How to

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Twitter Video is here! And it's going to be great for libraries

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NB If you're reading this and can't find Twitter video on the app, don't panic, it's being rolled out across all accounts but not everyone has it yet!

I resolutely refuse to include things in my training just because they're fashionable, and for that reason I still don't talk about Vine in any of the sessions I do. I think Vine can be great (some of the 'Vine-magic' stuff is awesome), but I'm yet to see an absolutely essential use for Libraries or in HE, so it gets left out. [Edit: I've finally seen a good example of a Library Vine account! Check out Newcastle Lib's here.]

Part of the problem is that 6 seconds is just too short for the kinds of ideas I have of how to use what you might call 'social video', as opposed to the more permanent videos you find on Vimeo and YouTube. I feel like I've been waiting for something like Vine, but less trendy...

Happily last week Twitter launched an alternative to Vine (which it also owns, by the way) which I do think we can get some proper use out of. You can now take 30 second videos and upload them to Twitter, where they'll play within the tweet without people needing to leave the site or the app. (At the moment you can't use video already on your camera roll.) The videos can be combinations of several shorter clips like Vine, but it won't automatically loop, and it won't play without someone hitting the 'play' button.

If Vine is the short-attention-span but bang on-trend toddler of internet video, Twitter video is its more considered older sibling. Less cool, but maybe with more meaningful things to say.

Here's how it works (email subscribers, click the title of this post to be taken to the web version if the pictures aren't appearing):

Image taken from Twitter's blog - click to be taken through to the relevant post

Image taken from Twitter's blog - click to be taken through to the relevant post

Like Vine it records as long as you hold the button, and you can quickly stitch together multiple clips - as many as you can fit into 30 seconds, in fact.

Note the third screen-shot there - you can delete, and drag to re-arrange the order. So it may be worth recording the most important parts (the start and end) first so you know how much time you have left for the rest, then re-arrange the order - rather than meticulously creating something with 20 clips, only to not have enough time for the ending and having to redo the whole thing.

So how can libraries use it? Before we get onto specific themes, the most essential thing is to think mobile. The whole point of this feature is people watch short videos, where they are, within the app. Twitter offered promoted videos to paying sponsors before this was rolled out to all of us, and apparently 90% of them were watched on mobile devices. So, hit the ground running (1 second intro, max!); shoot from the chest up if you've got people in there so they can clearly be seen on a small screen; if you're speaking make sure you're close to your phone so it's not too quiet; if you use words make the font LARGE; and if possible make the video in such a way as to not need sound to make sense.

I'd love some more ideas in the comments, but here's a few video ideas to start things off:

Customer Service: answering questions with video. If you use Twitter for customer service or a channel for enquiries, you'll know that often when one person answers a question it's worth ensuring everyone can see the answer (hence the twitter dot!) as many will find it useful. There could be even more impact to answering a question with video. So for example, a basic query like 'how do I locate a DVD' gets much more interesting if the answer is a video...

Transient videos. By which I mean, something where a video is appropriate or useful or funny or tapping into some sort of meme, but which you don't neccessarily want a 'permanent record' of on your YouTube channel. It's not that Twitter videos aren't permanent of course - they are - but just that your YouTube vids form a sort of canon which needs to be left alone, so the most important videos don't drown under lesser inconsequential ones. But Twitter video would be a way of getting something out there - news about an event, say - without that feeling of permanence.

If you do need to keep them though, you have the option to embed like I did above, meaning a Twitter video can be seen by and used by those not on Twitter, via the Library website, blog, or LibGuides.

Lightning Tours. Everyone loves a virtual tour! And you need a longer video to tour an entire library, but what about a new building, or new collection? 30 seconds should be doable.

Quick-fire 'Screen Capture'. Narrate a video which tells your users how to do something useful  and then tweet it as a twitter video. So that opens up instant guides to using equipment, finding stuff, getting the most out of databases etc. Here's an example of that, explaining how to make Billboards in Photofunia. (You could even have a #30SecondsOn... series.)

Ask A Librarian. For the brave and camera-confident, get a Twitter Q&A going, and answer the best questions with a to-camera answer from someone who knows what they're talking about.

Previews. Preview a larger video (a full virtual tour, say, or an infolit guide) with a movie-style trailer on Twitter video.

That's all I can think of for now but people are bound to come up with more creative ideas, and I'd love to hear them.

There's more on Twitter Video here. How are you going to use Twitter video in your library?

