Jack Daniel’s Does Letterpress from Aggrodesign on Vimeo.

Made by Hand / No 2 The Knife Maker from Made by Hand on Vimeo.

TL/DR: A few videos about handmade design work and a few dubstep videos.

For the most part, I’m fine with that. We don’t have to worry about bandwidth and storage, we get decent analytics and get the added bonus of YouTube users stumbling across our videos.

That being said, I’m seeing a trend lately that’s been bothering me – and it’s one that can potentially make our institutions look bad.

People – when you’re embedding a video from YouTube, for the love of crackers turn off “Show related videos.” It’s a simple checkbox. It looks like this:

Checking that box can save you quite a bit of embarrassment. Case in point:

Georgetown University is about to launch a major capital campaign. It’s an amazing video – it’s beautifully shot, beautifully edited and is just really compelling. Here it is:

I guarantee you that video was not cheap to produce. I was watching it on their campaign site, where it was embedded, and was really engrossed in it. I was good until it ended and the YouTube player showed me related videos that it thought was relevant to the launch of Georgetown’s capital campaign. Front and center: one showing off the fact that rapper Wiz Khalifa spends $10,000 a month on weed.

I’m serious. Here’s what it looked like:

I can pretty surely say that Georgetown doesn’t want to promote Wiz Khalifa’s drug habit. I’m sure it doesn’t fit in with their mission (the embalming process video that also shows up is a bit creepy too.) I’m sure they don’t want people to leave their campaign site and videos confused why they’re linking to drug videos.

For something that’s critical to a university, such as a campaign video, I would probably host the video on my own, or use JW Player to grab it from YouTube directly.

If you can’t do that, and have to use a YouTube embed, you really should turn off the related videos. Don’t play poker with your career.

Update: Looks like it was oversight and is on its way to being fixed.

Karine describes the series as:

“Professional Photos, Videos and Live Streams 101″ is a 3-webinar series that will help you learn (or train your campus content contributors on) how to take photos, shoot videos and live stream events like a pro. With tighter budgets and the increasing need for multimedia content, more and more communication, marketing, publication and web professionals are asked to take photos, shoot videos or live stream events without any formal training. This series is designed to offer winning strategies and practical tips to improve the quality of your photos, videos or live streaming events on a shoestring for teams who can’t rely on a professional photographer, videographer or live streaming expert.

I’m just one of three speakers this week, including a great tutorial on campus photography by Judson Copland, Director of Creative Services at Oklahoma Christian University and how to do live streaming by Seth Odell, Communications Associate at the UCLA School of Public Affairs and the host of Higher Ed Live.

If you work with video or photography, there will be a lot to learn. The HigherEdExperts webinars are well-run and the presenters are top-notch (well, Judson and Seth are, for sure.) The prices are affordable, and in addition to the live show, you get access to a recording and handout materials. It’s a good deal, especially if you aren’t able to travel to conferences in this tight budget environment.

What’s remarkable about this video is the sheer scale of it – over 900 people participated in it. That’s pretty astonishing.

I’m going to substract 2 points because there was a cut in the middle, but other than that, nicely done.

Unless a group releases a video that features more than 900 people, or does a lipdub to a song by Slayer or Wu-Tang Clan, I’m not posting it from here on out.

But, there’s a downside to some of this as well. With cell phone cameras, Flip cams and even the fact just about every laptop and netbook has a camera, there are a lot of opportunities for students and others to capture things happening at your institution, both positive and negative, some flattering for your institution and some not.

Take this video from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee for example. In it, a student gets into an argument with an instructor during class, It ends with the student being taken to the ground by security officers, handcuffed and led out of class. Of course, a student quickly got out their phone and started recording. Warning: definitely NSFW.

I’m guessing this is not the type of thing that officials at UW-M are not really excited to see get out there.

The same thing happened at my institution recently, when a group of students protested during halftime of a basketball game. It was posted to YouTube and Facebook group started within minutes of the event happening.

The take-away here is that we’re getting to the point that we should be assuming that everything is going to end up on YouTube, good and bad.

What can we as web and marketing folks do about this?

I think the days of doing nothing are quickly coming to an end. We’ve got to be proactive, and here are a few steps to get you going on monitoring what videos are being posted about you.

I’d recommend searching for your institution in YouTube and grabbing the RSS feed that YouTube provides and adding that to your Google Reader or RSS reader of choice so you’re updated when something new is posted. Second, I’d recommend having a set of steps laid out ahead of time outlining what your (and by you I mean your group/department/institution) response will be.

