YouTube Channels for Universities #2

My analysis will mainly focus on several highlights of the best channel (i.e., from UniversityPennsylvania) as well as some pitfalls from other channels in order to show how well YouTube channels can help these universities pursuing the goal of teaching, research and service.

The UniversityPennsylvania channel is a very well-developed institution channel with clear brand promoting strategies.

• First, when first log in to their site, it makes you feel that you just open another web page of its school website. Because there are highly integrated channel background colors (navy blue with watermarks of the school building picture), format, font type and size.
• Second, the Instant-on introductory video quickly catches your attention with closed-captioning that makes messages from the video clearer. Only two of the ten observed channels activate the closed-captioning function.
• Third, the channel uses the Interactive Banners linking viewers directly to the school main website and creating seamless integration of the school images and messages. Moreover, the channel adds four small icons at the top right corner of the site which represent “About Penn,” “Admissions,” “Academics,” “Research” respectively, and each icon is mapped enable direct links to relevant pages of the school website. Similarly, UHuston channel uses the interactive banners at top right of the site but they link audiences to its three separated YouTube sub-channels—“courses,” “multimedia,” and “departments.” Such embeddedness of webpage elements to the YouTube channel is an important successful experience of channel design, which offered online audience familiar feeling between YouTube channels and official sites. The interactive banners play the important bridge roles between YouTube channel and the school, and well reflect the strategic goals of the school to promote teaching, research and service.
• Fourth, the interlink icons are provided between YouTube channels and other social media sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Flickr). This is the unique feature of UniversityPennsylvania channel. In doing so, the university channel creates its own social networks and gets full use of other social media channels to increase its traffic.
• Fifth, in order to better promote the teaching goals, the videos being uploaded on university channels are supported with unlimited play time and up to 20 Gigabyte (three hours of video). This allows the schools to broadcast lectures, classes and speeches. This is the most unique feature and advantage of university channel over other private or corporate YouTube channels—they share with the world the schools’ strong academic resources, which, in turn, attract more students to the channels. Most of the ten channels I observed have uploaded such academic videos ranging from 25 minutes to 2 hours and 28 minutes.
• The sixth, which is the area, I think, UniversityPennsylvania needs to improve, is the use of playlist. Specifically, some channels (e.g., texastech and Arizona), although with fewer uploaded videos produced by themselves, build playlists with the mixed videos of their own and those from external sources as supplement. Those external videos are mostly featuring high-ranking videos compatible with the schools’ strategy. Texastech categorizes its playlist into eight classes, for example “Academics and Research,” “Campus Life,” “The Texas Tech Vietnam Center,” and “Texas Tech University Celtic.” The videos within each class are from a large variety of sources, but under the same theme. Through this smart use of the playlist, Texastech’s total upload view ranks the first among all ten channels.
• Seventh, in order to promote the school’s desire of serving the local community, some universities directly embed local TV news in their YouTube channels broadcasting their social event or community activities. For example, UniversityofVirginia post a NBC news report of a local high school student volunteering to support the using of google fiber in the school community region. It is very smart to post a non-university produced and seemingly non-university business report on the school’s channel. Because it expresses, implicitly, the university’s support to the adoption of new technology which echoes the voices of local community as well as the demands of a large amount of high-school students who will also be the potential university recruits. Such video posts not only strengthen the social tie of the university and the local community, but also enhance the university’s reputation among high school students—the potential customers of the university.