Webinar: YouTube

Date: May 3, 2011
Speaker:
Will Houghteling (YouTube) – to discuss how HHS can use YouTube effectively, and how to develop interesting content for viewers.
http://www.slideshare.net/HHSNewMedia/webinar-youtube
Download Slides (PDF)
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If you have questions regarding this webinar or the HHS Center for New Media Webinar series, email newmedia@hhs.gov.
Transcript

My name is  Will Houghteling and I  am  --- perfect. I am Will Houghteling and  I am on the  YouTube  politics team. A large portion  of my job is working with government  both agencies and government officials,  to try to make sure and  help people upload innovative and  interesting content on YouTube and  help build audiences  for it. Today I want to talk briefly  through why everyone should be using  YouTube, although I assume if you  already in this meeting you are  probably inclined use it. I will  talk Ridgeley about what is YouTube  for government, and  then that main thing will be how  to engage citizens  using YouTube. Have this content,  and the other half is technical  insider tips  on how best to use a YouTube to  engage the citizens. The first thing  is that why  use YouTube? I believe this presentation  behind with Julia so she can e-mail  it around. I have to start with  some data. The real point  is that YouTube is an online video  platform. The  average American spends 270 minutes  per day, actually that's outdated  comments 15 minutes  per day on YouTube. We want to make  sure that all of  our users are not 12-year-old girls  watching Justin Bieber videos. That  is a lot of  our users -- I'm getting a tax on our the  slides on presenter  mode now? 

 Hold on. Okay, perfect. Now I think it will  be  set.  Cool. So, as I said, why use YouTube  for government? Not everybody is  a  12-year-old girl watching Justin Bieber videos.  45% of our audience is over the  age of 35, so it is an older, more  sophisticated audience. The second  think about why using YouTube is  about content. Twitter and Facebook  are great  social media channels of but I really view them  as distribution channels and not  particularly content rich channels.  What is the last time you spent  more than 50  seconds reading of Facebook posts?  If you get someone to the video  on YouTube that you can really engage  them in  ways other meatiest can't. You should  be using all  three together . The kind of thing is of our &#à;  la the. When is the last time that  a tweet  went viral, but YouTube goes viral  all the time. Someone is always  sending you a link, right? If you  really want to get in those word  of mouth networks, YouTube is  the  great platform. What is YouTube  for government? We have a range of that all government  partners, the federal government  agencies as well as officials get  a set of features that are normally  available  to advertising , the first of which is the channel  branding. You can see at the top  of  this page that this is at the White  House YouTube channel and they have  custom branding with a button that links to Whitehouse.gov.  It is about making sure that your  website in your user channel connect  together.  

The second that is longer upload  to. The  YouTube government users can upload  files up to 20 GB so you could upload  an  hour-long speech. The White House  does  it frequently , upload very long speeches. The  final is custom icons. Most videos  uploaded a new job -- YouTube  you have a choice of the  three icons. YouTube for government  can select their  own icons.  Choosing, engaging is very important. Make sure you  are incorporating that.  

Now I want to talk a little bit  about how to use in YouTube. On  the content point  of view. On our team that we think  about these  four maxims as the key to curating  successful YouTube content, content  that is likely  to get viewed. The first is  the relevancy. I didn't pick the  exact best screenshot here, not  the most flattering look I could've  found, but the key for uploading  this video and why this video did  so well I got over 25,000 views  is that it was  very relevant. I think like you 50% of the YouTube  reviews comes in the first seven  days because a YouTube  really is a search engine. The second-largest  search engine after Google. People are coming  to YouTube to find the content.  You want to have something  to offer. That's why we say upload  as often as you can because people  are always  searching for. I think you guys  did a very good job with this video  and getting it  uploaded quickly so if people search  they see it.  

