IN SEPTEMBER 2009, A GROUP of communications students at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) worked on a fun project as part of orientation week. All 172 of them played a role in a lip-synch video shot in just one take (known as a “lipdub”), which was produced by seniors Luc-Olivier Cloutier and Marie-Ève Hébert. In the four-minute video, students lip-synch to the Black Eyed Peas’ tune “I Gotta Feeling” while touring campus facilities. A couple of weeks after it was shot in Montreal and then uploaded to YouTube, the video was picked up by CNN and some excerpts were played on the air. At that point, it turned viral and reached a million views in about a week, less than a month after it was first uploaded.
This unscripted success story is a dream come true for the French-speaking institution, highlighting the quality and creativity of its students to the Montreal community, but also to the world. It also demonstrates how powerful YouTube videos can be when it comes to promoting your institution to web users, traditional media or even the general public.
Online video has become a great way to reach wide audiences at a minimal cost—or even at no cost. The reason is very simple: lots of people watch videos on YouTube.
According to a survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in April 2009, 62 percent of adult internet users have watched videos online, compared to 33 percent in December 2006. The vote of confidence is even stronger with internet users aged 18 to 29, with 89 percent of them saying they watch content on video-sharing sites, with 36 percent doing so on a typical day. In August 2009, comScore Video Metrix, which measures online video activity, recorded the largest U.S. audience ever for online videos, with 161 million internet users and a total of 25 billion views during that month. Close to 40 percent of these views were logged on YouTube by more than 120 million people in the United States.
YouTube is a world based on searching, sharing, and a bit of serendipity.
While there is no recipe for creating and producing a YouTube success story similar to the lipdub video from the UQAM students, you can do a few things to increase the chances of having your institution’s YouTube videos be found, liked, and shared as widely as possible.
1. Get listed on YouTube EDU.
If your YouTube channel isn’t listed yet on the portal dedicated to channels from colleges and universities around the world, just fill out the online application form and get this item off your to-do list right away. While the rules to become an educational partner at YouTube were not clearly spelled out before the launch of YouTube EDU in March 2009, they are now very simple and easy: The program is open to qualifying two- and four-year degree-granting public and private colleges and universities.
Your university channel needs to be set up first and should include educational, not just promotional, videos before you apply to YouTube EDU. Once your channel is added, it will stand a better chance of being found within the directory, and the institution’s productions will have a shot at being featured on the EDU homepage as a most viewed video for the current month—or even on YouTube’s all-time honors’ roll—and get even more traffic as a direct result.
2. Make videos that are easy to share.
Leave “embedding” turned on for your videos so external sites may embed them. YouTube blockbusters get watched within the website itself, but they don’t get all their eyeballs from there. Most of the time, a successful video is going to start (or continue) its road to success on blogs that invite their readers to watch the video right there.
In a recent HigherEd Experts webinar about the topic, Elizabeth Giorgi, web communications manager for the University of Minnesota News Service, explained that she pitched “The Science of Watchmen” to blogs as soon as it was posted on YouTube. The six-minute video—featuring Jim Kakalios, consultant for Watchmen and professor at the University of Minnesota, explaining the science used in the movie—got 1.5 million views between February and April 2009.
3. Choose keyword-rich titles, descriptions, and tags for the videos.
