Love this practical blog from Delib on the merits of using Youtube, who many moons ago I shared a coffee with in Covent Garden:
It’s becoming a bit of a mantra round here, but time and again we’re telling clients to use Youtube for their video content, unless they’ve got a genuine reason for not doing (such as wanting to restrict the content to a small group). Not making use of a channel that is a) free and b) has a massive existing user base just seems like utter madness.
Of course, Youtube in a way is a bit shorthand for A. N. Other free video service (we sometimes use Vimeo for projects instead for various reasons), but the point remains the same.
So, very interesting to see this flagged up by Paul Canning, that Barack Obama has received $46,893,000 of free advertising through Youtube so far. Whilst it’s not worth trying to translate that into a UK value given the current economic climate, it’s clear that there’s a massive potential for free engagement and free value add from the use of popular free sites generally by the government sector at all levels.
The software is there, you just need to know how to use it properly. (SH: Easier said than done when’s it’s new, and you’re not in complete control over it?)
I should also add that with a social networking platform such as WordFrame that because of the way Youtube RSS doesn’t quite work, you can’t autopost videos using that route:
“You can’t do anything to fix the problem. Youtube.con does not generate correct RSS feeds. There is a specification that they don’t follow strictly. But WordFrame needs correct feeds in order to autopost them. So these feeds does not go through our rss validation process (we follow strictly RSS feeds format specification) and cannot be autoposted.” Rumen Yankov, WordFrame support.
See the full chain of thought at: http://forums.wordframe.net/Forums/13961
Glad you like the post, the pingback for it seems to have got caught in our spam filter oddly. Askimet has now been taught the error of its ways…
Guess knowing how to use the software properly might be easier said than done, but the more people in the sector use it, the faster everyone will learn. Certainly the Hammersmith and Fulham council tax video on Youtube taught people the problems of astroturfing pretty quickly for one.
Thanks for the plug Stuart.
I have another one on how to actually get viewers for those videos – otherwise it’s a tad pointless, (p)reaching-to-the-converted:
http://paulcanning.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-not-to-do-video-about-recycling.html
Also posted before about where political dialogue *is actually happening on YouTube (i.e. off the radar of the ‘engagerati’)
http://paulcanning.blogspot.com/2008/04/could-british-teacher-ever-do-this.html