The second thing is to  be informative. We think of this in the same way  in that people come to YouTube for  how-to advice. This is a screenshot  from  a video that the Department of Education  put out about filling out the  FAFSA form. The Department of Education  has a 500 videos on  their channel . This is their second most viewed  a video and it is probably the most  dry and boring of all of them. It  is just that people really want  to know this information. If there  are forms that you need to fill  out for various a medical, medical  processes or whatever, put up a video about  how to fill out the form and literally  walk someone through a 10 minute  guide to filling out the form. People  search how to use and you want to  be the one providing the information  rather than somebody else  providing misinformation. 

The next maxim we say is to be  genuine and engaging. This is  Kathleen Sibelius speaking about the it gets better  project. I'm sure many of you know  about it but it was a series of  videos to provide emotional  support for positive, young, gay,  lesbian people who are maybe a not  comfortable  coming out but need some kind of  support. It's an anti-belly -- bullying  kind  of measure. President. Obama did  one. The first company that had  their please do one was Apple .  Google  did one of the first ever TV ad  last night about the it gets  better project. But, Kathleen Sibelius  did a video in the series that has  admittedly nothing to do  with HHS, yet it did very well at  over 10,000 views. I think the key  here is  that YouTube is it like network  TV and that it is a more direct  one-on-one conversation with your  fans.  I think -- YouTube is a lot about  personality, about getting  to know people. One of the examples  we have here that I often talk  about is Nancy Pelosi did  a video for cats, and her cat prance  around her office. It  had like  100,000 views. Lots of fans  were watching. 

The final one is a build a community.  I am sure you guys are all familiar  with H1 in one rap by Dr. Clark.  I thought this  was brilliant. Admittedly, I didn't  know about it until about two  days ago , but I looked into it and I thought  it was very smart. The reason it  is  so  smart is, Exhibit uses video got  60,000 views, but then you have  300  submissions and each one would get 300,000 views.  If you leverage the YouTube community  you can get your message  out there. I often say that the brilliance  in YouTube is the content of the  community and not the product itself.  YouTube is a platform for everyone  to share their voice. As much as  you can get users submitting  videos on a topic the more you amplify  your message. I will check in briefly  on our friends in  the meeting . Perfect.  

This is a great example of using  YouTube to build  a community. And then I want to talk a little  bit about the  tech advice. People are always asking  when I give  these presentations what to do to  get more views and how to make my  videos go viral. These are the four  tools I will  talk about that are insider tricks  that we should be  aware of SEO. The first is about  knowing the ins and outs about and  the space. SCO is search engine  optimization and it is very popular  for Google. People thinks about  all kinds of ways to get there at  the site --  Google is -- YouTube is the second-largest  search engine. The basically Google's  search engine works  is that one website links to another  website and that's how  we know how they are all  connected to. The first video is  linked to other videos. Pieces like  the headlines, the title of  the video,  the tags that you put with the video  and  the descriptions really have a lot to do with where  your videos are shown in a YouTube  search. When you write a title,  write it how YouTube  would search. This would attract  people's attention temperature high  in  the search.  

The second big thing is  a promotion, about leveraging social  media and blogs. My older brother  creates eight be videos  of four living. Use my  YouTube partner. And so I asked him, how do you  make your videos  go viral? His videos have millions  of views. He said that if you have  five bloggers to rely on, and anytime  you have a new video out send a  personal note  the bloggers -- to  the bloggers and have them look  at it. If you look at YouTube trends,  it's all about finding out what  the viral videos are. We've done  a  lot of data analysis about what  makes videos go viral and almost  always they are catalyzed and embedded  on  a popular blog or website. And they get a  lot of traffic over two days, the  readers of  those blogs. People start sending the link actively  or start searching for it directly  on YouTube. It's not enough to put  a video on YouTube, you have to  really market them  to blogs. The second is twitter and Facebook.  YouTube has a tool called activity  sharing where you can automatically  post to Facebook or tweaked out  any videos -- tweet out  any videos. Every time you favorite  a video it will  tweet out. I generally say be  very cautious, because Facebook  and twitter are  there own languages.  Be conscientious when you create  a  new video to try to  get people asking questions about  it and comment on it.  

