I discovered a fun winter project, and am ready to show off the result: the Greenbelt Maryland YouTube Channel!  So far, it has just 22 57 videos but surely there are more Greenbelters making videos.

Greenbelt Videographers, Where are You?
If you know of any videos about Greenbelt or by Greenbelters, email me (gardenersusan@gmail.com) or comment here with the link because they may be a good fit for the Greenbelt Channel.  Also, if you have a YouTube Channel that’s a good fit it can be added to “More Greenbelt Youtube Channels” in the right sidebar, let me know.  So far, I’ve listed these Greenbelt channels:

A Greenbelt Homes Inc Channel that was just announced yesterday.  It’ll have helpful how-to information, and who knows what else.  Great idea!

A City of Greenbelt Channel that’s titled “Beverly Palau” at the moment and will presumably be renamed.  She’s the city’s communications officer who created the channel.  It’s also very new and sparsely populated, as yet.

Angella Foster’s channel for alight dance theater.

Gretchen Schock’s Channel about yoga.

The NASA Goddard Channel is chockful of great videos.  Good job!

And another YouTube Channel I recently created – the Greenbelt Community Foundation Channel with 9 videos so far.  The plan is to include videos for many if not all its grantees, plus some for the Foundation’s functions.  I’m helping with new-media promotion for the Foundation and its grantees, contacting all the grantees to gather photos for the Foundation’s new Facebook page and videos for this channel.

YouTube, the hottest marketing platform on the web

The advantages of having a lively online presence with videos are too numerous to list or imagine, but suffice it to say that YouTube is the number 2 search engine on the whole web these days, second only to Google, and for videos, it’s the place to be if you want to be seen.  Vimeo is the alternative online spot for videos, but it’s more for professionals who need top quality, and also if the owners want to charge for videos to be seen.

For purposes of marketing anything or creating community, video quality at YouTube is just fine – even if the videos were created on your smart phone!  Proof of that notion is what happened to the Polar Plunge video I made at the Aquatic Center on New Year’s Eve Day, which was somehow noticed by NBC-4, which showed the video the very next day on the nightly news, with my permission.   And I hadn’t eve uploaded the video in high-definition (because I didn’t know better at the time).

Next, GATE and City of Greenbelt Television?

One obvious source of Greenbelt videos for the web are those broadcast on Greenbelt Access Television, and there are encouraging signs that they’ll start to be uploaded to YouTube this year.  Fingers crossed.

Another is a station I didn’t even knew existed until I started asking around just this past week – City of Greenbelt local access TV station.  That link shows lots of online videos but they’re huge files that take forever to download.   Let’s hope that short, watchable videos will be uploaded to the city’s new YouTube channel where they can be seen, even by people who don’t have cable television, and where they can be of use to others in the community.  Just one example are videos of Greenbelt Concert Band concerts, which are created by the city and broadcast but not uploaded anywhere.  If clips from the concerts were available on YouTube, they could be embedded on the Band’s website as a valuable promotional tool – for the band and the city.

Taking charge of the message

Right now if you search for “Greenbelt Maryland” in YouTube a video shows up with that title on the first page with this description: “Not a very good city. It is kinda dangerous and there’s a lot of robberies! Also, it doesn’t have attractive homes.”  Let’s get more positive videos up there and drive that thing down in the search results.