Business Systems Explored

Vinay:

Hey everyone. Vinay here with another episode of Business Systems Explored. Really, really excited today. We have a kick ass episode. I'm here with my co-host.

Tony:

Yeah. Tony Brown of Tonylbrown.com. I'm excited about this. I've actually just finished using the products that today's guest co-founded, which is Wistia. We have Chris Savage with us today, the co-founder and CEO of Wistia. Chris, how are you doing?

Chris:

I'm great. Thank you both for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Vinay:

Yep. Really excited. How's everything been? It's been a while since I dropped in at your office in Boston during the blizzard.

Chris:

That's right. It's been good. Last blizzards, in general, is always a good thing. Yeah. It's been a busy year. We added a ton of people to the team last year. Doing a lot of big stuff. Excited about what's coming out. We just flew this ... a piece of content the other day about 360 video, which is something we've been thinking a lot about.

Vinay:

Oh, nice.

Chris:

We released this 8-minute video, breaking down how to think about shooting 360 video with the rare ... We used 14 GoPros. I've been playing around with that a lot. I've been really excited about it, and we have more stuff coming there. A lot more stuff coming, so it's exciting times over here right now.

Vinay:

Yeah. I saw on Facebook that Zuckerberg shared a 360 video. It was super cool. He went surfing in Hawaii, or something. It looks awesome.

Chris:

Yeah. It's one of those weird things, like it doesn't make sense the first time you hear it. You're like, "What the hell? 360? There's a camera everywhere?" It creates a totally new form of content. Yeah. Actually, Facebook is really pushing to pioneer this stuff with the Oculus acquisition they had-

Vinay:

Right.

Chris:

-a couple years ago. Now, the official versions of the Oculus are coming out. The rest is coming out in June, and the Oculus Samsung gear is actually out now. It's a game changer there. When you put that headset on, you feel like the presence of being in a different space. We wanted to figure out how can we help people use this new medium and think about it. Because it's super early days, but I think it's definitely something that's coming.

Vinay:

Yeah.

Tony:

Yeah.

Vinay:

No. I think, for sure.

Tony:

I think so. I feel like 360 video is definitely ... Must be exciting for yourself, given your video marketing platform. Who would have expected such an innovative form of video coming to us at this stage? Like you said, it's a game changer. I'm sure you guys are already thinking about how are you going to prepare yourselves to be able to deliver that type of content.

Chris:

That's exactly right. It is a really big game changer, and it's confusing because it's like are people going to walk around with these headsets? How do you make videos that make sense on the web, where you can look around a video with your cursor, or then on your phone. Where you hold the phone in front of you, and move it around, and then, ultimately, on a headset where you don't even think about it, you just look at stuff.

Tony:

Yeah.

Chris:

If you think about it, it's a really big challenge. Because it's one of the first media types that you consume completely differently-

Tony:

Right.

Vinay:

Yeah.

Chris:

-on the medium of higher conservian.

Vinay:

Device. Yeah.

Tony:

See. It's a game changer on both sides, for both the content creator, but also from a viewing perspective, it just changes everything. It's exciting.

Vinay:

We have some Wistia users as well, but we haven't actually announced yet. At least, at the time of this recording. We've done our Wistia integration, which, I guess, is almost a completely different side of the business for you, the developers side, but where we've actually migrated over to using you guys as our core video hosting platform inside the app, so that when users come in and they want to upload their own video, instead of it ... We were just throwing it on Amazon S3 before, now we push it to Wistia. Obviously, all the playback is much nicer and faster, and optimized for devices, and that kind of stuff.

Also, what we're going to do in the future is start servicing a lot of the co-analytics that you guys provide back to the user so they can use it to watch. As users are going through processes, or as employees are going through training, and that kind of stuff, and get some [inaudible 00:04:10] around the video consumption there, too.

Chris:

Yeah. That's huge. It's interesting because it's like, that's a part of the business that nobody really knows exists. Until two weeks ago, there was literally nothing on the site, except the the APIs that let you know that you could do that. We have a ton of people that are doing it. We're actually starting to build up more tools just for developers to go on top of us in video.