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Social Media: The best times to post

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I like an infographic that actually tells us something useful. So, following the 'social media image sizing' one from a few weeks back, here's a 'when to post' infographic from QuickSprout.

I didn't used to think social media timings were important, but increasingly I think it is worth trying to hit times of peak engagement IF you're tweeting or posting something important, particularly when using social media as an organisation rather than just for yourself. If you've put effort into creating useful content, you want as many people to see it as possible.

Image courtesy of QuickSprout - click on it to view it on their site

Image courtesy of QuickSprout - click on it to view it on their site

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Top Tip: Create your PPT for the web, THEN strip it down for live presenting

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In my Presentation Skills training I spend a lot of time offering different ways of presenting information and ideas visually, so you can lose a lot of the words from your PowerPoint slides. After all, it is a presentation, not a document. It's not designed to be read - or at least it shouldn't be, else you'll leave your audience wondering if your presence as a presenter is even really neccessary...

Then later we discuss the importance of uploading your presentations to Slideshare to amplify their impact and reach a wider audience. So inevitably the most common question which gets asked after that is: "But how will this make sense to people who weren't in the room to hear me talk?"

It's a tricky question because in most cases, a presentation simply can't be fit for both purposes. Good live slides won't make sense without the presenter, and good web slides won't have been an effective communication tool in a face-to-face presentation.

There are basically three answers to this (that I give, anyhow):

  1. You make a different version that goes online
  2. You upload the accompanying notes or audio
  3. You accept that the online audience will have a different experience, and that's not the end of the world

There are times when I do all three of these, sometimes all for the same presentation (bear with me...). Let's look at each of them in turn.

Making different slides for live versus web

My main advice here is twofold: first of all make two versions of the presentation - one for the face to face presentation, and one to sit on the web afterwards - and second of all, do the web version first!

It is a lot easier to start off by putting in all the detail on the slides so that the presentation makes sense on its own without you talking over the top. It helps you shape your ideas, work out exactly what story you're telling with the presentation, and can be a useful aid to learning your talk (learning your talk is actually something I wouldn't recommend, but there isn't time to get into that here).

Once that's done, save a copy to upload to Slideshare or whatever, and then save a new version which you edit to strip out all the detail. The function of slides in a conference or training situation is to enrich and reinforce what you have to say out loud, help the audience understand and engage with your message, and last - but NOT least - to prompt you as to what you need to say. Not to duplicate it. The ideal slide (in my opinion) has perhaps one sentence on it, which crystalises the key message of that part of the presentation AND acts as a jumping off point to remind you of everything you have to say on the topic. So you take your detailed web PPT, and you strip them back to one or two sentences per slide (or go entirely word-free).

The key thing here is it's a lot easier to make detailed web slides and strip them down for live presenting, than the other way around. Making your live slides and then adding all the detail in afterwards takes ages. It really adds to your prep time and so isn't practical in most situations. Doing the detail first doesn't really add that much time on at all because it's part of the process that helps you create the narrative in the first place.

Incidentally, I don't use this option all the time - because it does take some more time. If the presentation is important however, it's worth it.

Providing further content to help explain slides

If you want to leave your slides beautifully simple but consequently ambiguous, you can provide some supplementary materials to help them make sense. For example:

  • If you've made notes you could upload them to Scribd, and then link to them from your presentation (and embed the Scribd document and the Slideshare presentation on the same web-page)
  • If your PowerPoint presentation has speaker notes (in that little box below the main slide in edit view) they will be added to Slideshare below your slides. The trouble with this is you need to upload specifically a PPT file to Slideshare, it doesn't work with PDFs - and if you're using non-standard fonts, which can be really beneficial, you need to use PDFs. So potentially useful, but not ideal
  • If you literally have a script of the whole talk, just provide that alongside the slides. If you don't use a script, and again I wouldn't recommend doing so, the only way to achieve this is to record the talk and then play it into some kind of dictation software to provide you with a transcript after the event...
  • You could add audio. Slideshare discontinued their webcast functionality (being able to add audio to PPTs once uploaded) last year, so really your best option for this is YouTube. In the past I've recorded my own talks using my iPhone in my jacket pocket, then used Camtasia to add that audio to slides - as in this example from South Africa - but that's a laborious process, takes ages, and honestly I'm rarely happy enough with any of my talks to want people to be able to hear and analyse them outside the in-the-moment conference environment... I would recommend recording your talks though, just for your own use - it's amazing how much you learn about what worked and what didn't
  • (If you do go down the YouTube route, don't forget to add the YouTube video to your slides on Slideshare too. Slideshare has so much reach, you don't want to just put stuff on YouTube.)
  • You could use Storify to collect the tweets from people in the room during your presentation and link to / embed that with your presentation - this is my preferred method as I don't use notes and don't like the audio options listed above. Even if you're not on Twitter I'd recommend at least considering this option
  • And finally, my super-advanced-mega-slideshare-hack: Slideshare displays whatever text you have on each slide, in the transcript below. (That's completely seperate from the notes field thing discussedearlier - every slideshare presentation has an accompanying transcript.) So you could add a full explanation of each slide, to each slide, but then make it invisible on the slide itself! (Either by writing in white on a white background, or covering it with an image, or using font-size 0.5.) So the transcript has all the info, but the slides do not. Good eh? [High-fives the internet]

