Here are 5 tips tips from Heather Mansfield, author of the new book, Social Media for Social Good on how you can get better traction with your YouTube channel.

1. Use Your Nonprofit’s Avatar as Your Profile Picture
Your nonprofit’s avatar is very important for branding on YouTube. Your avatar will be displayed on all the channels you subscribe to and become friends with, as well as on the walls of any comments you post. It should be square and include your logo, and it should be the same avatar that you use on your other communities. YouTube is a visual community where avatars trump text or titles, so to maximize brand recognition, never use a photo as your profile picture.

2. Use the Colors of Your Avatar to Design Your Channel
YouTube offers one-click automatic branding for your channel. As with Twitter, you should log in, go to “My Channel > Themes and Colors > Show Advanced Options,” and enter the numeric values of the colors of your avatar. Again, these numbers can be provided to you by your graphic designer or guesstimated by using the 4096 Color Wheel.

3. Limit the Description of Your Channel to Your Mission Statement or One Paragraph
People are not on YouTube to read. They are there to watch videos and be entertained and inspired. Don’t overwhelm your viewers with unnecessary text. Simply go to “My Channel > Profile > Edit” and enter a brief “Channel Description” and link to your website. Disable most categories that you see there, such as age, movies, schools, and music. Keep your profile section simple.

4. Maximize Your YouTube Search Engine Optimization Using Channel Tags and Video Titles
YouTube is now considered the second largest search engine in the world, behind only Google. To maximize the possibility that your videos turn up in YouTube search results, first go to “My Channel >Settings > Channel Tags” and enter a wide variety of tags that you think potential supporters of your work will search for in YouTube. Obvious tags are nonprofit, organization, your city, your state, and your program areas (environment, homelessness, international development, and so on). Next, when you are uploading videos to your channel, again add as many tags as possible to each video, give a strong but brief description, and, most important, title the video to optimize your YouTube search engine optimization (SEO). Titles have the strongest impact on YouTube search results after your channel’s name, so be clever and creative when titling your videos. For example, an excellent video by the Community Housing Partnership with the title “Inside Looking Out” would probably get much more traffic if it were renamed “Inside Looking Out: Homelessness in San Francisco, California.”

5. Enable Channel and Video Comments
YouTube is much more than simply a place to host your nonprofit’s videos. It’s a thriving online community. If you don’t allow comments on your channel or your videos, then you have cut yourself off from the YouTube community. Unless your nonprofit works on controversial issues like religion, politics, immigration, or abortion and you don’t want to have to monitor your comments on a daily basis, enable channel and video comments. The vast majority of the time, the comments will be positive and supportive. For the few that aren’t, if they are exceptionally mean-spirited, then simply delete them, block the user, and move on. That said, there are seemingly more mean and grumpy people on YouTube than on any other community. Try not to be too shocked when you experience your first.

Want to see the cutting edge of crowd-sourced video production? The Uptake, hands-down the best guerrilla video shop in the country (they live-streamed the Wisconsin Uprising), has developed a new video aggregator for the Occupy Wall Street movement that lets you easily click back and forth between feeds from 61 different locations (and counting, there’s even an #OccupyLjubljana feed from Slovenia).

Here’s a screenshot of Uptake’s aggregator.

Pretty amazing…

Turns out there are not huge swaths of the American public spending their day using social media.  Here are some surprising stats posted by our friends over at Frogloop:

• Twitter: 1.1 % of the U.S. population is on Twitter. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.)

• Facebook: While Facebook says that they have 150M U.S. “active” users, which is 48% of the U.S. population, only 50% of active users login any given day. So 24% of the U.S. population logs into Facebook on any given day to check or post updates. (source: Facebook)

• LinkedIn: 0.37% of the U.S. population is on LinkedIn. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.)

• YouTube: 19.94% of the U.S population is on YouTube. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.)

• MySpace: 1.19% of the U.S. population is on MySpace. (source: April 2011 results from Experian Hitwise.)

Folks over at the Green Media Toolshed blog posted a simple list of “things to consider” before you start creating an online video:

• Every organization has enough money to do a video, and anyone on staff can do a video, with just practice.

• People tend to underestimate the time that it takes to watch what you’ve shot, and edit it.

• Create good objectives. A good objective is one to create a communications tool supporters can share (rather than go viral). focus on objectives that make sense around your organizational goals.

• Think about who you want to reach. The general public or “the world” are not an audience.

• For messaging, think about what messages your audience cares about, right now, as well as the story that you want to be telling.

• You must connect the video to other creative projects that you’re doing. Develop the video as a part of a cohesive project, rather than a separate project that you just stick in your website where it can fit.

• Focus on the story first. The story will be what is carried away by the audience. People shouldn’t need to comment on sound or anything technical, because that should just roll through smoothly and facilitate the message.

YouTube has launched auto-captioning for all users. Auto-captioning combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms found in Google’s Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by a viewer. A video owner can also download the auto-generated captions, improve them, and upload the new version. Viewers can even choose an option to translate those captions into any one of 50 different languages — all in just a couple of clicks.