Vinay:

Awesome. It was a huge pain for us, and so this made it much easier. Because we let people use ... Before we only had a Wistia integration where you could use your own Wistia account, right? Just the same as you use your YouTube link, or your video length, or whatever. You can just put the link in. A lot of people would just want it, in a way, where they know it's just an internal video, and they don't need it hosted anywhere else. They don't want to care about having some kind of secondary account, so they can just use it through our system, seamlessly, but it's still coming off your servers, and getting optimized through Wistia, Right?

Chris:

Yep.

Vinay:

Awesome. On that note, you must have a lot of businesses that use video in lots of different ways. That's what we're going to be exploring in this episode, how businesses can integrate video, or build complete systems around video, and where that can fit in, and how that can be used. I know there's a few different use cases. We use video, for example, to do screencasts. It's a combination of education over our product, and also marketing. We also use video for explainer videos and demo videos.

I know there's a lot of different ways that companies can integrate video, not just on the marketing side, but also internally, and probably other ways that I can't even think of. We'd love to explore that in this episode.

Chris:

Let's do it. I'm excited about it. There's a lot of really cool stuff happening that nobody knows is happening, that we get to see, that I'd love to fill you guys in on.

Vinay:

Let's do it.

Tony:

Yeah. That's the type of stuff we want to hear. There's no doubts, video is an extremely powerful form of communication. It's a powerful form of marketing, of a good medium for education, like we've mentioned. Can you just share with us what kind of businesses have you seen use video effectively, like in terms of different industries, different issues, et cetera. What type of businesses use video successfully?

Chris:

Yeah. I've seen a lot of very interesting things. I'll go through the most obvious, and we'll get to the crazier stuff.

Tony:

Yeah.

Chris:

How's that sound?

Vinay:

Sounds good.

Chris:

Yeah. You mentioned this yourself, but the explainer video, using videos for marketing. We see a lot of people starting there. I've seen some very creative things. It's the thing that makes the most sense. Because you make a video, you want to know that it's doing what you're hoping it's going to do. You want to hope that it's converting traffic. You want to hope that you're driving actions with the video, that you are getting more people to sign up, that you're doing all the things that a marketer wants.

Some of the things that I'm seeing right now, that are interesting, are they're like the unsung heroes of video. They're the hard working videos that everybody makes, but nobody talks about, that actually do most of the work.

Tony:

Okay.

Chris:

The most common one, and that always works, is the support use case. Which is making videos to explain really specific and complected things that come up in support. We see a lot of doing this. MailChimp has done a ton of this, Squarespace is doing a ton of this. You can see these companies, that are extreme scale, are doing it.

What they doing is they're making videos that are designed for the exact moment that someone's feeling pain with your product, or is confused. In that moment, when they're looking for answers, and they might have even already emailed support, or they've tried to call in, they can find this content that walks them exactly through, step by step, what they need to do to solve the problem. The reason that's so powerful is what we've all learned from the Khan Academy, and why that has taken off, and the lean back, learning movement, is that when you can rewatch something that is confusing, when you can pause it and take you're time with it, you end up retaining more information, and you end up with a better understanding, and so you end up solving your own problem.

I see a ton of people doing that. One of the other things I'm seeing is, as companies get better and more confident in how they make their videos, whether or not they're making them internally or they use an external firm, is we're seeing the uses of video, that are happening today, that made absolutely no sense that anyone would ever make videos to use as, like, 10 years ago. An example of this is, there's a company called Blue Leads, and Blue Leads is an agency. They're like a marketing agency, and they go out and they sell marketing services to people.

They have started making a video, before they have closed the deal. They make a video for each potential client, introducing them to the people who are going to be on their team. These are the people you're going to work with. This is Jenny. She's in social. This is Elise, she's going to be a writer. This is Andrew, he's going to be a writer, or whatever the people are. What they found is that they get a 80% higher close rate when they make those videos.

Vinay:

Whoa.

Tony:

Whoa.

Chris:

This may make sense, because we want to do business with humans. We want to connect with people. We want to understand what we're getting when we buy from a company. It also doesn't make any sense because it would have been impossible to make those videos, on spec, 10 years ago. Because everyone would say, "No. That's too expensive. That's crazy. It doesn't make any sense." When the cost has changed so much on creating content, you have these totally new uses that we're starting to see people start to do, and they work extremely well.

