People like video

22
March

Posted by Dave

In an article on the BBC Technology News page, I read about how the British web-going public are really getting into online video:

British demand for online video sites has shot up over the past year, according to a new report.

Written by research firm Hitwise it found that UK internet traffic to video websites was up 40.7%.

YouTube is the most popular destination, followed by the BBC iPlayer and Google Video.

Which is rather interesting. I remember reading loads of blog posts - locations long forgotten, sadly - last year talking about how people couldn’t be bothered to sit and watch video, and that simple text based messages were the best way to engage an audience.

Using online video, however, is increasingly popular, and government is trying to make the most of this new channel. Downing Street has plenty of stuff going up on its YouTube channel, and DIUS’ channel has been around a while too, and was used to good effect recently as part of their Mature Students consultation.

For a list of all the (known) central government YouTubers, see Neil’s great list.

In fact, mentioning Neil at this point is rather pertinent, as his new department, BERR, have recently started a YouTube channel - BERRtube - featuring some really good content.

One such example is the collaboration between BERR and Yoosk, which saw Theo Paphitis questioning Lord Mandelson on issues raised by the public. Take this example, on the subject of bank bailouts:

What makes this video work well for me is that: it isn’t just a talking head, but an interaction between two people, both individuals are recognisable, it clearly isn’t a ‘normal’ government broadcast and it is nice and short.

Paul Canning has written a fair bit on online videos, especially their role in marketing and making them go ‘viral’. I’m not sure any of the government produced stuff is quite at the viral stage yet. But that is not to say that it isn’t of value, nor that by taking baby steps now, more exciting stuff won’t happen a little further down the line.

Tagged: berr, Social Media, Video, youtube

Possibly related posts:

Category : Video

Comments

paul canning March 22, 2009

“people couldn’t be bothered to sit and watch video” because broadband wasn’t as widespread. Now it is, they are.

All my post points to is the methods everyone else uses to publicise videos. Unfortunately. because egov lives in a walled garden, we insist on inventing our own methods rather than learn from elsewhere.

I also pointed out how hard it is to go really viral - i.e. major audience. But this doesn’t excuse using what amounts to basic marketing tactics to help your video content.

The other point with this is what I found last year - a lively youtube debate on UK political issues - in the case i uncovered a debate amongst young people about what citizenship means. Where is the engagement with this?

Tony Hirst March 22, 2009

Just by the by, I’ve built a Yahoo pipe to scrape Neil’s list and used it to build a metasearch engine that will search all the gov dept youtube sites in one go:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=MlA3914V3hGytuNx3nBDOQ

Neil March 23, 2009

Thanks Dave. I’m really pleased with how the BERR channel is shaping up, though most of the credit goes to my team member who leads on our YouTube. But I did make the Yoosk introduction, leading to that Paphitis encounter. Theo was very down to earth, and despite protesting otherwise was a great presenter-interviewer.

Neil March 23, 2009

…Personally though, as a consumer of web content I still lean heavily towards text.