Customer testimonials are typically hard to get. I thought I’d list a quick way that I have gotten video testimonials from customers in the past using flip cameras and dropbox.

1. Step one buy some video cameras Kodak Playtouch ($179) or Flip Cameras ($80) with your loaded logo (as of today you still can) – see picture to the right.
2. Step two send the cameras to your clients with an email & document asking them to find a quiet room that’s well lit.
3. Step three ask them to turn the camera on, sit in front and read the questions aloud and then answer (its also helpful to send a “best practices how to record”).
4. Step four ask them to upload the raw footage to your dropbox folder you have just shared with them – or ship the camera back.
5. Step five edit the video down to under 1:00 in total time.
6. Step six load the content to your site with appropriate tracking codes to see who watches and what they do next (don’t forget a call to action).
7. Step seven ask for their final approval and tell them to keep the flip as a gift.

Marketing should exploit the immediate connection and effectiveness of using video in their referral process. Video is an effective and simple way to make a connection. These types of clean videos come across as very honest as there is very little “production”. I’ve gotten five testimonials completed in 30 days using this method.

It might be obvious to some but the web is becoming a broadcast system. People love consuming content this way and it really has an impact. You don’t need large budgets or time to enable this component of your demand generation marketing engine.

David Meerman Scott just launched his revised & updated book The NEW RULES of MARKETING & PR (Click to buy).  If you haven’t read it you should.

In it David talks about the creation of a video category called business casual (page 252). He explains that video in all its forms need not be the high production difficulty and cost you’ve come to expect from “formal video”.  David goes on to make several points

1. You can produce simple low cost engaging content that works/converts.
2. Do not create poorly shot video, with bad lighting and editing – there is a baseline.
3. He is “convinced that the trend towards casual content means that consumers want to get closer to the organizations they do business with”.
4. Informal “telling it like it is – will make us more efficient”

One additional learning that David and our customers have stressed is -

Trust.

Business Casual video is honest. You’re standing out there on your own with no fancy backgrounds nor teleprompter.  People love the directness and the honesty that comes through the simple format.  We find that people appreciate it and are therefore willing to advance to conversation with such a forthright individual that’s focused on the content delivered.

Never forget that no matter how produced your video is – the content must be authentic and engaging. That is what converts visitors. The business casual content is easily produced on small high definition capable cameras (Cisco Flip, Kodak Zi8) that are simple to use and cost less than $80 to purchase. The quality is fantastic and as of this post Flip cameras are still online for sale.

Here is an example of business casual video content –

Today, when visitors see this business casual content they find it genuine and engaging. The results are excellent and the more you do it the easier it gets.

Whether you are getting started with making a business video or you’re an expert, it is important that you know how to measure your success.  Every video solution and almost every website analytics solution has some flavor of video measurement, but there are few standards.  In this post, I’ll try to cut through the noise and provide 3 simple tips for measuring.

We like think about video measurement similar to how you think about website measurement.  How many people came to your site, what did they do while they were there, and did they take one of actions that you wanted (i.e. signed up for a webinar, took a free trial, downloaded a white paper, etc.)?

1. Start by measuring the number of views

This is the most popular metric and also one of the most important.  Obviously, if you post a video on your site and you are getting very few views, there could be a problem.  Is it below the fold?  Is the call to action not strong enough?  Or, does the topic of the video not work in the context of that page?  For example, we see very few views of the customer testimonial video at the bottom of our homepage.  The biggest reason for this is that it is a customer testimonial and website visitors landing on our homepage are problem not ready for a testimonial quite yet.  When we’ve embedded testimonials on our pricing page, the number of views were much higher.

In the VisibleGains product, we measure number of views, but also the “Opt-In” rate which is a simple calculation of # video views/# page views.  This basic metric helps our customers to understand whether they are getting better over time or with different placements of the video.  If you use YouTube and Google Analytics on your site, the opt in rate can be calculated pretty easily using the number of video views from YouTube and the number of page views from Google Analytics.