• Currently, auto-captioning is only for videos where English is spoken.
• Just like any speech recognition application, auto-captions require a clearly spoken audio track. Videos with background noise or a muffled voice can’t be auto-captioned. President Obama’s speech on the recent Chilean Earthquake is a good example of the kind of audio that works for auto-captions.
• Auto-captions aren’t perfect and just like any other transcription, the owner of the video needs to check to make sure they’re accurate. In other cases, the audio file may not be good enough to generate auto-captions.

Here’s a tutorial for those of you that want to experiment.

Youtube’s nonprofit program now allows organizations in the program to insert personalized external links into videos using the Annotations feature. This is especially big news for anyone using video to fundraise.

The new Call-To-Action capability means that groups can now build graphics within a video that ask people to “Donate” or “Sign Up” or “Sign the Petition” and then use an invisible annotation to make it so viewers can click on the link.  This works both on the Youtube page and with embedded video on your organizational site.

Users can also go back to old videos on the site and add annotations that are visible that can say “Donate Now” and that link to pages on your site.

YouTube has previously enabled users to add text notes and bubbles, links to other YouTube videos or channels, and highlighted areas.  But giving users the ability to control formatting of their annotations (change font size, etc) and build invisible hyperlinks into their own videos is a new important tool for groups to drive people to their organizational sites.

Here’s a screenshot of CharityWater’s use of the annotations tool to fundraise:

And here is an interesting use of the annotations device by droptheweapons.org about the ramifications of carrying or using a knife, where they allow viewers to choose various plot lines as they watch the video.

The Wilburforce and Brainerd Foundations have released a new report that examines the fundraising successes and lessons learned from the Obama for America Campaign’s new media program. Here are a few of their key lessons:

Discipline: The discipline to develop best practices and stick to them is what often separates a mediocre online program from a truly great one. This includes the discipline required to ONLY send content that you know your supporters will value, instead of sending out the press release from your communications department. It also includes the discipline to adhere to a consistent brand, including look and feel, and message narrative. It means, in short, the discipline to stay ON message. David Plouffe, Campaign Manager, described this philosophy as “a belief in alignment…That alignment is really hard, though. We had to step back every day and make sure: Are we in alignment?”

Spotlight on Supporters: The campaign made a concerted and deliberate effort to keep the spotlight on the people who supported Obama, and not just on the candidate…Not only were supporters a core part of the campaign story at every level – including in the national media – but the campaign also created tools and forums that encouraged two-way communications and invited people ‘in’ to the campaign. However, these tools were not necessarily as critical as the story about the tools, which was really a story of how supporters became the center of the campaign. In July 2008 a New York Times reporter wrote, “The campaign’s new media strategy, inspired by popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook, has revolutionized the use of the Web as a political tool.”

Nimbleness: Being able to react quickly to breaking events was critical to the new media program’s success. Again, this can be seen in the campaign’s response to Palin’s “community organizer” comment. The campaign was able to turn on a dime and launch a fundraising email…In addition, the campaign used video as a rapid response tool. Instead of taking days or months to produce videos, the campaign would at times have a new video out within a few hours (or less) of an important speech or media moment. This frequently meant that instead of reacting to the news cycle, the new media team was actually scooping traditional media by getting their content up on the web faster than traditional media outlets could report on the story.

Authenticity: In the nonprofit sphere, email copy seems to see-saw between wonky and dumbed-down. But OFA managed to do something unique – share real, inside campaign information with its supporters, while making that information accessible and meaningful. For example, the campaign published a seven-minute video of David Plouffe on YouTube, detailing the campaign’s electoral vote strategy – filled with wonky, insider information.

Content Matters: From top-notch emails, to 1,800 videos, to amazing graphic design, the new media team demonstrated a serious and intensive focus on content. The campaign deliberately built profiles of specific online personas (David Plouffe, Jon Carson, Barack Obama, etc.), giving them each a unique voice. Scott Goodstein, the campaign’s External Online Director, described how good content trumped all of the individual new media tactics: “Tools are a frying pan. If the ingredients (the content) aren’t tasty, you’re still going to have a horrible dinner.”

Data-Driven Culture: More so than any campaign in history, OFA was a data-driven operation…By the general election, they had a six-person analytics team and they had tested and measured every aspect of the online program, including messengers, messages, layout, design, video, voice, segmentation, and other tactics. Entire projects were scrapped because the data showed they weren’t effective; resources were then directed to higher-performing strategies.

YouTube has created a new “News Near You” feature that senses a user’s location and offers up a list of relevant videos, allowing Youtube to “essentially engineer a local newscast on the fly.”  Trouble is that right now there is not enough “professional content” from TV stations so most of the YouTube videos near you come from nontraditional sources: radio stations, newspapers, advocacy organizations, churches, colleges and, in the case of a San Francisco outfit called VidSF, three friends who despise the local TV diet of fires and homicides.

