EyeView's Blog

The Message Or The Medium

The BBC's political panel show Question Time celebrated its 30^th anniversary in September of this year. The format has remained mostly unchanged in that time with a chairman fielding questions from a live audience before a panel of invited guests usually representing each of the three major political parties in the UK and a journalist or representative of one of the smaller political parties.

The show, and the BBC, has attracted considerable criticism for extending an invitation for tonight’s live broadcast to Nick Griffin. In July of this year, Griffin was democratically elected to the European Parliament where he represents the British National Party (BNP) a far right party whose members have at various times made remarks that were anti-Semitic, anti-Islam, homophobic, in support of Holocaust denial and against mixed-race relationships. While Griffin has tried publicly to tone down some of the less-palatable aspects of his party’s manifesto, there is no denying the party’s (and his) roots in the murky world of British fascism.

Prior to broadcast, the debate has centered on whether or not Griffin should have been invited. Some people question whether the BBC, a state-funded broadcast company, should give a platform to a man whom many consider to be an unrepentant racist. The response of the BBC, until now, has been that it is merely the medium and that it would be wrong for the corporation to control the message. I don’t want to delve further into the ethics of this situation, but I do want to think about this distinction.

We know that online video increases engagement for the visitors to your site. We know that the more video they watch, the more likely they are to continue along the conversion path you have built for them. An engaged visitor is a contented visitor and is more likely to download, register or purchase.

My question today is how important is the medium and how important is the message? Is it enough to embed today’s most popular video on YouTube within your landing page to entertain your visitors? How big should such a video be? Could you turn the entire page into a screening room for the funniest clips and hope that prolonged exposure to such fare will cause them to click the download button out of sheer gratitude? In presenting the medium, how much responsibility will you take for the message?

Coming from the other side, should you prepare a video that delivers the right message clearly and articulately, hitting each of your marketing beats and presenting an overwhelming case for people to continue towards conversion and then use an clunky generic player to host it? Do you want someone else’s ads to appear on the player during and after your precision targeted pitch?

In other words, how should you divide your attention between the information you are trying to get across and the method you employ for doing so?

In the case of tonight’s Question Time, the BBC may be able to claim that they are doing nothing wrong, merely broadcasting someone else’s opinion. On your own website, you probably need to focus on the message just as much as the medium. Either one of them can negatively impact your site’s effectiveness, while doing them both well can significantly increase your conversion rate.

New UK Tax Legislation Means More Interesting Videos

In the past two years, the British government has made changes to the tax legislation that have particularly impacted independent contractors and the agencies that recruit and pay them.

Part of the new legislation exists to counter fraudulent claims of tax exemption and part of it seeks to ease the tax collection burden of small companies employing workers on an ad hoc project basis.

These changes have given rise to a new kind of company known as an “umbrella company” to manage the financial relationship between the contracted employee and his or her employer. The law makes it clear how these companies act and apart from the fees they charge and the level of service they offer there is very little room for any umbrella company to maneuver in terms of paying more or less tax than another similar company.

In a new market such as this it becomes important for the first company to offer a service online to concisely explain the offering and establish itself as the market leader for clarity and professionalism.

This was the brief we received from Excellium Umbrella, an umbrella company that manages salaries, taxes, travel expenses and meal subsistence claims all through a unique online portal.

None of this may be relevant to your situation, but if you take a look at this video, I think you will appreciate how complex ideas can be expressed in an engaging, informative and even entertaining way to build confidence with users and boost conversion over time.

A/B Testing Done Write

I’m really excited about the test we are currently running for our friends at Ginger Software. Ginger Software is a spelling and grammar checker which uses the context of the entire sentence “to facilitate error-free writing”.

It’s a great product that might have been aimed at people for whom English is a second language, but that is also tremendously useful for those of us who remain a little unsure about ‘principal’ and ‘principle’ or ‘affect’ and ‘effect’.

The A/B test running right now on Ginger’s homepage divides incoming traffic into two groups and offers each half one of two situations. Half the visitors will find a video player embedded in the page that autoplays the first time they arrive there. We know video is a persuasive medium for increasing conversion, and we also know that forcing people to watch by using autoplay can sometimes be controversial, so it will be interesting to compare the conversion rates for this half of the visitors with the figures previously achieved by the homepage.

The second group of visitors will be presented with the same homepage, but in place of the embedded video there will be a video initiation trigger. The trigger changes as you roll over it and if you click it the video opens in a lightbox player.

You do not have the Flash Player installed.
Click Here to install it.

Another key difference with this player is that throughout the running time of the video there is a clear call-to-action button that sits on the player and directly reflects the call-to-action button on the site.

So, while the video is the same in each case, the method of delivery is very different. We will be closely tracking the conversion rates for each version and reporting our findings in this forum in the near future.

In the meantime, enjoy the video.

Video Demos Are More Than Just Videos

It was gratifying to read Jason Kincaid’s piece in TechCrunch this week that he thoughtfully titled: The Underutilized Power Of The Video Demo To Explain What The Hell You Actually Do. If we disregard the fact that it might have been easier to make a video than to type that heading, Kincaid makes some strong points about the power of video to deliver something between an elevator pitch and a run through of your key features.

