Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Now available with Google Apps: YouTube

[Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog]



Editor’s note: We recently launched an improvement that makes over 60 additional Google services available to Google Apps users. This series showcases what’s new and how your organization can benefit.



Welcome to YouTube
With more than 1 billion subscribers and 2 billion video views per day, YouTube is one of the top destinations for watching, uploading, and discussing video. Now, your company can benefit from the tools and scale provided by YouTube integrated with your users’ Google Apps accounts.

Many companies are already using YouTube in interesting ways to promote communication, both within the organization and to external audiences. Here are some examples:
  • Build a public YouTube channel for your brand or product: You can maintain a public YouTube channel for your entire organization or for individual departments. For example, your marketing team can create a brand channel on YouTube to advertise your company to external customers. Take a look at HP's brand channel for a nice example of how a business can use YouTube to build a community around the exchange of product knowledge.

  • Build an archive of all your company’s videos in one place: From training videos to strategy updates, you can centralize both externally-facing and internally-facing video in one video archive. YouTube’s sharing options let you choose whether you want your videos to be accessible publicly on YouTube or privately to people who you individually invite to watch, giving you control over your content.

  • Build a channel to support your business processes: Customers and employees can stay up-to-date on new videos and channel activity by subscribing to the appropriate channels. Recent activity from those channels, such as new video content uploads, will then be delivered automatically to the subscriber’s homepage or to their email inbox, if they choose. For example, P&G maintains a hiring channel on YouTube targeting potential employees, so interested candidates can subscribe to the channel and ensure they don’t miss P&G’s latest hiring updates.


End users can also engage in conversations relating to the video content using the YouTube Moderator feature, which provides a forum for questions and answers directly in the video interface. This type of conversation can bring invaluable product or service feedback directly from customers to your organization.

YouTube provides a platform on which your organization can manage and archive video communications and control how those videos are shared both internally and externally. YouTube's features also allow for easy and intuitive uploading, viewing, collaboration, and conversation covering all of your organization’s video collateral. And now that YouTube is integrated with Google Apps, sharing content with colleagues and distribution lists is easy with contact list integration.

Learn more and get started
YouTube sign-in can be enabled by your domain administrator from the Google Apps Control Panel at https://www.google.com/a/[your_domain.com] (replace [your_domain.com] with your actual domain name). If your organization isn’t using Google Apps yet, you can learn more and sign up today at http://www.google.com/apps/more.

For the latest information on YouTube features and updates, check out the Official YouTube Channel and the YouTube Blog.

Share your story
Have you already started using YouTube at your organization, or plan to now that it’s available? Please share your story and your organization could be featured in the next Gone Google ad campaign!




Note: YouTube may not be available in all areas.