Techno Tchotchke

Category: Video

Not So Short, Short-Form Video Content Isn’t Dead…
It’s just hard to do effectively!

Short-form videos are generally under 10 minutes but the conventional wisdom is that marketing videos shouldn’t be longer than 2 minutes and ideally between 60 and 90 seconds. So, by default we marketers end up producing a lot of short, short-form video. While there are plenty of studies to show that after 2-minute mark there is a noticeable drop in engagement with marketing video, you can still have success with longer short-form video.

It you are solely focused on click-through and completion metrics you will likely focus on producing very short video. Almost universally, there is a significant drop off by 30-seconds into a web video and another at 2 minutes so it makes sense to keep it close to those marks if you want a high completion rate.

But, it is hard to do serious demand gen and customer education in 30 seconds. Short videos are great for hard-hitting, relatable content that can serve as an advertisement for your product or solution. But you need more time when you are trying to hook a prospect. Nota Bene – Don’t think that video length correlates directly with production value. It’s often the case that a short-form video is of much higher quality in all areas of production.

The paradox is that if you want to educate your prospects on the challenges your solution solves, you need a bit more time – but people won’t hang around to hear the full story. So how do you make longer form video successful?

My personal recipe for success is PHAT – Pace, Humor, Assumed Drop Off, and Track. Check out my latest video below and then I’ll unpack each of the ingredients and show how I used them in this video.

Pace

First and foremost, keep the video moving! Rapid pacing creates intensity and excitement that discouraged drop off. Use short, quick cuts so viewers don’t get bored. Try and keep the talking to short sentences (I need to work on this) to keep combat short attention spans. Modern viewers are used to web-clicking, channel changing, station switching and stream skipping so don’t be afraid to pick up the pace – they will keep up.

Humor

Humor doesn’t mean you must have a video that will leave your viewers in stitches, nor does it require a writer’s room to do your scripts. While this video is high on humor, you can achieve the same effect with just a. few funny lines or visuals sprinkled throughout. This breaks up the tone and keeps viewers on their toes again, holding their attention longer.

Assumed Drop Off

Plan for the drop offs. Put your key points just around the 30 second mark and the key takeaway around 2 minutes. This way even when you get the typical drop off you have at least accomplished some of your objectives and the video is a partial if not complete success.

Track

Publishing a video is not the end. Regularly reporting on key video metrics and compare it to other videos. Are you getting the impressions you expected – if not you have an advertising problem. The play rate will determine if it is well positioned on the page and/or has an engaging first frame. And the completion and drop off rates will let you know if your video is getting people to your key message points even when they don’t finish the video.

This video is performing well. It has is a normal play rate with an above average amount of traffic.
- Play rate of 5.7%
- Engagement rate of 54.6%
- Completion rate of 40%
People make it more than halfway through the video but the completion rate is a little low. Lesson learned – the end its a little too long, but it is not the end of the world as the key takeaway is mostly before the drop off.

Don’t be afraid to do longer video – shorter should be the guide but not the rule. IMHO – the length of video should be driven by the goal and content. Just make sure you have a plan to drive people through it and get your message across even when they bail.
February 26, 2019
Alright, Mr. DeMille, I’m Ready

I hate being on camera! I am naturally a super self-conscious introvert who hates attention, worries about looking bad and fears sounding stupid. But, I have a job that requires me to be on camera from time to time – either to film short video pieces or worse live video interviews.

I never had a problem speaking in public and it would be very ironic if I feared being interviewed by the press, but something about video daunted me. Every time I saw myself on a screen I would cringe because that was not the guy I saw looking back at me in the mirror that morning. Instead, I saw the awkward geek I was in my teens (and still am occasionally in large groups).

Earlier in my career I found substitutes to cover for me. When the occasional request came time to film something I deftly deferred to colleagues who I felt were more natural under the harsh truth of the camera’s eye. “You do it, the exposure would be good for your brand” was my common judo move to get someone else to take my place. However, a few years ago I started getting tapped to do video regularly and couldn’t get away with ducking it anymore.

And to be honest, I needed to started to practice what I had been selfishly preaching to others – to be more successful as a marketeer I needed to use video to build my own brand. Compelling material and great presentations are necessary for but not sufficient to being a marketing leader. I gave in and ended up doing about one video piece a month for over a year.

At first I treated it like the Klingon Rite of Ascension – something to be suffered through to become part of a sacred band. Even though I was doing it regularly, I was still not natural in front of the camera. Worse, the stress of being on camera would occasionally knock me off my talk track. (I will admit that my selfies in makeup garnered an incredible number of likes!)