I'm seeing a lot of stuff like this where, if you're trying to get someone to interact with you, because you're on a customer success team, or anything where you want someone to interact more, those personalized videos can have an enormous effect on someone's ability to respond and get back to you.

Vinay:

Just to dig into that a bit more, could you explain to me how, or an example, of how you've seen, say, a support team, or a success team, that has built a cool integrated system where they can quickly record a screen cast, and send that link to the customer in a very point-and-click integrated way? Have you seen that set up where you can be like, "Oh, this customer has this question."

Record a screencast message for this customer, a thing pops up, you can quickly record it and hit send. It uploads it and sends it when it's ready. It's really clean for support to do it that way, to do those customized screencasts. Have you seen a system set up that way?

Chris:

You know who was doing this really well is New Relic.

Vinay:

New Relic?

Chris:

I'm, not sure if they still doing this. I checked in with them about a year ago. They had their team set up to really quickly shoot, record, and send screencasts back to customers. My understanding, at the time, was that that was an enormous win for them.

Vinay:

Yeah? Is it something they built in-house? Do you know of any products that can help enable support, or success teams, to do that?

Chris:

Yeah. They were using a product called Screener, which has, actually, since, shut down.

Vinay:

No.

Chris:

I think they were trying to be too much to too many people, and therefore didn't focus and couldn't build the business. There's a company called QuickCast, which is a really fast way to record and send over a quick video for support. There's also Cloud app, which is designed for, when you take a screenshot, it saves it, and it copies it to your clipboard so you can just ... You take a screenshot, and then you paste and it shows up with the link, and it's hosted. They have a version like this, it's working for video.

Most of the systems I've seen are not super productized. They are custom. Using ScreenFlow, or Camtesia, using the quick record stuff on your Mac. It's supposedly not end-to-end systems.

Vinay:

Yeah. It seems like it would be a cool solution if you could record it, attach it to the customer, and then attach it to a knowledge base, or something like that, somewhere, so it can be reused in the future, or customers could discover it, again, in the future.

Tony:

Here, here. There's a quick tool called Jing.

Chris:

Yes. Jing is a good one. Yes. Yes.

Tony:

You can grab the link, and then shoot the link off to somebody, whether it's in Slack, or any other sort of quick messaging app.

Vinay:

Awesome.

Chris:

One of the other ones that I've seen that's been really cool is making videos that are specifically designed to create a stronger relationship with the company. They're for one company. We started doing this a little bit, and it has worked pretty well. I can't get into all the details, but we made a video, which was basically how much we love Slack. It's this really amazing video that, literally, is people getting on camera, and trying to make this sound of the Slack notification message. I can't do it. It's just this very-

Vinay:

Like chick, chick, chick, chick?

Chris:

-cute, fun thing. Yeah. Exactly. I'll send it to you guys. It was a fun idea, everyone here loves Slack. Let's just make this video for them, as a thank you video. We sent it over and it took off. We were watching the views, it got 1,000 views. A lot of people at Slacks saw this thing, a lot of people who work there. I was like, "That is a pretty amazing thing," because if I think about how hard it would have been to get all the people in a company to know that we exist, and then how easy it was for us to do it this way. It's like, "Maybe we should do more of this."

I've started to see other companies do that, but it's hard to see those things happen because they usually happen behind closed doors.

Tony:

Yeah.

Vinay:

Interesting.

Tony:

There's value in making something like that public.

Chris:

Yeah. In this case, we decided that we wanted ... We made it public, and we tweeted it at them. We knew other people would see it, and that we weren't super worried about that. I think that, probably, also, was more of a benefit by doing it that way.

Vinay:

Yeah.

Tony:

Yeah.

Vinay:

It's almost like a sneaky pitch video. I can see these for really high-ticket customers. Making it a specific video just for pitching that one customer. You're selling airplanes, you're doing an advertising deal with a car company, or whatever. A really big-ticket customer. It totally makes sense to invest in, versus a PowerPoint presentation.