The final thing  is subscribers. Everyone I want  to know how many Facebook fans are  how many twitter followers  you have. For some reason a YouTube subscribers  are not as popular but it is still  very powerful. Every time you upload  a video you will  so scribe -- subscribe to the feed.  You wonder why popular YouTube stars  like Fred and [ Indiscernible name  ], every single video they have  get 2  million views. It's because they  have 3  million subscribers. Is people log  in every day and they sign onto  YouTube, and they see the  video automatically. And so, they  are getting 500,000 views within  the first  two hours. So, I don't think HHS  will get to 3 million subscribers  about it is important to think about  creating that  basic subscribers. To get the subscribers  you can use annotation  on videos, so you can add in an  annotation that says to remember  to subscribe. At the end of the  video you can have a callout of  whoever is being interviewed on  the video saying, haste, subscribe  for more updates  or videos on whatever is the big  issue of the day. Once you have  subscribers, there is a feature  called Ola 10 that will allow  you -- called  the bulletin that will  allow you to solicit  videos,  and ask HHS bands to  submit videos --  HHS fans to submit videos.  

The last thing is  Google moderator which is a free  tool which can be integrated incredibly  easy on YouTube. It is  used primarily  for interviews. I'm not sure if  any of you saw the first State of  the Union interviewwith President.  Obama . It was actually done all  through  Google moderator. People all around the world submitted  questions. We had 140,000 question  submitted. This site is from a last  year's interview. This year we had  hundred  40,000 questions from people all around the world.  Users vote on questions and the  top voted questions we ask in a  live interview. This tool can be  posted right on the YouTube  channel and there can be a video  callout above and it can say go  below to ask  a question. We have done this now with  Obama,  David Cameron, [ Indiscernible name ], we have  one upcoming with John the [ Indiscernible  last name ]. We are trying to  do these interviews with as many  world leaders as possible. I think  that we also want evil to use  this tool. If you do  the PSA project, again you can have  a users  submit videos via Google moderator  and other users of vote on  the video. It's a  democratic way.  

There are a couple of other examples,  we did the Prime  Minister Canada and we had a CNN/YouTube  debate on  climate change. 

Another feature  is annotation. This video is a very  alarming screenshot I  have here,  at YouTube.com/ -- it's  a British Lisa system. It's a PSA  about not bringing knives to parties.  They actually have annotations in  the middle of  the video where it's a guy getting ready  to go to a party. You choose take  the knife, or don't take the knife  and then it leads you to another  video. It's  a YouTube adventure PSA. It's very  very popular and got 100,000 views.  If you take a knife to the party  and you get in trouble or  get arrested or whatever. If you  don't take the knife, it's a normal  party. It's a fun way to interact  with the audience. I always thought  this would be an awesome tool  to use.  

The final bit is a YouTube insight.  YouTube  insight is Google analytics but for YouTube  videos. This is available for every  account. On  YouTube insight you can look at  your total videos over time and  you can look  at demographics. You can look at  the democratics of a logged  in users, which is about 20% of  total users. You can see who is  watching our videos. I think the  most interesting parts to look  at is where your videos are  being viewed. I told you earlier  about the importance of getting  the bloggers to feature  your videos. You can look at some  of your popular videos  and see where were they embedded  early on,  and maybe bloggers that have already  looked at your content. From being  a  blogger myself, it is always refreshing and makes  my life very easy when people reach  out to me with  quality content. RT moderate -- manages about called  Susan to where we highlight interesting  news and government news  on YouTube. There's 100,000  video views). You need to find  those bloggers that have been successful  in the past and reach out  to them. It is a really good way  to use  YouTube insight.  

