Tips for Effective Institutional Video

Want something to go viral? Take your fans/followers "inside". Show them emotion of the event or institution. Get it up there fast.

There is no accounting for taste, and this certainly applies to on-line video. Yes, consumers want to see episodes of traditional broadcast television -- extremely high production value and cost work -- but they also glom onto the simple.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed takes a look at what got the most traffic on YouTube EDU. The winner: a video of a disabled student graduating at Cal. The video had all three parts.

It took fans inside the Cal graduation.

It gave them an inspirational visual and story.

It got up on line quickly.

My own example from back at Arkansas was the fall band spectacular. We knew about it in advance -- hey, there's a radical concept on internal communication - but that didn't help us when it came to getting out the door. Proud parent in the stands with iPhone 4 captured it from 25 rows up and put it on YouTube.

Within 12 hours, it had 5,000-plus views - and emails streaming in from the chancellor, the AD and others alerting us to this really cool video and maybe we should promote it. All great ideas, except that we were finishing a fully produced version from the floor, with two cameras, interviews and supers.

By the time we put our version out, and promoted it extensively with emails back to those folks plus the band, official Twitter and Facebook pages, we were down that 5K and it took 6 1/2 months for the HD, high quality version to finally catch and pass the number of views -- both over 25,000 noes.

The point being, quick and dirty sometimes wins the race. The lesson learned is that we'd raw capture anything like that and push it as fast as possible, then return with packages.