It totally makes sense to invest in a high-level production, if the output's going to be whatever. 100 grand, a million dollar a year contract. It can totally help close that deal, and make you stand out against your competitors, right?

Chris:

Yeah. I think it's, also, the number of things that the video makes sense for has just changed. It's like design, right? It's like design. All your designers ... Always done by an outside firm, you have to have a really concrete reason why you're doing everything. If it's not, if it's done internally, then people could focus on other uses. They could focus on lots of different things they wouldn't normally focus on, because they want to, and they care.

You can find something, and be like, "Oh, I'm just going to make this look better." I think it's the same thing. You don't think about the ... or at least, I don't think about the ROI of people on the team, in the same way that I do of the ... working with a consulting firm. When I'm working with outside firm, you're pretty concrete of looking at what the ROI is, but when someone's internal, it's a much longer term return that you're getting.

Vinay:

Right.

Chris:

You end up trying a whole list of different things.

Vinay:

Yeah. It's like a cross-pollination of work when people are internal on the team, right? They're doing one thing, but they're also moving a bunch of other things forward, and they're talking to other people. It's all this stuff going on, versus the consultancy, which is, they're very confined to a very specific project that they're working on.

Chris:

Yeah. It's the same reason why there's ... You can get a better explainer today than you ever could have before, because people have been so focused on that. They do their jobs extremely well. I think that's what's so interesting, is the balance between those things. Because the reality is that most companies ... If you can afford to have someone internal, you end up also, at some point, thinking you should use external people, too.

Tony:

One good use I've seen of an explainer video is your music video on your profile, on the Wistia webpage. I watched that today, and I thought, "Wow." The simplicity, but the creativity of it. Rather than just saying, "Hi. I'm Chris. I'm the CEO, and co-founder, of Wistia." You've created a music video, a very simple music video-

Chris:

Oh, on my profile on the site?

Tony:

That's right. Yeah. I think it really shows your character, your sense of humor, et cetera. It's definitely a good use of creative video. I would definitely encourage listeners to go and check that out.

Chris:

Thank you. That, actually, was, originally, made as another use, I guess, for our conference.

Tony:

Okay.

Chris:

EOS has to introduce every speaker, and I had not seen that video. They surprised me with that. It's pretty amazing, because they made a song for every speaker, and they put up it. I love '90's music, and so they thought they would embarrass me by taking the most embarrassing photos they could find, and putting it together.

Vinay:

That's awesome.

Chris:

I love it. I do agree that that tells such a different story-

Tony:

That's right.

Chris:

-than go do a profile, and be like, "Look at how great I am. Look at me." I, personally, just get turned off when I see that shit. I think that what we ended up, in this case, by using that video there, it was like, "Oh, this dude is pretty human," and clearly is jumping around ... In the video, I'm jumping around in an outrageous ... I can't even explain what it is. Just very outrageous outfit from this music video that we shot once, and I was like, "Yeah. You could do this, maybe, as a normal person," which is ... I am, so that's the point.

Tony:

I see.

Vinay:

I love that example. All right. We've talked about some different use cases for video, and I'm sure there's a bunch more that we haven't even brought up, but I want to talk about, just quickly ... or ask you if you've ever seen some huge epic fails of companies that have tried to use video, unsuccessfully, in individual cases. Also, if you've just seen patents of a specific types of companies, or industries, that video just doesn't work as well for.

Chris:

Yeah. The most common fails are the videos that people make that are really allotting of how great the companies are, and no one gives a shit about them. I think we see these all the time, and, probably, from the amount of time, effort, and money spent on them, are, by far, the biggest fails. Cumulatively, it's just the classic video of a company announcing their own success. Hoping that, now, everyone is going to think that they're cool, or something. I see so much of that stuff. It never works.

It never endears people to you. It just doesn't function the way that you would hope it would. In terms of most magnificent failures, there's, I feel like, a ton of attempted viral videos that I've seen that are horrible. Yeah. I would go to the generic "We think we're so great" company video, I think, is, in my book, the biggest fail.

Tony:

Are you going to press for an example?

