(On the topic of website video, here is a follow-up to Video Primer.)

Is your video experiment working? Check your statistics! Video websites track the number of playbacks of each item, one potential measure of success. In YouTube, go to Videos and click on the Insight button next to the video you want to track.

If you use Google Analytics on your school website, check out the “time on page” measure. Larger values suggest that more viewers actually watched the video all the way through. Your website platform may also include a statistics package.

Determining perceived quality is more difficult. Comments may provide some clue. If hundreds of people view a video and only one person complains about video quality, then you’re probably on the right track.

Amateur Video On Your Website

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth a million. Some may express apprehension about posting “home videos” on your school website or social network site. Given all the care that we put into our print publications, we may wish to hold videos to the same standard. That would be nice, but It takes many hours (and/or dollars) to create professional-quality video. In the new web, content has trumped style, and amateur video has become increasingly acceptable.

You may not want to post your first video experiments to your public-facing websites. Facebook and YouTube are chock full of amateur video, so people will expect to see work of lower production quality there. The community pages on your school website may be another good place to start. Yet don’t stop there. Collect data on these first experiments in order to make an informed decision about whether to extend the experiment to the public-facing pages on your main school website.

Follow Richard Kassissieh on Kassblog and Twitter.