It is automatically enabled for  every video you have. If  you go into my account,  there is an insight to have at  the top. It's for all  new videos. Right now this is how  it looks. We are testing a little  more advanced analytics so you can  look at at it a little more  granular overtime. The two systems work together.  We are testing that with limited  partners right now but in the next  few months it will  roll out. This tool right now is  pretty effective. You can dive into  the  demographics of viewers and see  what countries they are coming from.  You can see where the subscribers  are and things like that. This is  actually interesting. I remember  President. Obama  did a  Middle East policy in Cairo, and  the press  team actually took a screenshot  of their popularity throughout  the world. They will use that in  the  press release saying it is a YouTube video is  the most popular in the Middle East.  We are reaching the audience we  intended to reach by uploading this  video. And the transparency on the  data.  

The final that I want to talk  about is  my list.  -- Playlists. Right now this is  on my  YouTube channel, just like our blog.  What we have done is we have partnered  with in organization called the  storyboard and we can carry news.  This right now is a playlist about  Osama  bin Laden and his death. We have  videos from the White House, videos  from a CBS news or ABC. We  also have videos from the Naval  academies around the country celebrating.  We have videos  users submitted from in front of  the White House, Ground Zero and  all that we have created a playlist  is that when people search they  can find a playlist of great content  rather than just  one video. In this way I think it  is a very low intensity way to build  up a following and make  your name in the space. You can  embed your playlist on your site.  We do this for the  Middle East, for this in on me in Japan, and  we actually have CNN and all the  major networks come to this page  and they look at all of our videos  to see if there's something they  want to feature. I  think for flu season you can have  a series of videos featured. We  actually already do this is  fairly well. We create a playlist  of other  people's content. It's very important  to establish yourself as a curators  of YouTube content. This is something  that very few government  departments do, but HHS  does it. We are becoming the expert  in the field  of health.  

I think that is all that I  have prepared.  So now I will open it up for questions.  I recognize that I talk very fast  so if you want to go back to anything  I spoke about earlier,  feel free. I think we have one. All right.  The first question is what is the  process of switching from a normal  YouTube channel to a  government YouTube channel with  custom branding and  other features. There is a woman,  Kay Morrison, and I will send Julia  per contact information. Once  a month she sends me a list of a  government channels to upgrade.  I can switch you guys  to government and I normally do that at the end  of every month. Try and get your  request in with a channel username  2K. She should be able to help out.  

[ Indiscernible - low  volume ]  

Yes, you can. Normally at the  end of the month I will get  to that. You guys will have to wait a little  bit. I will help  you out. Where  you send your channels all to Julia  that you want to  be switched. She will send them to me and I  will get them done in the next week.  That is  totally fine. I will send UK's information  because I work with her a lot and  she can answer almost all technical  questions and it will  is easier for it to go through her  then have everyone e-mailing me.  Ideally, we will work with K.  on it. Any  other questions?  >> It sounds like somebody is talking.  I can only hear it if it is typed.  You guys are all  on mute. 
     Okay. 

[ Indiscernible - low  volume ]  

Okay.  Of course. 

[ Indiscernible - low  volume  ]  

Yes.  

[ Indiscernible - low  volume ]  

Yes. I would generally suggest  creating a playlist of all the shorter  videos so that a  user could continue to  go through the various videos. You  can embed that playlist on blogs.  You can  send people with blogs the playlist  with 10  chart videos and they can embed  the playlist, or you can send them  one and it will link to the whole  playlist. That's the best tool we  have to keep  things together. I think another  thing, and I totally hear your  issue about trying to create enough  content.  I knowa lot say we have to have  Secretary. videos, and you guys  don't need to worry about  that . The  Department of education might have  to do videos, but some of  the staff are  talking about if the information  is timely. 