Or, of course, just not worrying about it at all. Which brings us to the other way forward.

Just having the same version for both

Sometimes a presentation is too low stakes to worry about all this stuff. Sure it's not ideal that the slides don't make so much sense online, but what's most important is that they worked for the audience in the room.

Another way of looking at it is to view it as simply a different experience for the two audiences, rather than neccessarily a compromise or a problem. Your slides aren't as easily understandable for the online audience, but the fact they get the kernel of an idea rather than the fully-formed notion can be really interesting in itself. Just as the one-sentence prompt was your jumping off point during the talk itself, it's the online audience's jumping off point for their own ideas and further learning. That's no bad thing. Barthes would approve, anyhow.

An example of combining all three

The slides I put the most effort into ever were those I created for a keynote at the BLA Conference last year. And I kind of did all three things listed above.

First of all I did a different version for the web. Not a massively different version - but I included more detail in quite a few places, skipped to the end of some pseudo-animated parts, and changed the way I displayed certain images to comply with the copyright licences. I also removed a section which contained at its climax with a category C swearword (or is A the strongest category? I never know how that works) because although I trusted the audience in the room to understand it and not be offended, I coudn't be sure The Internet would do the same...

So what you end up with is slides which first and foremost aided my communication to 60 people in a room in Leicester (the face to face audience must ALWAYS be the priority!), but which at least made sense and provided some sort of jumping off point for over a hundred thousand people online subsequently. The only upsetting thing for me is one of the two fonts I used doesn't seem to render properly on Slideshare no matter what I do, but never mind...

I also provided a Storify of the tweets from the talk in the associated blog-post. And I didn't fill in ALL the gaps, as I really do think slides are great for providing a taster of a topic, hopefully in a way which encourages people into looking into it more themselves, and forming their own conclusions.

Other peoples' perspectives

I don't want this post to just be my views and opinions, so I canvassed Twitter. Here's what they had to say - if you have anything to add, I've love to hear from you in a comment.


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Behind the Scenes at the Texas A&M University Libraries 'Happy' Video

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Some of you may recall that before things got all serious with my post about my daughter, the previous article on this blog was a bit lighter and featured a great library tour video.

Texas A&M University Libraries pastiched Pharrel's Happy (one of the most watched pop videos in 2014) with one of their own. The original features loads of different people dancing to the song; Texas A&M featured loads of people dancing to the song AROUND the library, brilliantly, as way of providing orientation to new students.

This is an update on my previous post, as Texas A&M reached out and provided some great information about the aims behind the film - but first for those who haven't seen it, add to the 66,000+ views it has already had and take a look:

Stephanie Graves, Associate Professor and Cooridinator for Learning and Outreach, provided me with some details. First of all, here are the instructional outcomes they were aiming to achieve:

1)      We are a massive university and the size of the University Libraries can be intimidating.  We want their first introduction to the Libraries to be a positive, engaging experience that reduced library anxiety.  We intentionally choose the theme “Happy” to help accomplish this goal. 

2)      The students are inundated with information from various campus entities during orientation season.  We needed to do something that would be catchy, while relaying just enough information that was memorable.

3)      We have 6 buildings with numerous services.  This can be confusing.  It’s also impossible to give students a “tour” of the libraries on such a large campus.  We wanted the video to highlight our key services and communicate the variety of locations.

Overall, the video turned out to be very successful in reaching these. It's always hard to properly analyse success of this sort of thing, because the video went somewhat viral and that distorts all the statistics. We know it went down well in the library community but that's really on icing on the cake, and the cake is engagement from the library's actual users.

