How to YouTube with Success — and closed captions

November 30th, 2009 Karine Joly 2 Comments

My latest UB column is now available in the November/December issue as well as online: “How to YouTube with Success: Six tips for optimizing online videos”

Here are the 6 tips:
1. Get listed on YouTube EDU.
2. Make videos that are easy to share.
3. Choose keyword-rich titles, descriptions, and tags for the videos.
4. Produce context-rich videos.
5. Don’t ignore your most fervent video fans—and critics.
6. Add closed-captioning.

I wrote this column a couple of months ago, after writing this post on how closed captioning can make a big difference but long before YouTube made an important announcement about new features using speech recognition on November 19: auto-timing and auto-captions.

Auto-timing will automatically synchronize your text-transcript with your videos.

Auto-caps will do ALL the work and is already used by several institutions such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, etc.

You can find out more about these features by watching this video from YouTube:

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2 Responses

  1. Tim Brixius says:

    But how does one get past step 1? I’ve applied three times for an edu account with not a word from YouTube. What are their selection criteria?

  2. Karine Joly says:

    Tim,

    I don’t have any personal contacts at YouTube, but this blog post I wrote along with its comments from higher ed pros might help.

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