[ Indiscernible - low  volume ]  

Yes. I think  the balance is always convincing  the older media folks to let go  of  the message in stranglehold and  YouTube  operate differently. If you have  Obama doing a WebCam using  a laptop, I think  users would  be wondering why Obama is using  a WebCam. With YouTube you can be  more formal and  you can film it outside of the WebCam  and whatnot. A couple more questions came in.  What kind of camera equipment do  you have to use? I only suggest  for people  to use foot cams. They are very small  affordable and you can get an HD  and they are cheap, 150 bucks. The  cam went out of business now.  

[ Indiscernible - low  volume ]  

They've decided to move out of  the  consumer  electronics. So, I am not a camera  expert beyond that. I do say shoot  in HD. There's a big difference  in shooting in HD or not HD. I know  there are a lot. Of the can and  look like an SLR. And they shoot  very good HD.  My brother shoots at most of his  videos with a camera like that because  it is  so portable. He uses a spot Mike  on top  of that.  

Next question. Can you talk a  little bit more about  story full? Sure. Story full is  a duration partner and they call  themselves of the  social maybe -- as  social media duration. They look through Facebook  and twitter and YouTube at what  is being  shared and get the videos that people  are talking about an  aggregate those. We  did them for a while  for free, but I think we will enter  into a more  phased agreement or share with the  videos they  are featuring. Story five as  their competitor. 

Next question. Can you address  of the lack of accessibility for  people  with disabilities or lack of technology.  This is something I am not familiar  with. I do know that we have made  efforts to add captioning for people  that  are deaf. You can upload a text  file that automatically syncs with  the audios of  the video that shows at the appropriate  time. Start making it as  possible as can be for users to capture their  own videos. I'm pretty sure the  voice recognition software that  we have is supposed to work, but  it does not. I will  admit it. That is something that  over time you will see more and  more improvements there in the  same way that over time you will  see more and more  improvements would Google translator. The dream is  that every video can be recorded,  transcribed and translated automatically.  They are not there right now, but  hopefully we will get enough brains  that can figure out how to make  that happen.  

I have a comment, can hear  speakers. -- Cannot hear speakers. Oh, sorry,  I've had a couple of comments now  saying that the question that was  in person they could not hear. There  are two parts to it. One was  the difficulty of finding time  to create  the content, and a summary of my  answer was essentially  don't worry about having somebody  who is a big name on video, and  don't worry about having a super  HD videos. It is good to just get  content out. And also for things  that are informative, it is fine  to do screens at that  you narrate . Like when you're walking through  how to fill out a form online you  are explaining it. Just get the  video  out there.  

The next comment is there a preference  for more conversational pieces or  more formal pieces? In one other  presentation I showed two clips  back to back, one of them was  Eric Cantor who had very  polished stuff. I'm sure you've  seen  his videos. If you feel like --  you feel like you are in a  Steven  Spielberg movie, very very polished  and edited. And the other clip by  show isn't  Ron Paul with a click cam behind  his desk telling a story about when  he was a doctor 30  years ago. Both of them did very  well. I think the take away is that  that it is really the message more  than a -- more than the media, but  they too should fill  -- bit. If you want to have a conversational  tone and then it is fine if it is  just someone sitting behind a desk  and talking directly into the camera  and it is not polished  or edited. 