2. Measure your viewers’ engagement with the video

Depending on your video solution, you will likely have a unique way of measuring engagement with your video.  They all pretty much do the same thing, but have different names and look & feel.  YouTube, for example, has the Hot Spots feature which show the most interesting (hottest) parts of your video.  Another visual is that a lot of the web analytics systems have an engagement graph where you can see where viewers are dropping off.

I believe these are interesting tools to use, but they are more complicated than needed for most business video amateurs.  We suggest you start out by simply measuring the average amount of time viewers are spending in your video.  With this metric, you can get a pretty solid understanding if the video is interesting.  Once you get some experience, it might help to dig into the Hot Spots or drop-off charts to further optimize, but we do not recommend them for most early customers due to their complexity.

3. Measure the success your video has on your website conversions

At VisibleGains, we always coach our customers to start with a video to help increase conversion.  The first time you make a video, it can be daunting, so we want to make sure that you can easily see if the video worked.  When video achieves a goal, it makes it easy to justify doing it again, both to yourself and your management team.

If you use VisibleGains or another video solution that has built-in calls-to-action and lead capture forms in the video, you should measure how many video views lead to a click on the call to action or to the lead capture event.  If your solution doesn’t include those features, then you can write custom reports in your website analytics solution to correlate conversions to video views.

Conclusion

Depending on your video solution, you will likely be overwhelmed by the options for measuring video on your website.  When you get more experienced, you can dig into all of the advanced features, but when you are just starting out, it is important to keep an eye on the simple metrics above.  For a good example of these metrics in action, check out this video on a landing page promoting an upcoming webinar.  This was a very easy to make and also had a very short life-cycle.  This made it easy to quickly understand the impact video could have on the customer’s key metrics.

P.S. If you are interested in some of the more advanced topics in this post, let me know in the comments and I will write an advanced video analytics blog post in the coming weeks.  Thanks!

We’ve seen video on landing pages and in blog posts (like this one!), but what about press releases? Apparently the PR folks are hopping on the online video bandwagon and yielding incredible results.

Joe Chernov from Eloqua discussed his experience with PR and video at a social media breakfast with VisibleGains, BusinessWire, and MediaMobz, where he served as a panelist:

The statistic speaks for itself; Chernov’s video press releases attracted 500% more views than exclusively text-based releases. This is no surprise when one considers that video is rapidly gaining momentum in nearly every field, and PR is no exception.

Marketers need to constantly innovate, and online video may just be the solution. Tell us what you think: is it time to do away with text-only press releases?

Is heavy branding in video the only way to promote your company in the right way? Many marketers are struggling with this balance between taking control and letting the brand speak for itself. The problem is, the decision is not really up to the marketers at all.

We recently had an event with BusinessWire and MediaMobz focusing on online video and branding. Judy Gern, Director of Conversion Marketing at Constant Contact and one of the panelists for the event, spoke about the importance of finding an appropriate level of branding in video.

Marketers are often tempted to intensively brand their videos to ensure that it is portrayed in the best possible way. They use video to reach their audience in an authentic way.

Unfortunately, branding accomplishes just the opposite. The transparency of video allows viewers to see the push for control, and the video’s “authenticity” seems forced. On the other hand, the accessibility of video provides consumers with the power to share their own opinions of your brand.

No matter how meticulously you script your video, there will be other conversations taking place externally that the public will be watching. As Gern explains, “Conversations about our brands are happening outside of our walls. We have to play, but we can’t control it.” It’s important for a company to have a strong presence by promoting and spreading its own content, but it must recognize that its influence may not necessarily be quite as dominating.

If you’re concerned about branding, you want to communicate a message that is as transparent as possible. Video does just that; it’s a lot harder to be vague or wordy when you’re speaking on-camera. So embrace it–and use online to your brand’s advantage to promote authenticity.