The YouTube Symphony Orchestra returns!

The world’s first online collaborative orchestra is back, and this time a new round of performers will be playing their part onstage at the iconic Sydney Opera House.

It seems like just yesterday that Carnegie Hall was abuzz with a sold-out performance that made headlines around the globe. Ninety-six musicians arrived in New York City, from over 30 countries, to perform together after uploading an audition video and then being chosen by the YouTube community to be a part of the exciting event. We are thrilled to invite you to audition for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011.

In addition to the new locale, this “second act” includes another new element: “Mothership,” a musical work from composer Mason Bates. Right now, it’s still missing something: an improvisation provided by you. Take a listen to it here and start planning your contribution.

This time there are two ways to audition, for the classical audition perform the pieces listed on the channel according to instrument. For the opportunity to contribute your own creation, choose the solo improviser—it doesn’t matter if you play trumpet, viola or didgeridoo. If you proceed to the final stages, you will join musicians from around the world in a week-long music summit with Grammy-award-winning conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, who returns to guide the orchestra.

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011 is a collaboration with partners the Sydney Symphony, the London Symphony Orchestra, Berliner Philharmoniker and many other leading institutions of the classical music world. This event is being made possible by Hyundai.

Michele Flannery, Music Manager, recently watched “Eucalyptus Didgeridoo Solo”

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Tips for partners: Gimme content (and then analyze it!)

As promised, we’re excited to feature a series of blog posts with advice and actionable suggestions regarding what has helped partners be successful on YouTube. By now, all your videos should have lots of metadata, and you should have added annotations to at least one video, or grouped a series of videos through a playlist. Up next, our third post is on the importance of finding a niche with your videos and then analyzing data to determine how viewers are finding your content.

As always, we want your feedback. If there are things we are missing, or other optimization tips you want us to cover, let us know via the comments section in this post.

Find Your Mojo
It is easy for us to say, “make great content!” We know that is ultimately what you are are trying to do with your videos. When you first start out, experiment with different approaches and topics until you find your niche. It could be vlogging, beauty tutorials, a character sketch...really wherever your passion takes you. YouTube gets over 100 million views a day, so the world truly is your oyster. Find your mojo and then cultivate your content.

Once you create and publish your great content, are you paying attention to your Hot Spots? Are you maintaining a schedule so viewers know when to check back for more? There is actionable data you can use in your account to tweak your videos to keep your audience coming back.

To do:

• Use Insight Hotspots to see if your video is hot or not. Do you see a full red thermometer in the top red corner of your Hot Spot video report? If so, great! If not and your video hovers on or below the “Average” line on the graph, you are not keeping your viewers’ attention.
• Edit your videos to keep your audience engaged. See where viewers are leaving your video, and determine why (and consider using annotations to keep users engaged).
• Use Insight to figure out how people are finding your content. Is it through search or related videos? To find out, go to ‘My Videos’ and click on ‘Insight’ for one video. Then click on ‘Discovery’ and under ‘Links Followed to this video,’ you’ll see top referrals. You can click on ‘YouTube Search’ to find tags viewers queried to get to your video, and then add these tags to your video to boost your ranking in the search index. 

How to find more tags through the ‘Insight’ tool:

More tags to add:

• Review YouTube charts to check out the most viewed videos, and how you stack up.
• Use Google Analytics to understand the source of your YouTube traffic. The better you understand your audience and how they find you, the better you will be able to produce new content, promote the discovery of your videos, engage with your audience and build your brand.
• Keeping a video upload schedule is important, and we encourage you to upload consistently. When you are starting out, a technique that has worked well for many successful partners is maintaining a schedule that your subscribers will remember.

Now is a great time to log into your account and analyze your data to make sure your tags are fully updated, and your top referrals are either increasing or changing for the better. Tune in this Thursday to hear from one of our partners who found his niche, and will discuss first-hand how he uses ‘Insight’ to make smart decisions.


Julie Kikla and Mahin Ibrahim, Account Managers, YouTube Partnerships recently watched “The Unseen Sea.”

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YouTube political commentators join National Economic Advisers in Reuters debate

On YouTube they go by The Young Turk and How the World Works, but this Tuesday Cenk Uyger and Lee Doran will be taking their political commentary beyond YouTube to a special forum on Reuters.com focused on fixing the global economy.

Reuters Editor-at-Large Chrystia Freeland will host the forum, which will feature a debate between Laura Tyson, former Chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Glenn Hubbard, who held that same position under President George W. Bush. Tyson is a candidate to replace Larry Summers as President Obama’s top economic advisor and also to head the new federal Office of Financial Information.

Afterward, Freeland will host a live video debate between the progressive Uyger and the conservative Doran. This won’t be the first time that Uyger and Doran, who each boast tens of thousands of subscribers on YouTube, have faced off: Each of them has a strong following on YouTube and a regular audience of comentators who take the debate over the future of our country very seriously. Within the context of the Reuters forum between Tyson and Hubbard, their discussion promises to be lively and full of controversy.

The Forum, entitled “Conflicting Visions: Fixing the Global Economy,” will be hosted on Reuters and YouTube. Check out youtube.com/news around midday Tuesday, when we’ll post the clip.

Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics, recently watched “Health Care, Economic Policy, and Political Polarization in America”

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million

Editors note: Today’s guest bloggers are Troy Olson, Digital Advertising Manager, and Jeff Loquist, Search Marketing Manager, for ShoppersChoice.com. ShoppersChoice.com owns and operates a family of web stores with a wide selection of products, from barbecue grills and accessories to patio sets.

We sell everything from home furniture and fireplaces to kitchen cookware, but our true passion is barbecuing and grills. We’re in BBQ country, where people are fanatical about barbecuing and smoking. We’ve found that the best way to connect with customers is to provide them with great videos – grill reviews, how-tos, and recipes – presented on our branded YouTube channel, YouTube.com/BBQGuys.

We started with instructional videos to address customer service. Then our attitude toward video morphed when our CEO was on a business trip 1,000 miles away from home and was recognized as the “Barbecue Guy.” We saw how great YouTube could be for reaching many people at once and conveying our company image. Our important performance indicator is our relationship with viewers. It excites us when we see comments such as, ‘Great recipe! I tried it a few days back, loved it.’

In 2009, we brought on Chef Tony. He knows Cajun food and has a gregarious personality that our viewers love. We get hundreds of thousands of views whether we’re showing how to smoke a brisket



or how to make honey-glazed sweet potatoes



We want our customers to love our grills, and the way we do it is to give them recipes that make them proud and happy with the results they can achieve.

Through Promoted Videos, there have been almost 100,000 views on our YouTube channel and more than 15 million impressions of our brand name – all at the most competitive cost-per-click you will find anywhere online. Our campaign is easily managed in the Google Adwords interface. Every tool we need is there to grow quickly and manage easily our video efforts. So far this year, we’ve had over 2,200 visitors to our BBQGuys.com site from YouTube. We’ve also seen a significant increase in subscribers across all our social media channels since we started using YouTube.

Online video advertising is central to our business. For this past August, our revenue was up 48%. Our videos were viewed 94,000 times during that month alone. Overall traffic to BBQGuys.com is up 20% from last year.

We’ve been so successful on YouTube that we are now planning to extend our YouTube presence to our SportsmanGuys brand and beyond.

For us, video is our secret sauce. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million!

Serena Satyasai, Marketing, recently watched “Homemade Pizza Dough”

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