The audio for this podcast can be downloaded at http://highedweb.org/2009/presentations/soc4.mp3
[Intro Music]
Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of podcasts from the 2009 HighEdWeb Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: Alright. So short history on that is that we had a receiver, football receiver, last year or the year before named Michael Crabtree who is creating quite a bit of national excitement. There was a local rapper who decided to write a song called Crank Dat Crabtree which was a spoof on the Crank Dat Soldier Boy song that was popular at that time.
They did a video for the song and our mascot Raider Red was in the video doing the dance. At this particular football game, he decided he wanted to teach the Mask Rider how to do it. It just so happened that one of our substitute Raider Reds was sitting there with a video camera decided to record it, got the video footage. We took it from them and posted it.
Now as far as from a technical standpoint, it’s terrible video. The image is shaky, the footage is grainy, there are blurry lights, the cameraman is screaming the whole time which is fairly obnoxious. But from a recruiting standpoint, it’s actually—I will submit that it’s not a bad recruitment video because it does actually meet several of the key messages that we try to promote in our recruiting efforts which is that we are a big twelve school with exciting athletics and activities. It talks about some of our traditions. It has two of our mascots highlighted. Also give students an idea of what they might expect if they were to go to school there. Go to events like games and stuff like that.
So far the video has 28,000 views. It has a 4.5-star rating out of 5 stars, and we have really not had to push it at all. We’ve just been able to let it sit there and let people watch it because the Crank Dat Soldier Boy has enough traffic, people searching it out and this tends to pop up on their searches that people find it on their own so—which brings us to the beauty of using YouTube as a marketing tool.
I’m sure you’ve all seen the statistics before. There are 70 million people daily that view videos there; 100,000 million viewers each month. Every minute, users post 10 hours of video. So basically what you’re looking at is a great forum where people are already sitting, waiting for you to give them a soft sale marketing approach. You have an opportunity to actually show people what makes your institution unique whether it’s students, faculty, facilities, programs, traditions you want to talk about. You can basically show them all these things rather than having to tell them about it.
Not too long ago, if you wanted to try and reach people, you’d have to buy an ad on a TV commercial. You’d have to buy a newspaper ad, magazine and not only was that fairly expensive but it also, again, limited you to telling people about things that were going on in your campus. You could tell them that you had great students, that you had great faculty, but you couldn’t really show them in any true way. So with YouTube, it actually gives you a fairly unlimited forum where you can talk about the things that you want to talk about as far as your campus goes. And, again, at almost no cost and with very little actual labor involved.
So we actually got involved with YouTube in 2007. We launched the page in 2008 but in 2007, our president at that time wanted us to look into using YouTube as a way to support student recruitment.
We have an initiative right now where we’re trying to get to 45,000 students by the year 2020. And they thought that this could be a way to help support that. So there were some universities that were starting to break into YouTube but it still look like it was fairly open field. There are a lot of people trying to figure out how to take advantage of it. And also YouTube wasn’t really promoting its education initiative at that time.
We had established in iTunes U page and we’re kind of looking to broaden out on that. But we ended up having to make some phone calls, finally track down someone at YouTube named Obadiah Greenberg who basically set us up with our page, and we just work with him and got that established.
The look we decided to go for since we are targeting younger users and also since YouTube is a fairly lowbrow in casual environment, we decided to break away from our more traditional look and go for something a little bit more contemporary. You can actually see the banner that we used on the page up at the top.
We actually had this hand done by a faculty member of ours that we wanted to highlight through this program. We thought it would be an interesting opportunity to highlight one of our faculty members, so we have a Commercial Arts professors named Dirk Fowler who has gotten fairly famous, has gotten a pretty strong ‘following’ for his hand-printed letter press concert posters. And so we asked him to design our background. He handed all the links and everything, and then we took the JPEGs and just linked them up and used them for our banners.
We also—you can see, example, one of the posters in here. We also went for a really lowbrow hand-created look with our advertising that we did with the initial launch in the posters or online advertising; we kind of kept it pretty lowbrow and everything. And then we went and built in to the page, things like playlist that would support different messaging topics we had like academics and research or our campus life.
So since that time, our videos has been viewed about 354,000 times as of this weekend. Channel’s been viewed about 30,200 times. We have 448 subscribers and these are all potential students, faculty, donors; people like that that we’re trying to reach.
A good example of this is actually a cheerleading video that was taken at the 2008 National Cheerleading Competition. We posted this thing and immediately became our most popular video. It’s been viewed more than 70,000 times. And initially we are sitting there making jokes about all the guys that must be logging in to watch this cheerleading video. But as time went on and we started looking at the inside’s tracking information that YouTube revived, it turns out that 72% of the people watching were female, 40% of those were between the ages of 13 and 17, which you’re going to see some of those were potential cheerleaders and most of them were potential students.
