How I Used Technical Storytelling To Generate One Million YouTube Views

Stepping into the lightboard studio in IBM Raleigh can be a daunting experience. Standing behind a giant pane of glass you look out into blackness. The room lights are off, except for the LEDs embedded into the lightboard itself. In front of you are a set of illuminous marker pens and the only thing visible to you is the unblinking eye of the camera lens. You have six minutes to talk about the topic of time series analysis — go!

Lecturing technical topics on YouTube brings about a unique set of problems. While the “fancy see-through blackboard” provides some visual interest, the presenter faces a continual pressing challenge. That your viewer can, and most likely will, up and leave at any second. YouTube measures this with a metric called “retention” and it unapologetically displays second-by-second where you viewers stopped watching. It’s a humbling experience, and a viewer that clicks away early one time is much less likely to return to watch your other videos.

It’s through this world of metrics that I’ve had to learn what keeps viewers sticking around. Why they should proceed to a fifth, sixth, or seventh minute into a video about a machine learning algorithm or a database comparison? And while I still don’t get it right every time, my technical lightboard videos on the IBM Technology channel have generated well over one million views with channel-leading retention numbers.

So what’s the secret? Simple. Technical storytelling.

Let me give you an example. That time series analysis video I challenged you with — how do you open that video? A definition seems like a logical place to start.

“Time series analysis is a statistical method used to analyze data that is collected over time to identify patterns, trends, and other relationships.”

Sorry you’ve just lost 45% of your audience and we’re only 10 seconds in. As uncomfortable as it may be, your viewers are judging everything about you and your video right now. The set, the presenter, the video quality, your opening sentence. Should they continue with this video or pick one of the other 20 time series analysis videos their YouTube search presented them with? If you want the viewer to stick around, we need to immediately give them the impression that it’ll be worth their while. So I opened my time series analysis video with this instead:

“My smart watch tracks how much sleep I get each night. If I’m feeling curious, I can look on my phone and see my nightly slumber plotted on a graph. This is an example of a time series — data of the same entity collected at regular intervals. And where we have time series, we can perform time series analysis where we analyze the time-stamped data to extract meaningful insights and predictions about the future. Like how much sleep I’ll get tomorrow.”

This is technical storytelling. Relatable, engaging, and entertaining. It’s about finding the human story behind the data and explaining it in a way that is easy to understand. And this is just the first principle of technical storytelling.

The second principle is to use analogies and metaphors. This is a powerful way to help viewers understand complex technical concepts. For example, in my video about web application architecture, I used the analogy of a load balancer being like a bean dip with seven layers. It’s a silly analogy, but it helps to explain the different layers of a load balancer in a way that’s easy to understand.

A little sprinkling of humor — principle three — always helps. Technical topics can be dry and boring, but injecting something fun into your video can make it more entertaining and engaging. In my video about Apache and Nginx, I made a joke about how rude it is for the reverse proxy server to take all the credit for the work that the web servers are doing. I named a fictional database management system in honor of my late cat, which — to my delight — I still see referenced in the YouTube comments section today.

The fourth principle is to use visuals. Technical concepts can be difficult to explain with words alone, so using visuals like diagrams, graphs, and sketches can help to make your video more engaging and easier to understand. This is where the lightboard format really stands out — sketching topics as they are discussed. But this principle can be applied to any video format.

And the fifth and perhaps overriding principle is to keep it simple. Don’t overload your viewers with too much technical jargon and complex concepts. Keep your language simple and easy to understand and focus on explaining the key ideas in a way that the viewer can relate to. For many viewers the high-level overview is what they came for. If, after watching the video they want more, you can direct your audience to the more in-depth content you’ve published in other videos.

So, next time you’re faced with the challenge of explaining a complex technical topic, remember to incorporate these five principles of technical storytelling: humanize the topic, use relatable examples, focus on the “why,” use visuals to enhance understanding, and make it memorable. By doing so, you’ll be able to connect with your audience, make your message more engaging, and hopefully keep folks around long enough to hear the message you’re giving.

Martin Keen is an IBM Master Inventor based in Raleigh, NC. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.