“We had a record breaking attendance at our Library Open House (also Happy themed) with over 3,600 students in a 2 hour period. We ran out of Happy T-shirts (3,500) and had to order another batch (also gone). The library Happy shirt is now a “thing” on campus and you see them every day. Our desk staff get asked where folks can buy one on campus, which is a testament to the social phenomenon of our theme event.”
— Stephanie Graves

This reinforces the belief that the details of these kinds of ventures, really perfecting a video and making sure it is aimed squarely at the target audience (and not librarians) really pays off. I'm so pleased this worked out so well for them. 

Finally, for those planning their own library video, you can see a Shooting Script from a video we made at York embedded in this blog post, and I'll leave the last word to Stephanie on their planning for their own film:

"We intentionally used student dance groups as our “actors” to help communicate that the libraries were student-centered spaces.  We used a student salsa group, our Aggie Wranglers, and a hip-hop group.  We were hopeful that the variety of dance would communicate the diversity of our campus and make all students feel welcome.  We carefully thought of all the locations and services that we wanted to highlight and in what sequential order to present them.  This pre-work was done  and then we met with the videographer to discuss our needs.   We had it planned out enough that the video only took a day and a half to shoot.    We benefited by having our very skilled student dance groups because we librarians had to do very little choreography.   We simply discussed how we wanted to highlight the space or services and the videographer had them dance as they normally would in the shoot. "

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How branding SHOULD work versus how branding does work

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When it comes to 'personal brand' there's a lot of fuss in library-land, but the subject of corporate branding is, I hope, relatively uncontroversial. Most companies, organisations, and businesses, whether they're non-profit or profit-chasing, have some kind of branding - a visual style which makes them easily identifiable. We may not want to be corporate, but we do want to be easily recognisable; that's an important part of effective communication.

But often in Libraries I see branding that isn't doing the job branding is supposed to do. What is branding, what's it FOR, really? Well one thing we can be sure it's NOT for is making everything you do look exactly the same. If everything looks the same it just becomes so much white noise.

I read an analogy on the Canva blog which I really liked: "Think of your slides as sisters, not identical twins." They're talking about creating presentations, but really this applies to all branding - it's helpful to think of the visual resources you produce (signage, leaflets, guides, social media presences, the website, merchandise, digital displays, PowerPoints and so on) as being part of the same family, rather than part of a sinister cloning programme... However I'm going to take that analogy and adapt it to be about architectural relationships rather than familial ones.

Because ultimately what branding is for is this: good branding ensures your users understand they're in part of your organisational landscape. It helps people remember you. It helps people recognise when things are connected. It helps people identify something as uniquely yours.

Compare the architectural landscape of the two pictures below:

One of the reasons I hate templates in PowerPoint presentations is they make all your slides look the same. They reduce the value and impact of each individual message, and the research shows they actually reduce learning in your audience (as does anything extraneous to that message). The reason organisational templates exist at all is to support branding - they are 'on brand' so the logo, the colours, and often the font, represent the organisation on every slide. But eventually all the slides blend into one - it becomes like looking at the row of London houses above, where they all look the same and you struggle to distinguish what is interesting about each one. So the branding is getting in the way of the message.

Contrast that with the top half of the picture, which shows some lovely Tuscan architecture. All the buildings are different. They aren't identical twins. But they're very recognisably of the same landscape; you could look at one in isolation and recognise that it relates to any of the others. It reinforces the identity of the town, without the white noise of identikit architecture. That's exactly how corporate branding SHOULD work - but often doesn't...

So when it comes to slides, my advice is always to use colour (and font if applicable), rather than your template, to reinforce the brand. Your audience stays within your organisational landscape, but each of your slides have value and unique messages of their own. You don't need the company name and logo on every single slide - no one looks up 40 slides into a 55 slide presentation and goes "Who is this from again? Oh yeah..." - or if they do, they can surely wait for the last slide for confirmation! If necessary use the template on your first and last slides (this makes it easier to ask for forgiveness if anyone pulls you up on it) but not during the content of the presentation. We actually have official permission to do this at York after I made the case to the Comms Team, it's worth seeing you can do the same...

When it comes to wider corporate branding, again what is important is a recognisable style - something which identifies materials across all media as being of your organisation - rather than making everything look the same. Developing a visual 'feel' which is flexible is far better than 'the brand' becoming a millstone around everyone's necks which simply prevents creativity!

[The image above was made using two existing Creative Commons images: Italy by cfwee, and London by A R Driver. The image in the background of the header is of the same Tuscan town - San Gimignano - and is by imagina.]