Soon to be: 'Must see' KUJH-TV

Why put KUJH on YouTube? Maybe the better question is: why not? With more than 200-million clips viewed each day, it's the premiere video-sharing site, and best of all, it's free.

Right now, we're putting up stories that aired on KUJH-TV and we've seen a handful of views (especially the flu shot story), but are we making the most of our opportunity?

Here are some of my favorite ideas from marketers on how to use YouTube to your advantage.

Keep it short: Gareth Davies wrote that people who surf the net have "lightning-quick attention spans." For a clip to make it in the YouTube universe, he wrote that it must be both quick and catchy.
**Good news for us since stories for KUJH are usually short.

Choose your tags carefully: Jonathan Mendez wrote that the tags you attach to your clip can affect your number of hits. He suggests using adjectives because people often search for videos based on moods. Also, he said not to waste valuable tag space with words like "and" or "to."

Use your URL: Michelle MacPhearson pointed to a goofy video that did it right (and got 1.4 million hits). The short video started and ended with the URL and it was also burned into the video. That way, if people clip it or make mashups, your URL is still getting out.

Make it fun, but keep it real: Stephan Spencer likes Blendtec's "Will it Blend?" videos. In these short pieces, the president of the Blendtec blender company puts something unexpected into one of the company's blenders. The results are fascinating, but more importantly, real. Spencer wrote that one of the keys to these videos' popularity is that it's not smoke and mirrors. The president of the company likes to see what his blenders will do to stuff and the videos simply share that with the world.

Have something worth watching: Blendtec's George Wright said to make it on YouTube, you really have to have something worth watching.
**Again, we're in luck here. KU students and alum are all over, so there's a built-in worldwide audience for what's going on at KU.

Each semester, we get lots of talented, creative people who are ready to stretch the limits of what we've done before. Maybe putting KUJH onto YouTube is the first step in a bigger process where future KUJH'ers take these suggestions and turn the KUJH channel on YouTube into "must see TV."