I was whinging about an upcoming video when a friend said to me “You realize that the reason they want to film you is to hear what’s in your head, not to see what you look like.” Even though I dismissed her in the moment, I eventually processed what she had said it changed my approach to video. I realized I would always feel a bit awkward on camera, but that I needed to focus on the message I wanted to get across.

That attitude changed things and while it never made video fun, it took the anxiety out of the process and made me a much more confident subject. I relaxed and focused on why I liked my products, the compelling message we had build for them and I ended up telling a better story on camera.

In my most recent role I haven’t been called to do much video work, and surprisingly I have missed it! It’s a great tool for a marketeer to be able to use to get your message across – a short video is easier for people to consume than your 2-page solution brief or your 30 slide deck. YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine, so if you want customers to find you, you need to have a video presence.

But more importantly, you need to put a face to your product and why shouldn’t it be you? If you are confident enough in the strength of your message and are passionate about what you do, have the courage to say it on “film.” Your passion will only make the message stronger and it’s a differentiating skill to have on a resume!

October 5, 2018
Holding their attention
You approach the end of the cave and look around. You can easily see a tunnel sloping up to the right. Light flickers somewhere in the distance, giving the tunnel a mysterious glow. Upon further inspection you also see a narrow hole off to the left. While it would be a tight fit, you probably could squeeze through it. What do you do?
- To go down the tunnel turn to page 42
- To squeeze into the hole turn to page 27
- To go back the way you came turn to page 64
The Choose Your Own Adventure books we all read in the 80’s and 90’s were a brilliant way to keep us kids engaged in a book. One or two pages of story interspaced with decisions about what to do next brilliantly worked with, and not against, our natural attention spans — before you could get bored you were sucked back in to making a choice that could affect how the story ended. I have been leveraging the same approach to drive some increadible video sucess rates.

There is an inherent dilema with using video in marketing. While it is becoming an ever important tool — emails, social posts and web pages with video all have significantly higher interaction rates — studies have shown that the optimal video length is just one minute and that attentions drop off precipitously after two minutes. Yes, for a lot of what we do, a good marketeer should be able to distill a message into a few minutes. But there are plenty of times when we have a larger story to tell, so how do you use video and keep people’s engagement past 60 seconds?

Humor helps, but without access to a writer’s room on a regular basis most of us can only pull off a few funny lines per piece. Special effects are also good at grabbing attention, but can easily blow any budget. How to you make a longer video message engaging, but keep it cheap and easy to produce?

This was the challenge we had with when trying to make “full featured” video training content that customers and sales force would actually watch. Despite covering the cutting room floor with reams of virtual clips, our product overview video was coming in at over 10 minutes – a marketing cardinal sin. We struggled with what more to cut and how to prioritize what we didn’t — what should the order of the messages be?

https://cdn1.raptmedia.com/projects/W0IoyuJc/embed?autoplay=false&controls=overlay

The eureka moment was that we didn’t have to decide what to viewer should see and in what order — they did. Let the watcher determine what they wanted to see after the initial pitch. Instead of trying to find gimicks to overcome human nature, we decided to work with it and build the larger message in 1-2 minute clips and tie them together by making the user interact with them.

Yes it drove longer engagement time on the video – past efforts showed an average time spent watching our videos was just under 2 minutes, nowhere near the full length of the video. Once we made them interactive average time on video was over 5 minutes instead of 2 – letting customers get more of our message.

And there was a unplanned side effect. We got metrics on what segments customers clicked and spent time on, letting us know which messages were resonating and which weren’t. Great data for honing our messaging to be more impactful.

To date we have done two such videos – one for customers and one for our sales teams. Both are averaging incredible egagament times.
October 30, 2017
What’s Your Vector, Victor?
Reposted from blogs.vce.com on May 19, 2017

How to fasten a seat belt, when to inflate your life jacket, where to find the closest emergency exit – as a frequent traveler, I listen to these droning pre-flight instructions (and the occasional snarky one) at least once a week. Surely the FAA can’t be serious with the constant reminders for these simple things interrupting our Kindle reading, last-minute texting, or jive talking? It turns out they are serious – and stop calling me Shirley. Humans are fallible, forgetful, and error prone. There have been emergency evacuations where passengers and crew couldn’t get out of their seat belts; and in the US Air 1549 flight that crashed landed in the Hudson River, only four passengers of 150 were able to correctly put on a life vest.

The same is true for technology. Whether we assume that it’s magic and the laws of physics don’t apply, we overlook the simple things, or we just picked the wrong week to quit smoking, we often forget that deploying technology requires some prep work. Even the most automated solution needs a bit of manual inflation. A computer requires power and therefore power outlets. If you are plugging into a network, you definitely need a switch, cables, and IP addresses. And you have to make some decisions about how and where you are going to put it – some data centers charge extra for the emergency exit row.

