Alec

McNayr

Three months ago, I shipped a box of photo slides and reel-to-reel 8mm videos to Scan Digital, and just received the digital files back.

The troves of forgotten memories are amazing, both from my childhood and my parents’ childhoods. It’s a virtual look back at history, before GPS, color TV, and even push-button telephones. Dare I say it, “a simpler time.” I’ll be sharing the photos and videos over the next few months, one per day.

Looking forward to your thoughts and comments, about how these relate to your own memories of the 80s, 70s, 60s, and 50s…

First up, a video of me as a baby, circa 1979. Waaaaaaaaaaah!

Great tip for on-the-fly filmmakers. Use your tripod and your steady hands to get a fly-in-type dolly shot.

Double Your Video Exposure With Social Media:
UNICEF did it and now so can YOU

Stephen Cassidy began posting the videos to UNICEF’s own MySpace page and then to other video-sharing websites — all for free. In less than a year, the number of views on the video-sharing sites exceeded views on UNICEF’s homepage — doubling the exposure at no additional cost. more

Financial News Sites Bank on Video
Big financial news sites cue up Web-beats-cable sell

Yahoo Finance recently launched Tech Ticker, a tech-stock-centric blog that produces daily, bicoastal video segments. Yahoo claims TechTicker is pulling in 150,000 to 230,000 unique viewers per day, and sometimes close to 500,000 when featuring a big, news-making guest. Forbes.com took a major plunge into video in 2002 and now averages 2.5 million total viewers per week, per internal data. more

Colleges Putting Their Own Spin on YouTube

Frostburg, like a growing number of schools, is trying to elbow its own messages onto such sites as YouTube to promote themselves, create a virtual community and drown out embarrassing clips. more

Yes, big “b” as in “10.1 Billion.”

That’s the number of video streams watched during the shortest month of the year: February 2008.

(I was tempted to round down to “10 billion,” but that “0.1 billion” is still a hundred million views.)

Online video is big and your target market has fully adopted it into their online lives. What does that mean to your story, message, brand, PR, etc.?

Matt Herzberger of BlogHighEd pointed me to one of his favorite online video series in higher education, Real Nebraska.

The Obstacle

The University of Nebraska has about 23,000 students, which is about 10% of the entire population of Lincoln, NE. Big state school? Small midwestern college town? There are a lot of stereotypes flying through my head already. As a Nebraskan high schooler, your college options are increasing (growing online education options, competitive out-of-state rates, loopholes, etc.), so why would you consider UNL?

Since UNL has such an obvious battle to face, it would be easy for them to create some videos with the same lame scenes: students in lab coats (doing real science!), students working on computers, and super-engaged professors (what?). All this has been done in the past, to try to bolster the prospect’s view of “higher” academics.

The Videos

But UNL didn’t take that path, and instead features admissions counselor David Burge hosting funny, unusual, and thankfully honest depictions of life on campus at Nebraska.

The videos offer a wide range of content, such as “man on the street” interviews, guided tours around campus, weekly Grey’s Anatomy recaps by current students, and student band featurettes. Talk about unabashedly authentic!

Leveraging Online Video

The University of Nebraska admissions team gets big praise from me for their tactics surrounding the videos themselves:

(more…)