So there’s been a lot of positive commentary. It has 51 ratings, nearly 5-star rating also. It also worked in with what we were trying to do with the coach who had just come in, the cheerleading coach. This was his first time to take a team to a national competition. It was his first year as a coach. Took the team, they got fifth place in this competition. Last year they competed again, jumped up third place, and so they kind of highlighted him, what he was doing. Also we included our mascot in the routines; our Raider Red mascot as a way to kind of get it more exposure. It tends to kind of say takes second place to the other mascot, the Mask Rider, that we have. And so this was a way to kind of highlight the Raider Red program also.
The lesson to take out of this would be to start looking for better opportunities, to kind of rethink the way that you think about presenting information. Basically, it can be a matter of just having a video camera handy and kind of quick-thinking about videos having to be sophisticated, highly-polished videos. I think this is a great piece. And this is fairly well put together but I think it’s a great piece to do highlighting to their students who are called the compliment guys. And I will have to log in again.
[Video]
Bret Wescott: I’m Bret Wescott.
Speaker 2: Hey, I dig that shirt man.
Speaker 3: Hey, I like that brown hoodie.
Bret Wescott: Cameron Brown. You look good in jeans. And when people come up after that bad day and say thanks for a good compliment that makes my day.
Speaker 4: These guys brighten my day every Wednesday.
Speaker 1: I like your brown coat and you have a very nice pink backpack. You might as well have a terrific day.
Speaker 4: They’re so much fun.
Speaker 2: You got a nice scarf.
Bret Wescott: Hey thanks. Have a nice day.
Speaker 1: These are nice sweater.
Bret Wescott: The first day I wasn’t sure if you’re going to take it but there’s’s a pretty good response.
Speaker 3: That’s a cool sweatshirt—
Speaker 1: Sorry guys. It’s an example of highlighting your students, showing them kind of in a good perspective. Through the years since we’ve started doing this, we’ve shot video of things like students injuring students in a competition, launching toilet paper rolls on campus using catapults that they created themselves as part of the competition; kind of thought this would showcase engineering students, the engineering college, and also give potential students a kind of insight into the fact that higher education isn’t always sitting on a lecture hall.
On the other side of the engineering spectrum, one of our key programs in engineering is our Wind Science and Engineering Research Institute. They do quite a bit of work to mitigate hurricane and tornado damage in part by using what they called a wind cannon which is a large cannon that they load 2x4s in and launch it 100 miles an hour at storm doors and brick walls and whatever, other materials. People submit it to them for testing.
So it’s pretty compelling video. It’s one of those things that weather channels, CNN will come by every once in a while to shoot some footage of. And so we thought that that would be one of those things that we could kind of tape, put out there, have its viral nature where people would pass it along. It’s just footage of 2x4s exploding against brick walls or flying through the brick walls and exploding. So not any narration or anything like that but it is one of those things that people had passed along.
Another one is, a while back we had some mariachis playing on campus at our student union. It’s part of a Hispanic Student Association events. I just went over there and shot some footage of it thinking about the fact they would talk about diversity, also kind of show off part of our campus and, again, give students a taste of what campus life could be like walking out of student union and encountering mariachis’ kind of music.
Once you’ve shot the videos, it comes time to start to try and find the ways to give push. We established YouTube as part of our overall TTU, TT You social media umbrella, which is kind of a launch page that people can go in to our various different social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace; things like that.
What we decided early on was that even though Facebook and MySpace allow you to post video to their sites, that we would go ahead and mostly just post it to YouTube, put the links out on those other sites as a way to kind of drive traffic and cross-pollinates. We also occasionally send it or to Twitter if there’s something that’s coming out that seems kind of timely. Football season’s starting. We’ll tape videos of things like tailgating and put those out there just to let people see them.
I will offer a word of caution though. I would imagine that anybody about to launch YouTube will be tempted to host their video contest as a part of way to promote the site. I would advice probably not doing it and if you do, move forward with caution. We actually tried that multiple times with multiple formats, and really just never got one to get off the ground.
We’ve had contests for other social media sites that went great, had a lot of response. But even getting our coaches involved, getting various different players on campus involved, we just never really could get video responses. And when we did, it wasn’t necessarily one of those things where they quite fit with what we’re looking for.
So as you move forward, be sure to clearly define what you’re looking for in the contest; whether you want just great buzz for your site, whether you’re looking for internet attraction, if you’re looking for interaction, what the end goal is going to be. Also keep in mind that prices don’t necessarily bring entries. Sometimes it’s better to just make sure that you find that great niche where people might get excited about this. You might get some fun buzz and push you that way.
