Growing Successful Communities

[#1]

Probably "old hat' for many folks, but I found it is easy to embed a youtube video right into a post by grabbing the "embed" HTML code from the desired video, construct the post message using normal WYSIWYG editor, then switch to HTML and paste in the embedded video code in the post where you want the video to play.

This seems an easy way to introduce rich content into the community and invite discussion about the featured video.  This allows responses to the video without other members having to join youtube to leave a comment and reduces fragmentation.

I can imagine many scenarios for use...

Who has already made use of this in their community and what were your experiences?

Mark

[#2]

I'm glad it is working out for you Mark.  I was under the impression that an embed tag falls under the advanced HTML settings so the person putting those videos on the community would have to be considered a very trusted user.  Some communities, specifically the non b-to-b ones, are extremely wary of allowing their users to embed video.  The few bad apples out there can dig up all sorts of inappropriate things to embed.

We have one customer that got pretty clever with allowing regular users to embed video.  He put some javascript in his header that checks to make sure that the videos come from a certain domain.  If they dont, then the embed tag does not work.  I always thought this was a pretty clever workaround.

Message Edited by JakeR on 10-30-2008 05:43 PM

[#3]

JakeR,

Good point.   I suppose I was thinking more from the standpoint of the community sponsor rather than regular members in terms of who puts up the videos.  Interesting to hear about more advanced things that other's have done to bridge the trust / risk gap with technology.

Use cases I was thinking about were things like demoing several advertisement clips and letting people vote, or doing a short product demo, or embedding a short clip of an event and kicking off some discussion.

Maybe these kinds of tactics are more often seen on blogs, but in the support scenario, being able to interject a quick video into a discussion to demonstrate the answer vs typing it out might be interesting too.

[#4]

I also think that embedding videos to posts is a great way to add some flavor to the forums, which is mostly text. It's nice to talk about something, and include a little video about to topic to watch.

I've seen Juniper Networks embed videos to present new forum features that I thought was neat.

And as some of you have alluded to, it's definitely important that the right people are allowed to embed videos, as it could potentially be a moderation nightmare.