Vinay:

Yeah. I was thinking about it. I was like, "There must be some kind of B to B examples," as well, that you can give of companies that have invested a bunch in video, but it didn't work. I think instead of-

Chris:

Yeah. I can think of one right now that's really good, but I cannot say it because it will get me into too much trouble. Man. It was a parody of ... I can't say it. I can't say. It will just get me into too much trouble.

Vinay:

I'll probably Google it. "Viral Video Fails." All right. Moving on. We know that video's being very successful for a lot of companies. We talked about a lot of the different use cases. Why do you think that companies should consider looking at video, versus other forms of content?

Chris:

Yeah. Why video, versus other things?

Vinay:

Yeah.

Chris:

Yeah. I think video is the most emotional medium that there is. It's really easy to make a promise in writing. Anyone can write "We're great," and "We're cool," and, "You should trust us. Our customers love us." In all of those examples, it's extremely different to have someone on camera saying those things. It's harder to be genuine. If you actually have customers, or you have really concrete true examples, it's far more believable on video.

I'm not a person who says you should use video for everything, or that it should only be video on pages. Because I think there are still lots of people who can't watch video all the time. They're at work, they're in an open setting, they don't have headphones. They're not always going to be able to watch stuff. I think you want a balance of text and video, but I think whenever you want to build a more human connection with your audience, because you think that having a human connection is going to make for a stronger business, and it means that people will trust you more.

They'll come back and tell you about the problems they're having instead of just leaving. Basically, the thing that drives all business, of all time, has been the human connection. In any place where that connection matters, that's where you want to be thinking about videos. An example is: if you have someone signup for your product, signing up for products are scary moments because you're afraid you're going to waste your time. You're afraid you're going to end up using something that you shouldn't use.

Maybe you don't want to be sold, maybe you do. There's a lot of emotions happening. That's a really good time for video, because you can literally just say thank you to somebody, and that can mean the difference between them continuing on or not. You can introduce your success team, and that will be the difference between response rates being 2% and 20%. Whenever it's one of those moments that you think you want to build a much stronger emotional connection, that's where video's going to work well.

It also works really well with really complicated arguments, and things that are visually complex. Because you can take your time showing, as you tell it.

Vinay:

Got it. You've thought about video, and you think that it's something that would be worth investing. How do I go about validating that idea of using videos? Say you wanted to use it for a marketing channel, or even internal training, how would I go about thinking about, "Okay," constructing the costs of video, and then actually tracking, and figuring out whether or not that was a good spend. Is there some way to do some type of micro tests, or some type of early validation on that, before you invest in creating video?

Chris:

Yeah. That's a great question. To go backwards, you definitely can start by making a rough version, or a proof of concept of a video. Do it with your iPhone, do it with your Android. Talk over the video to provide narration, and send it to somebody, and see what they think. I think you'd be surprised how often, even something that's really crappy, that is shaky and done with your phone can be enough to convince people that it's worthwhile, or to convince yourself.

We actually do that, all the time, for things that seem risky. We'll make a proof of concept, share it around, everyone gets an idea and a feel for what we thinks going to happen, and then it makes it easier to decide, "Should we invest in this more, or not?" If you don't have anybody on your team, yet, who's doing video, and your options are do something with an external firm, or do it yourself and learn how to do it, I suggest checking out our library. We have a library of content that teaches you how to set up the lights, how to think about scripting, how to think about editing. All that kind of stuff.

Vinay:

Yeah. It's awesome. I've watched a bunch of your videos.

Chris:

Oh, thank you. I've seen a ton of people go through that, and go from not feeling very confident that they can do this, to actually feeling pretty confident, and actually doing it. I think when you're thinking about the ROI, it's the ROI of traffic or conversion, or anything that's really easy to measure is, of course, an easy place to start. I think that the thing that I would say, though, is that a lot of the feedback, you're going to need it first. It's going to be qualitative because a really great video can change how people think about your business.

An amazing example of watching this happen in real-time is, if you look at the videos that this company Sandwich Video makes. Sandwich Video is a company, is created by a guy named Adam Lisagor. They do a ton of start-up videos that you've seen. They did the initial video introducing Square, they've done videos for tons of different companies. They just did a video for a company called Notarize. It's an introductory to an online app to do notarizations, as apposed to going in-person to go get a notary to put their stamp of approval on something.