There’s a blog by Bill Ackman. I would recommend Googling it. Actually it has a pretty good insights in that area. A better idea is look for partnerships with schools. We have been working with our College of Mass Communications and also our Performing Arts students to create video content.
We had typically worked with professors in those areas. They will assign these video concepts to students to implement as past projects and YouTube also allows you to find existing videos and incorporate those into your playlist. And that’s a great way to kind of showcase what your fans are doing, who are probably are already up there posting stuff online. You can take those videos, post them into your playlist and, again, kind of broaden out your content at the same time that you’re promoting work that other people are doing.
An example of some of that would be, again, what was happening with our Mask Rider and Raider Red programs where Raider Red typically is in involved in the national competition every year. Part of that involves a video component. So they were out shooting hundreds of hours of video every year and giving them to Scott, our video producer, to take and turn into an actual video.
We decided to kind of take in mind that and pulled out about 10, 15 videos worth of raw footage that we could just take and post without really having to do a lot of editing to them. And each one of those have gotten about 5,000 to 10,000 views. It’s just things like Raider Red crowd surfing or interacting with other mascots, and stuff like that. And again, it’s just one of those things that promotes some of the messages that we’re trying to get out, kind of shows off our campus, shows off our students, and we really had to do almost no work to actually get the content.
Another thing we’re looking at doing is hooking up our Mask Rider who rides a horse into our stadium before football games, get a lipstick cam, set them up so that when they’re riding in, we can get a footage on them that we can post online also.
Some of the advantages of working with students are that they give you a fresh perspective. They also give you a lot more eyes on the world. They’re seeing things that you’re not necessarily seeing. And again, they have a lot of ideas that you’re not necessarily going to have.
We—I don’t know if I dare play this video or not. Okay. A little background on this first.
[Video]
We had a student who is a MassCom student do a parody of a Tom Cruise video that leaked out in the internet a couple of years ago where he’s talking about scientology. And this is about the same time period that he was doing the jumping on the couches and that’s sort of his stuff.
So he did this interview. It leaked out. It was kind of one of those things that got a huge amount of web traffic. This kid was in a MassCom class just decided to, as a project, put this together. And I think it’s a really clever take on talking about just Texas Tech in general kind of in a little bit more timely way.
Speaker 5: I think it’s a privilege to call yourself a teaching student because you know that when you come up on Iraq, you are the only person who can help them, okay? No. No. No.
Speaker 6: I heard he’s come around.
Speaker 5: Listen here, shut up. And then what you have to say to them—okay, okay—is do what I tell you. Just do what I tell you, and then you’re good, okay? You’re good. As a Tech Student, you’ve got TTU, EDU, E-Raider, where am I? Why are there no clocks in here?
Raider link, Texas; I don’t mince words with that, okay? It’s just right there, you know. When you’re out there in the world and you meet other people, you can know whether or not they’re a TTU student, okay, by looking in their eyes, okay? Just look them in their eyes like this, like I’m doing with you right now. I can’t fly. I can’t fly! I can fly. I can fly. Did you feel that? Yeah, I could tell. I really could. So yeah, it’s good start.
Speaker 1: Right. So, yeah, that was just a video that one of the MassCom professors just called me up one day and was like, “I’ve got a video you all might be interested in.” He sent it over to me and, yeah, it just—very pleased. So again, that’s just an example of going out, working with students, getting them to do some of the live work for you. And a lot of times that will produce some nice results.
So if you are looking in to doing YouTube, it has actually gotten quite a bit easier now. Just recently, YouTube officially launched its EDU page. You can reach it by going to youtube.com/edu and that’s open to all two and four-year colleges and universities that apply for it. And you can actually find a—okay, okay. So nonprofit ones, okay. And actually there’s just an application link on the page that you can fill out and send off to get some information.
One of the advantages to going this route is that you can create a branded channel—what they call a branded channel—which provides you some additional branding opportunities that you don’t know where to get as a user, just a typical user when you set up an account. You get a 960x150 link banner that goes on your main page. You also get link banners on your watch pages which are what they call the pages where the videos actually live. You have enter videos that play automatically when you go to the page, and then you can also upload larger and longer videos.
So one of the reasons to be out there would be to take advantage of the fact that your peers are already out there producing videos putting them out there. The students alumni faculty are also out there posting video which means that they are at the moment shaping your image for you. You can actually get out ahead of that and shape your image by getting on there,
One example that we ran into was a couple of years ago, we had a student at one of the football games. We have a student’s peer group called the Saddle Tramps and part of their tradition is to have this huge bell that will stand behind their ring. It’s called Banging Bertha. And there was a video shot at them at one of the football games. The angle was taken out and posted from—it makes it look like that they’re in the middle of an obscene activity, and the video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. It’s one of those things that pretty often you see it reposted and re-linked and stuff.