VxRail’s “autopilot” setup significantly reduces the complexity of deploying hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) such that it can easily be installed in a fraction of an hour. But, there are a few simple things that if not part of your pre-flight checklist may have you yelling “Mayday” (and not for the Russian holiday with parades and hot hors d’oeuvres).

We want to make the VxRail Appliance experience the best it can be. With a year of deployments under our belt, we looked at where people occasionally trip up and found them to be in a few categories:
- Physical preparation – where do I put my appliance and how do I plug it in
- Networking – how do I prepare my network so the nodes can talk to each other?
- Deployment Choices – which vSphere version do I want to use? Do I want to use the VxRail vCenter or will I integrate it with my existing vCenter?
We asked our customers how we could best remind them about the actions they needed to take – and the decisions they needed to make – to get ready for an HCI appliance deployment. You told us that a complicated approval process (“the white zone is for immediate installation and deployment, there is no installation if you are in the red zone”) was overkill. What you wanted was a gentle reminder of the few things you needed to prepare.

So, for all of you frequent HCI fliers, we made this VxRail “pre-flight” video. Please turn your phone off and kindly direct your attention to YouTube:

Xperts Shannon Champion (@smchampion) and Jason Marques (@vWhipperSnapper), will direct you through what is needed to ensure the smoothest and fastest VxRail deployment possible. They cover the key choices you have to make, discuss things you should do before your appliance arrives, and point out with aplomb where to go to learn more.

We hope you enjoy the pre-flight video. You will also find the topics covered in the video and the other information located in the seat pocket on our website at:
If you have any questions, please press the call button, and one of our Xpert crew members will assist you. Now sit back, enjoy your VxRail HCI experience, quit your jive talkin’, and watch some gladiator movies.

Roger? Over and out!
March 16, 2017
The Xpert Rides (or is That Rolls) Again

We are rolling out more Xpert videos! The 3 “how to” videos in January we did got rave reviews (and we have more coming in a few months), but people asked for some that talked to the overall Dell EMC VxRail Appliance story. To that end, we are now rolling out 4 videos that highlight and explain the value of Dell EMC VxRail Appliances.

These still feature our own Shannon Champion in the Xpert role, but we have brought in a some “talent” to help us tell the story, and we have upped the production value. We experimented with different styles for each of the videos to give them each a unique feel. Check out one of my favorites in this series – Lvlup byo? smh…

February 24, 2017
Become the New Hyper-Converged Hero in Town

Reposted from blogs.vce.com on January 19, 2017

Faster than a speeding data packet! More powerful than a 3.5 GHz processor! Able to conquer complex deployment challenges with a single family of appliances!

Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s–

Ok… so maybe she can’t fly. But she sure knows her way around a data center.

The Xpert and her crew have arrived, and with them is a VxRail Appliance to fit every use case. Their mission? Glad you asked. Simply put, they are here to empower IT staff everywhere, starting with this video. Empower them to do what, you say? Well that’s the best part…

The Xpert crew is moving fast, and transforming IT wherever they go. And they want you to be an Xpert too. If you want to spend less time building infrastructure, and more time building your business, join us. If you want to spend less time upgrading software, and more time upgrading revenue, join us. If you want to spend less time dealing with support, and more time supporting exciting new business initiatives, join us.

Your overwhelmingly strong demand for and interest in VxRail has exceeded all of our expectations. While we’ve been working hard to continually improve VxRail Appliances, we’ve also been looking for ways to continue to support deployments in the field. Which brings me back once again, to the Xpert and her crew.

Launching today. Right now. In this very blog, is the first installment of the Xpert Video Series. In it, we’ll be tackling important subjects on all things VxRail, the first of which is drive failure. What can I say? Sometimes good drives go bad. It’s not common, but it happens. And when it does, you need to know that your hyper-converged infrastructure is not going to miss a beat. Your data is protected, your VMs remain available, and your business keeps running.

Don’t worry. VxRail has got your back. Wanna know how? Well we’re happy to show you. We’ve brought in Shannon Champion, one of the founding members of the Xpert crew, to do just that. In Episode I of the Xpert video series, you’ll get an inside look at how your VxRail Appliance handles various drive failure situations without losing data access. What’s more, VxRail can even rebuild a failed drive non-disruptively. Click below to see how it all goes down:

Don’t worry–we’ve got plenty more where that came from. We’ll be rolling out fresh content nonstop. In fact, Episode II (do you see what I did there?) in the Xpert series is slated to drop next week, so stay frosty.

If IT Transformation is your game, we’ve got a spot on the Xpert crew with your name on it. All you have to do is show up.

Until next time…

January 20, 2017