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  • Google Update Some YouTube Functions

    I’m always urging marketers to start using more video in their marketing efforts. Showing customer success stories and profiling your staff, products and offices, are great ways to help prospects and customers connect and build trust.

    YouTube is a great resource for this because you can use this free tool to host, stream and create the player for your website, making about half of the hurdle to using video a no brainer.

    When you upload your video to YouTube, the service converts just about any format to web friendly flash and then gives you code to put on your site so the video can be viewed by your visitors.

    Recently, YouTube added some more options to this tool that allow you to set the player color and size and really customize the look and feel for your site.

    They also slipped in a Google Search bar across the top of the video so your visitors have the ability to search YouTube right from your the video you are showing. There may be some instances in which this makes sense, but not for most people just wanting to use Google to host their promotional video. Fortunately, it’s not very hard to get rid of this function with some code.

    In addition, the default YouTube setting allows viewers on your site to see what Google thinks are related videos to your video. Again, I can’t think of many cases where you would need or want this function enabled.

    Once you grab the code YouTube provides you can add two little bits of code to eliminate the related videos function and the search function. If you use the “rel” attribute it will eliminate the search as well, but if you would like to keep the related function but get rid of search, use the show search attribute.

    param name="rel" value="0"
    param name="showsearch" value="0"

    This image shows the added customization functions you can select before you grab your embed code.

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    Posted by: John Jantsch on Dec 07, 08 | 9:09 am
    Category: Web 2.0 | Tags: , ,

    Comments
    • Great tip John. I like that they are adding more customization functions all the time. Turning the searchbar off is a new one for me. I appreciate you sharing it.
    • Great tip.

      However, is this an example why we should upload our own videos to our sites? I would have not recommended this a week ago, but if your objective is to keep people on your site longer should we not consider? We never know what change will take place next?
    • Hi John, great info. One thing I had to do is resize the YouTube videos to fit my Website design.

      Copy and paste the code as you normally would, then edit it.

      Where it reads <object width="425" height="350"

      Try <object width="213" height="175"
      Or <object width="134" height="107"
      Or whatever fits your space.

      Experiment until you reach the desired size, keeping the height and width in proportion.
    • Great tips John, thanks. I agree, you want to disable these features as most of the time you will want to keep people on your website or blog.

      I had trouble implementing the change for my blog and the plugin that I used. Finally, I had to scrap the plug-in code and replace with my own dynamic variable insertion. If you are running a Wordpress blog and are using the Wordpress Video Plugin by Oliver Wunder Version: 0.67 (to obtain this info look in your Wordpress plugins folder for a file named "videos.php"), here is the new YouTube php code you should insert:

      // Youtube Code

      define("YOUTUBE_WIDTH", 425); // default width
      define("YOUTUBE_HEIGHT", 344); // default height
      define("YOUTUBE_REGEXP", "/\[youtube ([[:print:]]+)\]/");
      define("YOUTUBE_TARGET", "");
    • Very timely post. We just put together our first video last Friday. Still need to do some judicious editing but we'll post this coming week. I'd like to keep my visitors on-site, so we'll use the code you shared. Thanks.
    • I've not got my own videos yet, but I added some to a Squidoo lens for a client. They run videos at the website AND youtube. Squidoo has a specific module for youtube that awas a nice no brainer for me, but which made Squidoo more content with me too.
    • Thanks! The extra code snipet will definitely make it more friendly to marketing efforts on a website. I'm not as interested in taking people away from my page and into YouTube surfing. I also really like the idea of using the YouTubes to create more of a personal touch. I'll have to look at areas where we can do more of that.
    • The usage of videos will be more prevalent in the future. People have already started creating thier own video resumes. I am using a webstreaming tool from Myvideotalk. The tool is quite cheap and also has the capacity to earn money for you. For details please see the presentation at www.myvideotalkindia.com/ppt.
      For any queries please mail me at sitaram8s.mvt@gmail.com.
      I promise the time spent by you on this will not go un-rewarded.
      take care
    • I came to know something about the new tool. Hope, the post will benefit a lot of visitors and marketers. Thanks.
    • John, while I think video is a great marketing tool (and love the tips in this post!), I think people can get carried away and actually detract from their efforts. Video is a great "complimentary" tool, but it doesn't replace text. Text can be read by search engines and--more importantly--can be quickly scanned by potential clients. All too often I see people replacing their text with video--most of us are busy people that may not want to watch 2-5 minutes of something just to see if it catches our interest.
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