Perhaps one of those responses will be a video of your own, with one of your institution’s leaders – the fight fire with fire approach. This isn’t a higher ed example, but here’s such a response from Domino’s Pizza after a video of store employees doing nasty things went viral. This video is straight, and to the point. Mr. Doyle could use a bit more charisma, but it’s good just the same.

What do you think about videos like the UW-M one above or the response video?

And I say Dr. Horrible in the best possible way.

Here’s an admissions video from Yale.

It’s a well-produced, 16-minute (!!) musical production full of students, dorms, faculty and even a network news anchor. The coolest part – it was entirely written, recorded, filmed and edited by students. Seriously, watch the whole thing, it’s pretty amazing. The middle part is awesome, showing off campus groups and life.

I didn’t know much about Yale, but after watching this I think I pretty much get what its about and what it can offer students. What a great video.

If you can, watch it full-screen and/or HD.

If I worked in the university’s PR area, I’d be all over this. It’s fun, topical, and is authentic. Not every class may be this fun, but it shows off the effort their faculty puts into classes.

Good show. Want proof its working – look at the YouTube comments on the video. For once, the comments are civil, readable and very positive towards Biola.

I spoke about how schools in the us, and my school in particular, are using social media to connect with multiple audiences. It was fun to share what we’re doing here in the US and talk to web folks about what they are doing with social media in the UK.

Here’s some great feedback from Daniel Hanly of the University of Glamorgan about not only the entire two-day session but also my little bit. A snippet:

Promotion was the tip of the [iceberg] pyramid as far as the conference went – we had a guest presentation from Mike Richwalsky who is the assistant director of public affairs at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. He gave a very inspiring and discussion provoking view into using Twitter, Facebook and other social networking tools to connect with your audience and to connect with a potential audience. It also presents a way for your website to grow, facebook groups tend to be viral (if relevant) and twitter gives you access to everyone on the web to push your message to. There was numerous issues here especially from education institutions who believed that their students would see them as “trying to get down with the kids” and then it’ll actually impair relationships with the audience instead of help them, however, they were quickly dispelled by Mr Richwalsky who said that they only push information out as an institution and they do not try and connect with the students, instead just feed them relevant information. Promotion was a very rich topic, there’s so many ways you can get your name out there nowadays, its pretty much impossible to stay behind a closed door.

Thank you to Steve Boneham, Christine Cahoon and George Munroe for inviting me to participate as well as sharing a nice meal in Cardiff with me.

* Photo by Steve Boneham. The photo is from the London session. I was seriously jet-lagged.

So why would YouTube do this when the vast majority of user’s videos aren’t in that dimension?

Easy.

HD, baby.

Check out this video in amazing 720p high def on YouTube.

To see if a video is in YouTube in widescreen/HD, add this to the end of the URL string:

&fmt=22

Here’s the other very interesting thing. You can embed these widescreen HD videos as well, with a simple hack of the embedding code. Here’s the code:

<object width="480" height="397"><param name="movie" value="(VIDEO EMBED URL)&ap=%2526fmt%3D22"></param><param name="wmode" value="window"></param><embed src="(VIDEO EMBED URL)&ap=%2526fmt%3D22" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="window" width="480" height="397"></embed></object>

Thanks to Webmonkey for the code. This is very interesting. I’m getting stuttering HD playback here – how is the playback for you?

As you’ll see its a relatively simple spot, but the challenge was to show all 11 varsity sports as well as have some text at the end. Sounds easy, but it was actually a bit of a challenge. 30 seconds is not a very long time.

Believe it or not, I actually did the spot in iMovie (and not the past version, the most recent version). Since we decided to use still photos, iMovie was the quickest way to get them imported and easily set the movement effects. I created the final text screens in Photoshop (watch that pixel ratio or it will look scrunched) and output to raw DV for dumping to tape and DVD.

Once we had a version locked down, it was exported to DVCAM tape and I delivered the tape, and a DVD backup, to the Fox Sports video truck that was broadcasting the game from our facilities this past Saturday.

I was working in the press box at the game, so I had to DVR the game. It was really cool to finally see it air and to see it someplace that wasn’t my monitor at work.

Allegheny Athletics Commercial from Allegheny College on Vimeo.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to have people you trust watch the video for anything they notice that’s out of the ordinary. By the time you’ve got something completed and ready for review, you’ve seen it hundreds if not thousands of times and you lose all objectivity. Grabbing a group of people to watch it a few times proved invaluable and early drafts of the spot were much cruder then the final cut above. We were even making changes as late as Friday afternoon – all for the better, thanks Penny and Josh.

I think in the end, the spot is upbeat and meets all the goals we set out to reach.