When you look at the videos that they're making, you go from not being bought into this company, to having an extremely good understanding of what the entire company is, what the product is, why the product exists, and why you should trust them. If you go to sandwichvideo.com, you can go and see a lot of these videos. Go watch the videos for companies that you've never heard of, and then see how you feel after you watch the video. Qualitatively, you'll know. You'll feel it inside.

"I feel a connection to this thing, and I feel like I understand whether or not I want it." That can often happen with a video, with a small number of views, and it can be a complete game changer for you. I think it's, often, where people get the most ROI, and they don't realize it. Obviously, a great way to track the success of the videos is to put them on something like Wistia, where you can look at the engagement, which is how people are watching the video.

Are they sticking with the video? Are they skipping? Are they re-watching? Did the video do what you hoped it was going to do? Did people make it all the way through? Are they clicking your calls to action? Are they taking the next steps you want them to take? I think that makes a lot of sense, on a per-video basis. On a broader basis, you can plug this stuff into Google Analytics, plug it into, if you're using Market Automation, your Market Automation platform, and try to get a sense of how much it's moving the needle on conversion, and how much it's moving the needle in all of the other ways that you would hope it'd move the needle.

Vinay:

What metric do you think video ... I guess, on the logics, it effects most. Did you find it that it's useful for bringing in new views? Do you find it's useful for converting people and explaining products? Do you find it's useful for retaining customers by showing them more in-depth explanations? Where do you think it moves the needle the most?

Chris:

I think it's going to depend on your business. You need to look at what aspect of your business needs the most work, and then you can figure it out, right? There's a huge difference, in terms of impact, based on how you're customer wants to be interacted with. If your customers want to try your product before they talk to you, that's really different than if your customer says, "I don't want to try your product. I want you to explain, to me, everything, before I touch it." In both those cases, the most impactful videos going to be really different.

I always encourage people, think about the stuff that requires the most human interaction, and see if there's something there where you can just scale that human interaction by making a video to explain your product, by making a video to do the cold call, by making a video to do whatever the thing is that get's people going at first, and then, I think, it becomes a lot easier.

Tony:

I think any case of, if someone like myself has got a personal brand, video is extremely useful, because you get to show your personality, your quirks, your sense of humor, et cetera. Obviously, people begin to feel like they know you a bit more. What I was going to say is while, in terms of ... about the product, buying into products, I remember there were three specific products that I tried very early out, which was Evernote, Trello, and the CRM Insightly. All of them.

I downloaded them, I started to use them, and I didn't take to them for a while, until I watched videos about how to make this use of them. Tutorials of other people using them, and just simple walk-throughs. Just after watching those videos, every one of those tools I've mentioned, I use almost every day, all day now, in my business. It was because of those videos that I actually went back to them and I tried them again.

Vinay:

No. They teach the products that I would never understand without watching the videos.

Tony:

Yeah. See. It's interesting. Some of them are other users who have put the videos together. I think it was only the Insightly one that was actually produced by Insightly. The rest of them were just people who had uploaded them on to YouTube, and things like that.

Vinay:

Just to step back some, we've got a couple of episodes about B to B sales, one with Stelly from Close Air, and one with Quian from Assist IQ about outbound email. Have you seen people, successfully, include videos in their cold outreach emails? I think you just dropped a mention, using the video for the cold call, and how successful have you seen that being?

Chris:

I've seen it be extremely successful. There's a company called BambooHR that helps you ... It's HR software that helps you manage HR stuff. It doesn't sound super exciting.

Vinay:

HR stuff.

Chris:

I say it like that on purpose, obviously, because it's actually a really cool company. They found a way to be extremely creative in lots of different areas. They do two things, I think are really interesting. One, they do this thing called Video Voicemail, where they have videos of the different people on their sale's team, and as a follow-up, when they're .... Usually, I think it's all responsive to somebody, but if you contacted them, and say you want a white paper, or something, they will try to call you, they'll try to email you, and they'll send an email that has a video with the sale's rep in it.

Vinay:

Yeah. Because we do that, but we just don't have a video in it, right?

