PLane English

Why YouTube’s new “search captions” feature is super useful for journalism, comms

There are already plenty of good reasons to add captions to your YouTube videos –- but now there’s another frickin’ awesome reason, thanks to a new YouTube search feature.

Yesterday, YouTube announced that you can now search captions to find videos that contain specific words and phrases.

IMO, this opens up an interesting, useful avenue for finding relevant content, but also for your videos to be discovered by people who might not otherwise find them.

Think about it: say you’re a journalist doing a story about an event that took place — maybe a speech someone gave or a protest. You want to complement your story with a video, but you didn’t have a camera with you at the event, or if was a historical event, you don’t have any file footage.

With this new search feature, not only will it be easier to find relevant videos, but you’ll be able to hone in videos (and the exact spot in those videos) containing a specific quote or line or crowd chant (as long as those videos are captioned). You couldn’t do before unless the video’s publisher had included that info in the description, title or tags.

Another example: say you’re a communications officer/PR flack (like me), and you recall one of your researchers or students once said something really cool –- but you don’t remember which video it was in, or who said it, or at what point in the video they said it.

With this new feature, you can — if you’re videos are captioned. Awesome, eh?

Here’s how to search within captions: Just add the word or phrase you’re looking for in the YouTube search field, then a comma and the letters “cc”

For example, I wanted to see if there are any videos of people quoting scientist Carl Sagan’s great line “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” So I typed this:

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known”, cc

Turns out, President Obama used that line in a speech a few years ago. And the YouTube search captions feature not only finds the video, it gives me the option to Start playing at search term (11:34), just before he says that line.

Have any of you played with this feature yet?

And what other cool ways could it be used?

Workshop: Communicating with the media about your research

Want to learn the in’s and out’s of working with the media to spread the word about your research?

Then come along to this workshop tomorrow morning on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus:

Academic research makes crucial contributions to society but too often findings are kept within the research community. The goal of this seminar is to help faculty, staff, and students recognize the role that mainstream media can play in communicating this knowledge to a wider audience. Attendees also will learn tips for how to work effectively with journalists, and about resources that are available to researchers to support such efforts.

Date and time: Friday, November 18, 2011, 8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.

Location: Dey Hall, Toy Lounge (map)

To register, click here [sorry, UNC faculty, students and staff only]

Co-presented by:

• Ferrel Guillory, Professor of the Practice of Journalism, Director of Program on Public Life UNC, School of Journalism and Mass Communication
• Suzanne Havala Hobbs, Clinical Associate Professor, Director of the Doctoral Program in Health Leadership, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health
• Patric Lane, Health and Science Editor, UNC News Services (i.e., me)

Hope to see some of you there.

Does your Google+ Page have a purpose?

“Google+ could be great, it could be popular. As with all these things, it’s incumbent on the brand to have a purpose for whatever social platform they are using and then delivering against that (on an ongoing basis, rather than all guns blazing fading to nothing in two weeks),” he concludes.

Wise words (emphasis added by me) from James Devon towards the end of “What will Google+ Pages mean for your social media strategy?” Good wrap up article by Neil Davey.

So, higher education colleagues (and others), what specific purposes will you use your Google+ Pages for? And how will you deliver against that? 

Or will the streams of content and features found on Google+ Pages merely mirror our existing social media and web presences?

If so, will someone please just invent YouTwitFacePLUS already?

In the meantime, Mike Petroff at Emerson College has started a Google Doc list of colleges who’ve created G+ Pages. Check it out and add yours.