And so, you know, while we can’t counter that completely, by getting out there and posting the messages we want, we can kind of take the conversation away from that to some extent. And also another word of caution as you move forward would be to make sure that you do have resources devoted to maintain the page. We see it quite a bit where people go out, create pages, and just let them sit there.
As you all know, it’s not difficult creating the videos but it can be time intensive. And so we actually decided to go out and hire interns, use them pretty extensively to handle the day to day social media aspect of what we’re doing. Also we have learned that the commentary area for YouTube can be fairly crude. A little bit more so than all the other social media sites we’ve noticed.
So it’s one thing to keep in mind as you’re moving forward is whether or not to allow comments on the video pages. You can actually go in and decide which videos you want to allow comments on and to keep track on what’s being commented. What we typically do is we will—if we did have to take the content down for any reasons like offensive language or something like that, we’ll go ahead and email the people. Let them know or contact the people and let them know that that’s why we took it down, and bide the repost, that way it doesn’t look like we’re stifling commentary. It’s just that we do need to keep it on the less offensive side. And now I’m going to turn over to Scott who’ll talk to the rest of it.
Scott: I will just go over real quickly about how to post on YouTube. Probably most or everyone here knows about it. But it’s very easy to do. If you have a camera, you’ve done probably 98% of what you need to do to post something on YouTube. And like some of these examples that we showed, they obviously weren’t very polished, but some of the research that we’ve been told says that a lot of students, when they see something very polished and a clear recruiting type thing, they recognize that right away and kind of discount it. And if something doesn’t look like it came from a marketing agency or something, they’re more apt to take the message a little more seriously than they would have otherwise.
YouTube accepts videos from most digital cameras and camcorders. Most of time, all you have to do is you have the USB core that comes with your camera, and you just plug it in to your computer; and I’ll show you in a minute how you log in and do all that stuff. But otherwise, most of time YouTube will accept the format from the camera.
In fact, I just got an iPhone last week and I’m up with the rest of the crowd that seems to be here. You can post directly from your phone. You don’t have to go to a computer anymore. They have some simple editing software on there so it’s very easy now to get all these stuff done.
If you have a video camera that has a tape, you probably will have to go through some top of editing software. Just turn it into a format, digital format, that will be recognized by YouTube. And a lot of those all-ready cam if you have PC, movie maker is already on there. And then the two other versions like with Apple, you will have like iMovie and Final Cut Pro.
We typically use Final Cut Pro in our office when we’re working on big projects just because it allows a little bit more editing opportunities and more bells and whistles with Final Cut Pro. And a lot of people will always ask me like what would you suggest in terms of software for editing? There’s not a good answer. If you’re a PC person, you’re not going to like working with Final Cut and vice versa. There’s the Avid that’s probably more your style or something like that. But it really will just come down to personal preference in the end.
The YouTube page itself when you go to upload, it actually has some suggestions for how to get the best quality picture from your upload. And they recommend the MPEG 4 that you convert with the DIVX or the XVID and with this 640x480. It sound very technical but if you’re using some—like a final cut software or added software, you can export your videos out and set this parameters before you export it out. So you can hopefully get the best quality from YouTube. They recommend that you keep 16x9 or 4x3 in the frames that 30 frames per second. And a bit right, they say that you can go as high as you can but don’t go above—if you go above 1200, it’s actually overkill.
Regardless of what you do and if you follow their instructions, YouTube will recompress your video and it’s kind of just a fact of life. And there’s another thing that’s interesting about what they do is kind of a secret—it reminds me of people that try to optimize their web pages so you’ll come up first in Google. Like if you want your university to come up first, there are certain things you can do to help it but no one knows the exact formula for what you can do to get the best optimization. It’s kind of the same way with YouTube. You don’t know exactly what to do. You just follow their guidelines and hope for the best.
But typically, we try to upload as big of a file as we can and then they can take care of it because they will recompress it into like a Flash format to show back. But it is important to know that you don’t give them garbage to begin with, or poor quality to begin with, because they certainly will not make it better. It will always be worst.
Now, to what the actual screen will look like if you go to youtube.com. Over in the upper right-hand side, if you are not a user, you have to sign in as a user first. And once you—you have to create and account. And to do that, it’ll just bring up a dialog box where you pick your user name. You can rename anonymous if you want to, but probably for most of our purposes, you guys probably want to have some name that reflects your institution in some form or fashion.