Chris:

Yeah. They have a much higher response rate, and the videos are pretty weird. They're pretty weird. Actually, they released a bunch of data on it in our community. If you go to Wistia.com/community and search for Bamboo, I think you'll find it. They've had great success with that. They also send follow-ups that are just links to a 15-minute demo of the product. A lot of the conversations they have with people are like, "The first touch. I want to understand the product." They realize that, and that they could make all their conversations more useful. They can, also, build more trust by not trying to just get them on the phone.

They start following up with these 15-minute demos, and my understanding is that worked extremely well, because they actually look at the data to look at who's watching the demo all the way through, and if you do that, you're clearly serious. Then they can follow-up, even in a more targeted way, and then they get a much higher rate of close after that.

Vinay:

Awesome. No. That's really cool. Hey, Chris, I know we're coming to the end of the episode here. Actually, there was a lot more stuff that we wanted to cover, so I actually just wanted to put out a suggestion right now. Do you think that your, and I'm assuming you have someone, your head of video production would be interested in coming on the show? Because the next set of questions was around video creation for businesses, and I had to do that. I feel like that's going to be a bit of a bigger topic that we're probably not going to be able to cover right now.

Chris:

Yeah. I'm sure we could get ... Yeah. Absolutely.

Vinay:

All right. Awesome. We'll follow-up after that. Anything that you want to cover in closing, Tony, now that we're coming to the end here?

Tony:

I was going to ask about ... I know Wistia I've got, in terms of the backend stuff, annotations, and the comments, et cetera. I wanted to know, are there any examples of effective use of annotations in video? Whether that be an effective call to action, or when best to drop them in there.

Chris:

Yeah. I think we did a post on this at some point, but there turns out there's extremely huge differences on the effectiveness of annotations, based on where they are. We discovered that if you have a call to action, like a turn style call to action, so this is one of the things that takes over the screen and asks for an email address. If it's the last frame of the video, it's usually, I think on average, 4% of people will put an email address. If it's the first frame, it's something like 7%, but if it's a third of the way through the video, the average response rate's 40%. What this is telling us is that when someone has momentum, and they're watching a piece of content, and they're in that moment convinced that they should continue watching, that is when those annotations work best, because you have someone's viewing momentum. The call to action can be extremely targeted to that moment.

Obviously, sometimes, you don't want someone to click the call to action, unless they're super interested in that other topic, because they're going to move away from the video that they're watching. I've seen that putting annotations throughout the video is critical. Then if you want to put them at the end, which makes ... I think you should, basically, always have a call to action at the end of the video. There should be some reason, something, you want them to do at the end.

The advice, there, is keep the wrap-up as short as possible, because what happens is when people think a video is going to end, they stop watching. If you have a cue on screen that this video's going to end, people just start closing it and turning it off. If there's a very specific thing you want them to do next, like if it's a product demo, and how you want them to sign up for a trial, put that annotation over the video while that's happening, or just cut the junk, wrap up where you feel like you're trying to make yourself into a Hollywood filmmaker, and just end it. Go straight to the call of action, you'll get way more people engaging with it.

Vinay:

Yeah. That was a really good video from Jet, I don't know if you've seen it. It's with the actor from Silicone Valley, the Indian dude.

Chris:

Yeah.

Vinay:

Yeah. It's a really cool explainer video. They do the video where they do the ... It's five minutes, but they do the first two minutes, and then they end the video. They do their call to action, and then they have another two minutes of follow-on content, where they're explaining things in a bit more detail, or with some comedy in there. They don't wait till they do all that, before they do the call to action, you know what I mean? They ask for the call to action halfway through the video, and then ask for it again three or four times, in that following part, but they make sure that they don't lead up to the close.

Chris:

Yep.

Vinay:

Awesome. This has been really good. If people want to find out more about you, or Wistia, where's the best place to go?

Chris:

You can check out Wistia at Wistia.com. You can find out more about me, I guess, at Wistia.com, go to our team page, or you can follow me on twitter @csavage.

Vinay:

Awesome. Chris, it's been great having you.

Chris:

Yeah. Thank you, guys. It was a blast. I will make that introduction.

Vinay:

Sounds good.

Tony:

All right, Chris. Thanks a lot, man.

Chris:

All right. Take care.

Vinay:

Bye.