So, the next question is we are  interested in using annotation to  link to webpages relevant to our  videos back on our  main website. Can you do something  about the issue where my large-scale  medias are required have access  to  this feature? This is a request  that we get off and. Just to clarify,  basically if you  have a video you want to be able  to annotate in the video with a  link that goes to  your website. Currently annotations  are only allowed within YouTube.  I actually bought that large-scale  medias bias did not allow for any  video annotation. The only use that  I knew of was  a nonprofit that is allowed to use  a video annotation too weak  to donations. I don't think that  there is a short-term likelihood  that we would  change that. I think the two pieces of advice  I would give, or the one piece of  advice I give it to use your  channel banner. You have a channel  banner that you can  include links off once you get updated  to a  government profile. You can change the channel banner  links. If you have one video that  is very popular, add a button to  your channel banner saying it, click  here for  more information. Or,  click here for a way to  use this or whatever you're  looking for. The other way is to  use the description to link out.  Use  the description, for more information  click  here, or the full paragraph, or  link to your main website. Those  are the two spaces that you can  use right now to push people to  your site.  >> There is a comment, in response  to my answer about accessibility,  saying that  the players themselves are actually  inaccessible.  People attempting to watch the video  change the volume, start and  stop that video. This is separate  from the video accessibility issue.  I understand. That's a  great point. The only thing I can  think about is the most recent  release of her own of the browser  allows  voice communication. I am not sure if it has a voice  to control you to be yet. Maybe  that is in the works. I think that's  a very good point and I will take  you back to  the team. -- Take it back to  the team.  

[ Indiscernible - low  volume ]  >> Yes. The comment here  was that  some government employees can't  use chrome because of service, and  the larger issue is about the recent  linking of a  YouTube account, which is a  mandatory link. I know I was on  a thread where someone internally  asked  about this, what about people who  agree to  the YouTube's terms of service but  not the Gmail terms of service.  This is an issue for government partners.  I don't remember the answer so I  will have to look that up and get  back  to you. 

Kevin and I are having a great  back-and-forth here. Kevin's comment  about the description and  the banner was that it doesn't help when the  videos are embedded or shared on  social networks because the banner  is not seen. I think that's a very  fair point. What I suggest is and  then annotating videos with text  and vacation but don't link off.  Say, visit  your site, but if it's a really  long URL you can copy and paste link short,  or hopefully it is a URL that is  recognizable and memorable. You  can use that as a  text annotation.  >> There is a dog of a URL  shortening  or --.gov shorten  or. Perfect. Any  other questions? USA.gov  has it. 

[ Indiscernible - low  volume ]  

So if  you think  you use [ Indiscernible name ] it  will automatically  transfer a.gov link to a USA.gov  shortened link. I think that might  be it. Somebody is asking if we can share  this thought -- slides. Yes,  I will share this with you guys.  We will also be launching a website  in the next week that you guys can  check out, which is  a  YouTube.com/Government 101, and  that has all the information that  I want to  hear today. It will probably even  be better than these slides. You  guys can check that out. It is undergoing  some changes right now, so don't  rush  their  -- there. probably by early next  week you should be able to  see it.  

In terms of service for YouTube,  at  one point I thought government videos  had to be posted on a government  on  the server and then allowed to go  to YouTube. Is that still correct?  

The question was that the original  YouTube government terms of service  were  that YouTube videos it would be  hosted on an actual  government server. I have not heard  of that. I  don't know if it's still there.  I am pretty sure there is a YouTube  -- no cookie website that I think  was created for the purposes of  a government partners to not have  cookies tracked when  viewing videos, and not having their  views tracked  and whatnot. I think that was a  20% project from a while back and  I honestly am not sure.  

Originally, the government had  to host  its own videos on its own server  and then  upload.  

Yes. I  don't know. Okay. Thank you everyone so much  for joining today. I am sorry about  the technical ethical these at the  beginning. I hope you enjoyed my  speaker notes for the first two  slides,  but really, the reason that we do  this stuff  is because you can put up a video  of a just  and Bieber being aggressive and you would  get 5 million views. The question  is, what is the impact of those  5 million views? Every video on  YouTube is created equal and we  really do believe as a company that  there is tremendous value in using  a YouTube to break the barriers  between government and the people. It is a method  of direct access that was not available  five years ago. We think in the  same way that twitter  is instrumental, we think that YouTube  is the place to  record that. And to really connected  tell the whole story. Thank you  all for uploading videos and  for participating even if the videos  are getting  1000 years --  and views, there is definitely impact  to what you're doing. Thank you  all for using the platform and for  connecting with  users.  Awesome. Goodbye.
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