How to Bring Together Local Citizen Media Videos and Global Audiences

Global Voices Online Presents... Bringing Together Local Citizen Videos and Global Audiences

Or.... How To Get People to See (and Care About) My Video

Exhibit A: The Video

You have shot a video of a crucial moment in the history of your city or country.

You have edited it to loving perfection

You publish it online

You wait for viewers to arrive, news to pick the story up and comments to start popping up.

You wait for viewers to arrive, news to pick the story up and comments to start popping up.
You are still waiting.

So, ¿what happened?

Exhibit B: The Citizen Video Explorer

Checks favorite video uploading platforms for new videos

Searches by country, subject matter, a known recent event, what is on the media.

Knows a limited amount of languages

Has a limited amount of character sets installed on browser or computer

Has a limited amount of character sets installed on browser or computer
Has a superficial grasp of global politics, and maybe in depth grasp of a few locations.

Will most likely find citizen videos of already known topics.

Will be overwhelmed when doing broad searches (ex. Citizen Journalism)

Will be overwhelmed when doing broad searches (ex. Citizen Journalism)
Will be underwhelmed when doing specific searches (ex. Festivals Latin America)

First step: Getting people to see your video.

First step: Getting people to see your video.
Get your audience through the door.

¿How does searching for Online Video Work?

¿How does searching for Online Video Work? Better yet: ¿how doesn't it work?

Search engines can't detect content from images or video.

The tags, the title, the description and all other text published on the same page as the video are what the search engine looks over to decide if your video is appropriate for the search.

¿What can video producers do? (a few suggestions)

Video Producers:

Think of your target audience

Think of your target audience
Are they local or are they global?
Do they speak your same language?
Do they understand the languages spoken on the video?
Are they familiar with the situation on the video?

Think about the situation portrayed on your video

Think about the situation portrayed on your video
Is it known to a large population?
Is it on the news?
Is it a recent development?
Does it connect with “hot” news?
Is it timeless or will it “expire”?

Think about the desirable outcome for your video

Think about the desirable outcome for your video
Raise awareness
Appear on main media
Get Action:
Personal
Local
National
International
Fame and Fortune

Decisions If target audience speaks more than one language you can:

Decisions If target audience speaks more than one language you can: Make one video with transcriptions in both languages, spoken in one language and subtitled in another.

Decisions If target audience speaks more than one language you can: Make one video with transcriptions in both languages, spoken in one language and subtitled in another. Make two videos, one for each target audience.

Tagging

Tagging
Use the language(s) of your target audience.
Use both broad and specific terms.
Use synonyms.

Tagging
For video in both languages
Elections Democracy Government International Colombia Bogota Peaceful Protest Youth Downtown Citizen Journalism Video Ciudadano Periodismo Protesta Pacifica Juvenil Jóvenes Elecciones Gobierno Internacional Centro

Captions, transcription and subtitling

Text makes videos accessible:

For Search Engines.

For Search Engines.
For those who have a better grasp of the written than spoken language

For Search Engines.
For those with an auditive impairment

For Search Engines.
For those with visual impairments who depend on software that reads text.

For Search Engines.
For those who speak a foreign language.

For Search Engines.
For those who speak a foreign language.
For videos without clear audio.

In the future, Google will be able to search the captions on a video, making it more important to include them.

Tools:
Your video editing software
Online video subtitling community:
http://dotsub.com
Video captioning or subtitling:
http://overstream.com

Give context:

Give context:
Assume viewer knows no previous information on situation shown on video.

Explain in general terms:
follow proper names with clarification
Define acronyms

Define acronyms
Define course of action you wish viewer to take

Define acronyms
Include attribution information, website links, etc.

Define acronyms
Include attribution information, website links, etc.
Fill out all the fields on the video description.

Make it available
Upload it to different video platforms, for example:
http://youtube.com
http://dailymotion.com
http://vimeo.com
http://blip.tv
http://dotsub.com
http://dogooder.tv
http://facebook.com

Publish your work under a license that allows people to share and distribute your work freely, or make it easy for people to contact you to ask for permission to use it.

Publish your work under a license that allows people to share and distribute your work freely, or make it easy for people to contact you to ask for permission to use it. For example: Creative Commons

Publish your work under a license that allows people to share and distribute your work freely, or make it easy for people to contact you to ask for permission to use it. For example: Creative Commons Add it to Creative Commons databases.

Finally...

Show, Tell, Ask:
Don't be afraid to:
Post your work on your social networks
Tell your contacts
Contact strangers and tell them about your video.
Ask people to share it with others and promote it

Afterthoughts
How to find citizen media videos:
Search for specific keywords and use synonyms for words within your area of interest.
Make your searches routine, to keep up to date with latest uploads
Use advanced search options.
Make your search on specialized engines
Search microblogging platforms such as twitter

Thank You!

Feel free to share, copy, modify and distribute (and translate!) This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

How to Bring Together Local Citizen Media Videos and Global Audiences

by Juliana Parra on May 16, 2009

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How to Bring Together Local Citizen Media Videos and Global Audiences — Presentation Transcript