It’s a topic that I touched on back here when I blogged about Your Video Elevator Pitch, and it’s one that continues to have legs. Kincaid’s article focuses more on the value of video to show a product demo. While I agree completely that video should be a big part of your customer education program, I would argue that video has a more fundamental role to play on your site.

Kincaid uses the video made for Dropbox.com as an example of effective video. I watched the video on the Dropbox homepage and it does a great job of explaining the service. I was a little surprised though, when at the end of the video I was directed to go to their homepage. There was a great call to action at the close of the video to download the software, but there was no correlation between the call to action in the video and the Download Dropbox button that sat below the player. I was even concerned that the download button sat partially below the fold on my laptop screen making conversion less likely for the people who watch.

I guess the point is that a great video demo is part of the solution, but you also need to concern yourself with placement and conversion to ensure that you’re getting the best return on your investment.

As always with TechCrunch one of the most valuable parts of the article is the comments section. From there I got this great link that Andrew Angus over at Switch Marketing put together of Producers of Explanatory Videos.

Favorite Headline Of The Week

Sometimes something just tickles you in such a way that you feel you have to share with everyone. I checked my news feeds as normal this morning and stumbled across an article heading which made me stop… look again… and… instantly want to read more.

The headline read: Rossellini Ponders How To Make Online Video Pay

Rossellini is, of course, Isabella Rossellini. Isabella Rossellini – one of the most beautiful women in the world. Isabella Rossellini who was in Blue Velvet. Isabella Rossellini, the daughter of Ingrid Bergman. Isabella Rossellini who was once married to Martin Scorsese and later engaged to David Lynch. Isabella Rossellini who played Sydney’s crazy aunt in Alias, Jack’s ex-wife on 30 Rock and just missed being on Ross’s laminated list on Friends.

That Isabella Rossellini.

Isabella Rosellini is thinking about how to make money out of online video. To give this some context, Ms. Rossellini has written, produced and directed a series of internet shorts called Green Porno all about how animals have sex. Now that she’s into to season three, she’s starting to think of ways to earn back the money she has spent.

Isabella Rossellini is wondering how to get a return on her investment in online video. For perhaps the first and only time ever, Isabella Rossellini and I are thinking about the same thing.

Now, if Isabella Rossellini is thinking about building ROI into your online video spend and I am thinking about how online video should be part of your conversion strategy in order to boost revenue, maybe you should start thinking about it too.

You Don't Need 300 Million Users To Make Money (... But It Helps!)

First of all, congratulations to young Mr. Zuckerberg and the rest of the team at Facebook. According to his blog post yesterday, the site now has over 300 million users. This is a remarkable feat by any standard and places Facebook firmly in the pantheon of internet gods. Given that the announcement about reaching 250 million users only came in July, we can see that Facebook continues to experience remarkable growth as it becomes an essential part of many people’s lives.

Perhaps even more importantly for Mr. Zuckerberg, he was able to announce that Facebook had finally become “cashflow positive”. An interesting choice of words that is open to interpretation as Alan Patrick of Broadsight amusingly points out on his blog. At least one thing is clear and that is whatever interpretation of “cashflow positive” Facebook uses for this past quarter, it is not likely to have made much of dent in the $700 million that has already been invested in the site.

So, if it takes one of the world’s most popular sites five years, 300 million users and $700 million of investment to make money, what hope is there for the rest of us? Plenty. And the reason is this. You don’t need 300 million users to make money. What you do need is a clear conversion strategy for the users or visitors you do have.

Facebook has built its user base with fantastic word of mouth and viral expansion through every demographic. The rest of us are using a combination of PPC, SEO and other SEM tactics to generate traffic to our properties. But even without a viral tsunami we can all still do more to optimize the value of the traffic we generate for our sites.

You may even find that your real online business is not an ad-supported behemoth like Facebook, but a lean and keen revenue-generating machine with a real product and an open and defined strategy for turning your visitors into purchasers or subscribers or downloaders. Facebook needed 300 million visitors in order to start making money. My bet is that you can achieve the same goal with far fewer.

Your Video Elevator Pitch

It’s been a couple of months since I inadvertently coined the term ‘twelevator pitch’ in a comment on Brian Eisenberg’s blog. It’s the Twitter generation’s version of the elevator pitch. The idea is that every company should be able to explain what they do in a 140 character tweet.

Since then I’ve been think more about the idea and trying to define some rules for brevity and precision not just in 140 characters but in translating that pitch into an effective homepage video.

The added ingredient here is that a video on your homepage should serve a role beyond pure exposition. A homepage video is a key part of driving visitors to your conversion goal whether that goal is to capture an email address or to download a piece of installation software.

How do you build the perfect homepage video? It’s a combination of your elevator pitch, your company’s visual style and a clear call to action all delivered in around 70 seconds.

In other words:

• Say the right thing
• Show the right thing
• Ask for the right thing
• Get out in around a minute

I think this video that we made for TradeSmarter is a great example. The script clearly describes the purpose of the site while the visuals establish a tone that is fun, professional and welcoming. The call to action is delivered at the end with viewers encouraged to register on the site and the whole thing comes in under 65 seconds.

I'd love to get your suggestions for the most successful homepage videos that you've seen.