But other than that, there’s a few other question that it’ll ask you about it. But once you do that, you’re ready to go, and it’ll probably takes under a minute or maybe a little bit longer. But the uploading process, you just click that upload button that’s in the top right-hand corner of the screen, and this will give you some—also on that page, we’ll have some links for some uploading tips that I showed you earlier.
But once you click the upload button, there comes up another dialog box where you navigate to the point on your computer where your file was already saved, and you just click submit, and then the upload process starts. And there’s a blue bar at the top that measures your progress, and typically it only takes usually a couple of minutes. Is that what you’re—
It’s fairly fast. While it’s uploading, you can put in the title of your video and some description about it. And that also helps optimize it for searches. And then once the whole thing has been uploaded, then the magical YouTube servers come in and do their parts and convert it. And sometimes they’re not available to view immediately, but usually within 10 or 15 minutes, it’s available to view, and then it’s complete. Your video is up there on YouTube. So it’s really an easy process.
And what’s more important and what I like about YouTube is that once the video has posted, it gives you this URL link that you can then use on your status updates on Facebook or whatever and promote in a variety of different ways, and also gives you the imbed code that’s right up there too. And webmasters know how to manipulate that and use it into webpages where the video player will automatically come in on their webpages.
And what’s actually great about all this is that once you submit your video to YouTube, it’s stored on their servers. So you’re not taking up space on your university server. It’s their problem now and they back it up, and you’re kind of done with it at that point. So it’s really a cool tool. I think the future of online video will do nothing but expand. So hopefully, your institution is with the program. If not, I think you have some pretty powerful arguments that you can show, that video is here to stay and it’s really a popular medium.
And we have just a couple of minutes for questions if anybody has any right now? Yeah. And we actually did work with Fox Sports on that one. We got permission to run that one. As far as the other, we do check with ASCAP and look for—because you’re right—that can be an issue and it is something to watch out for as…
Speaker 1: We do have an ASCAP license and I don’t know how far that would take us in a court battle. But, I don’t know, we haven’t been tested on that. And typically if you do put up something that YouTube—is a copyright infringement, they’ll just take it down. And I don’t know how many cases have gone past that.
Scott: But, yeah, as far as Fox Sports, we did specifically get the video from them and post it. So it wasn’t an issue on that one. Yeah and that is a good question. It is one of those things that, I think, in my opinion creates a sense of community. They’ve done the same thing and it is promoting the competition to some extent. But at the same time, I think it sets a good tone in that it’s kind of a friendly rivalry. You will put other people out there and sometimes they’ll have videos that—it also actually helps us in a way because every time that they post a video, as subscribers we see it so we can see what they’re posting and kind of gives us an idea of what they’re doing.
Yeah, we have. It takes longer to upload. But with this branded channel, we have a lot of extra room to do it as far as your upload limits. And from what I found, it’s all automatic. It automatically will have the HD button that viewers can put on if they want to see it and it’s very easy to do. You’d still just go to that same process. And as long as you had outputted it from your editing program in the HD format, it recognized it at YouTube. I don’t know that.
No, it won’t stream load over. You do actually have to upload them separately. But as far as the rest of it goes, I mean it’s a fairly simple process and it actually does most of the work for you. I mean, we have created most of the content ourselves. Again, we have taken from other people but as far as reposting it, the way we typically do it is just to take it and physically repost it in other locations; link it up and—
Speaker 1: I tend to use kind of a different story because I guess with the Apple side, we typically have to convert all those to, like, a QuickTime format or something. Apple’s work so a lot of times if it comes from like a Window’s file or something like that, sometimes you have to reconvert it for iTunes to post it correctly or for the other people to see it. So sometimes there is more corrections but...
Scott: Yes. Actually, we—I’ve been doing most of the posting myself. We do have some interns. You can sign in under the same accounts. And at this point, really, we have started turning it over more to our interns because, again, it is somewhat of a drain as far as doing other work to just take and post the videos; but for quite a while is a person that was posting everything. So again, fairly simple process. Just basically upload the video then it does—one of the beauties of it is it does give you the information boxes off the side where you can talk about as much as you want to about whatever issues is that you’re promoting there.
So once you get the video posted, it does allow you to pick which—an option of three video frames that you want to use as the icon that will go with the video. And then also playing around with the way that you name the videos and describe the videos helps as far as the searching goes.
No, actually the videos that YouTube posts, they turn it to a flash formats and I didn’t find it in the hints for uploading videos to YouTube, but I recently uploaded a flash video on it and it accepted it. Yes. Anything else? Thank you.