The Next YouTube Star: You
You can rub your eyes and double check the figures, but the latest reports say that YouTube has surpassed 10 billion views in a single month in the United States. Globally, figures show that YouTube serves up 1 billion videos a day, roughly 30 billion in a month.
It’s no wonder. Video provides that extra “oomph,” adds personality—pushing the imagination far beyond the black-and-white text on a page. Using a consumer-level camera (like a Flip), YouTube, and some simple editing software, you can easily create a customer testimonial or a marketing video and broadcast it for free, even embed it on your website.
Sure, you may be feeling a bit apprehensive about your first foray into video. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve made just about all of the mistakes you can make during the course of my own video blogging career: too little light, bad sound, too much ambient noise, audio levels too low, you name it. I’d like to offer a hand so you don’t have to go through, say, the agony of editing video footage from a conference where all of the subjects are in shadows. (Let’s just say the footage would be perfect had it been a spy video.)
As you think about making your own videos, what questions do you have? What do you want to know? Video will be a topic I’m covering at the upcoming Partner Velocity conference in Paris and I welcome your thoughts.
Please post your questions in the comments below and I’ll answer them. And, if you have links to your own videos, we’d love to see them. Post video links in the comments, too, and yours may be featured on this blog.
Additional resources:
- Channels Buzz Cisco Partner Community Video 101 tutorial
- VideoMaker’s You Tube Channel
Posted by Alexandra Krasne at 10:56AM PST
Alan Amsoil Oct 14, 2009
My first foray into the YouTube world was an amateur short that I called ‘Fishing with Steve & Cod’ - it had been up for 2 years before it was yanked for copyright infringement. In the credits I used a song called ‘Fish Heads’... my only option through YouTube was to replace the entire audio file for the whole video. So don’t make the mistake I did, use public domain songs. Also YouTube should make it easier to replace only a portion of the audio for such cases of copyright infringment.