead of going back and re-editing the first testimonial, as we could have done, we wanted to take the opportunity to have the testimonial be more focused and work with other content we’d shot. We didn’t shoot any new content, just combined footage we already had.

The point of all of this? Whatever analytics you’re using, the numbers aren’t necessarily going to give you that final insight. You need to look in context of what you’re actually doing to see what caused the boost. In this case, we think the newer version was more engaging because more was packed into a smaller period of time to hold attention, hitting key points over and over (versus the first video that was a slower narrative video about Litmus). Additionally, the new video was placed right on the front page of the Wistia website. In that context, the question “Why Pay For Video Hosting” was probably a question on visitors’ minds — so the video aligned context to content, making the video more engaging.

By closing the circle with analytics and improving our own videos, we can apply our learnings to whatever we do in the future. If you have any stats stories that you think would be a good snack, send Alyce an email!

Did you ever get in trouble for drawing on the walls when you were a little kid? Whiteboards are great for that kind of unbounded creativity – they encourage us to brainstorm and sketch our ideas, turn lists into diagrams and flowcharts, and express concepts and relationships instead of getting hung up on particulars.

Those are all things that are important to us, so it shouldn’t surprise you to hear we’ve got plenty of whiteboards here at 50 Grove Street. Here are some highlights:

1. Giant picture-frame whiteboard It’s really just a 4′x 8′ piece of plywood covered with Idea Paint. We framed it ourselves with some crown moulding from Home Depot and spruced it up with some gold spray paint (also from Home Depot). Total cost: $150

2. The Whiteboard Wall  This is the site of our weekly, all-hands stand-up meeting where we fill each other in on our work. As such, it’s also where we make notes and to-do lists. It was our first brush with Idea Paint, and it’s become a central part of our culture.

3. This patched-over spot where a window used to be seemed like a great place to have ideas. We tested a new product, Whiteyboard, which was not the world’s most raging success. It was a real bear to put up, and it doesn’t erase very well.

Stick to Idea Paint, is what we’d suggest.

4. The Whiteboard Table When we painted the giant picture-frame whiteboard we had some Idea Paint left over, so we painted this table. Once you mix the paint you have to use it all up, so pro tip: have some ideas ready for any leftovers.

Whiteboard paint isn’t cheap, but it’s worth it. When you consider the value of a good idea, turning everything into a whiteboard is one of the best investments a startup can make. Sure, those big-business fat cats can fill their offices with Minority-Report touchscreens and hologram Tupacs, but we little guys got to hustle. And that means getting creative on every possible surface.

Remember: anything can be a whiteboard, and it probably should be.

Deadline extended to Monday, May 7!

Oh. Hello there. You look awfully dapper today. Are you really going to let that go to waste? A mere photo of that kind of sleek just won’t do. Instead, why don’t you record it on video? Okay, fine, we’re kinda buttering you up a bit here, but we mean it. You look great. And we’d love to have someone like you record a quick testimonial for us. One of the most frequent questions we get from prospective customers is why they should pay for Wistia when YouTube is free — and no one can explain that better than you.

Here’s how you can help us out:

• Record a 20-30 second video of yourself however you like, in whatever quality. We don’t care if it’s a polished masterpiece or a quick FaceTime or iPhone recording.
• Name the file “Your Name – Company Name” so we can keep track of who you are! You don’t need to say your name in the video.
• It’s fine to have some dead air or multiple takes because we’ll be editing the videos together into one awesome one.
• Feel free to have fun and get as crazy as you like! But also don’t feel bad about keeping it simple and straightforward.
• Two options for sending us the videos: use the “Upload” button below or email the file to crl@wistia.com.
• We’d like to have these by next Tuesday, May 1! Extended to Monday, May 7!

Afterwards, we’ll share how you can do this yourself with tools that already exist in Wistia! First with the people who contribute, as our thanks to you, and later with everyone else. We’ll also shower your with our eternal gratitude, seriously.