Doing the Honors — Leveraging Human Desire To Build Community

YouTube is not always what it seems. On the face of it it’s a video site. It’s also a search engine (some say it’s the second largest one). It’s also a great example of a community … and their community platform offers many lessons for digital community leaders. Here’s one:

My almost-teenage son was very excited last night. He and some friends made a tribute music video of a song by teen heartthrob Justin Bieber.  They posted it to YouTube.  He was thrilled that the video received three “honors.” The video was ranked as most watched, top rated and most discussed — in a specific category, in a specific geographic region.

Good community organizers understand the desires of their members. Great community organizers leverage those desires to grow and engage their communities.

YouTube — one of the most fascinating community platforms — has leveraged technology to do just this. At least 100 community members multiplied by a huge, huge, huge number of categories and geographic regions were “honored” (great choice of word!) with feel-good feedback on their work yesterday. And this happens everyday. This is certainly not the only reason that 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute (source, YouTube).  But it certainly helps.

PRACTICAL TIP: Even if you don’t have the technology built into your community platform, do something (anything) today to honor members. And honor them for something that will encourage an action that will grow and further engage members in your community.

P.S. Check out the video… my son plays Bieber :-)

Ideas Worth Spreading — to 4.5B More People

The smart people who put on the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference — but who actually are also becoming a very interesting digital media brand —  announced something interesting today. It is now possible to either translate yourself or view translations of any of the many interesting videos (AKA “Ted Talks”) at TED.com. The idea: make the talks useful to the 4.5 billion or so people who don’t speak English. To quote head-TED Chris Anderson:

The TED Open Translation Project will enable thousands of volunteer translators to use subtitles to make TED available to their own communities. To do this the right way has taken a year of preparation. But now we’re ready.

The site is filling up with  what they call “interactive transcripts”. They allow you to click on any word in English or a translated language — and actually make the video of the given talk play from that word on.

This is all very good for making the site and videos people-friendly to many more people. But it’s also very good for TED.com’s search engine friendliness… talks are searchable and findable, increasing the site’s profile on Google and other engines.

BTW, here, per TED, are the languages with the most talks translated in them, as of this posting.

Source: TED.com

Smart. Or, if you like, inteligente, интелигентен, 智能, חָכָם, لبيب, วิทูร