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!

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

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.?

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:

• They posted videos everywhere (not just their own site). A simple Google-search reveals that they posted the videos to YouTube, Revver, and MetaCafe. Tip: They could use TubeMogul to get on more sites.
• Anyone can subscribe their videos via RSS. Allow people to download their videos, making them more spreadable. You might even see some mashups, which might be a marketer’s dream.
• There is interactivity right there on the page. You can vote on the video, see related ones, and ask a question directly.

Tactics Falls Short

For all the things they’re doing right, I have two problems with the Real Nebraska home page:

• You can’t copy HTML code to embed the videos right there on the site. It’s common practice nowadays and a must for anyone wanting to share videos online. Let your viewers distribute it for you!
• The RSS (Subscribe to Podcast) link is difficult to take action on. There should be a big red button that says “subscribe!”

And that’s it! Congratulations on such a great series and being bold enough to share your personality with prospective students!

If you happen upon this post, David & team, share some of your returns and findings!