While it lasts, this is good news for grassroots groups. Instead of collecting and ranking web content automatically with digital spiders, Youtube is asking video “news makers” to sign up as a partners and then list their materials for local viewers.  Since the system is driven by location, if your local TV stations are still stuck in the 20th century, you actually have a shot at controlling and framing the local YouTube content stream.

VidSF is a great example of the new breed of local news broadcasters — including ones without broadcasting licenses, the traditional barrier to entry in local markets — that is emerging online . The NYT reports that mobile phones and the increasing demand for citizen journalist content promises to make “News Near You” a dynamic and promising news space online. They point to the new iPhone, for example, which includes a video recording capability with a “send to YouTube” button, suddenly making it simple and fast to upload clips. Rachel Sterne, the founder and chief executive of the citizen journalism site GroundReport, said the feature “trains laymen to be reporters.” And YouTube says it is developing tools to automatically spotlight those citizen videos as they come in.

As we’ve said before on Crib Notes, with traditional news organizations in fiscal crisis, some of us may want to begin moving more deliberately into the reporting void as hybrid citizen journalists/activists. Since we now own our own cheap, fast and simple “printing” presses (blogs, websites), video production stations (Flip video recorders and YouTube) and broadcast networks (News Near You, listserves, Twitters feeds, Facebook, etc), we might expand out coverage of local community and political struggles to include local cultural events, inspiring human interest stories, etc. — but frame them within a larger political context.  Others of us may want to increasingly give our members the tools (and training) to report on the events they care about (this may well include news that falls outside immediate organizational interests) and provide them platforms to reach larger audiences.

Just as the news industry collapses, average people are increasingly hungry for information and news about these extraordinary times we’re all living in. Maybe we can begin to fill the void.

In the 1930s trade unions understood that that cultural organizing was essential to political organizing. They organized interracial dances, reading groups, musical festivals, etc.  Unions understood that social identity and cohesion was essential to building political solidarity.  While unions have largely forgotten this tradition, we are increasingly seeing activists and their allies engaged in a modern version of this type of cultural organizing through the use of online video tools to capture the oral histories of marginalized communities. Some of the best work is being done by filmmakers on the global level. The Global Lives Project, for example, is a network of filmakers around the world documenting 24 hours in the daily lives of 10 people around the world.  Another example is Living Cultural Storybases, a group leveraging digital technologies for cultural preservation  Here’s how Director Paul Rankin describes the mission:

Indigenous peoples are 4 percent of the world’s population, but half of humanity’s cultures. Yet they are the poorest and most disenfranchised. One language dies every 10 days; within 50 years over half the world’s languages will be gone. Cultural diversity is disappearing much faster than plant or animal diversity. We face a cataclysmic loss of millennia of wisdom and knowledge whilst threatened by megacity monocultures, economies of scale, environmental destruction and greed. We all need their understanding of fragile environments, custodianship of biodiversity, sustainable models of cooperative living, alternative approaches to education, health and well being, skills, artistry and ancient wisdom.

Storytelling transmits the essence of any culture, encapsulating deeper beliefs, values and identity, inspiring ways of behaving and believing. ‘Living Cultural Storybases’ helps minority communities build evolving digital repositories in their own language of their cultural narratives and knowledge, i.e. ‘Storybases’.P ilots in Peru and Mali prove that training young agents to record their elder’s stories, using novel appropriate technologies and the resulting community digital resource, empower the community, strengthen cultural identity, pride and social cohesion, reconnect the generations, include their urban Diaspora in an Internet dialogue and create new economic opportunities.

Grassroots groups here in the US that are deeply embedded in marginalized communities are well positioned to revive our progressive tradition of incorporating cultural projects into our into political projects.  Especially since it is now so cheap and easy…Here’s the one of the Living Cultural Clips:

As we’ve said before at Crib Notes, the web appears to be rapidly evolving (or devolving) from a text-based to video-based medium.  Trying to catch the wave, venture capitalists poured more than $80 million into Internet TV startups in the first quarter of this year and corporate elites are counting on online video as one of the few mediums that will grow this year.

And online video habits are changing fast, with older demographics leading the pack. In April, people between the ages of 35 and 49, were the fastest growing demographic in time spent viewing per viewer, increasing 29% during the past six months.

Older folks also seem to watching longer videos. In April 2009, three of the top five ranked video sites among 35-49 year old viewers were long-form video sites. Compared to six months ago, only one of the top five was a long-form video viewing destination.

At PTP we’re gearing up for our 4 day intensive summer camp on framing, messaging and video. In the July 15-16th session, Jen Caltrider of ProgressNow and PTP will guide participants through a two-day workshop on how to make effective videos, and how to create strategies that integrate the use of video, other online tools, and traditional organizing techniques. Participants will go through all the steps of video production from conception to finished product during the two-day training, and will also develop an integrated strategic communications plan.

Hope to see some of you there!