Increasing Community Engagement: 4.5 Comes Alive Music Video

Added to my online community manager job description: music video producer. How did that happen?

Early in 2010, my colleagues Tracy Maurer and David Michael and I were on a conference call lamenting that more people don't sign up for our training sessions about our internal online community and we acknowledged that it's hard to make learning fun. Then a crazy idea came up: what if we could make our training into a funny video that people would *want* to watch and would, in fact, share with their friends and tell them, "you have to see this"?

Thus was born my foray into music video production. I don't do the heavy lifting -- that's done by the incredibly talented Christopher Harris, aka DJ $crilla, who happens to be one of our employees in Cleveland, Ohio. He wrote lyrics, recorded his performance of them, then wrote, directed, edited and starred in our first music video, which went viral within our company and increased awareness of, positive attitudes about and engagement with our internal online community.

That video even went public for a weekend, before our company lawyers made us take it down. That was my first lesson in the finer points of copyright infringement law, something that is more complicated than "parody is a protected use," it turns out.

Well, we try to learn from our mistakes. This time around we worked in partnership with our legal team and got the music, lyrics and entire video approved for public release. Chris even got more creative this time, coming up with a teaser "trailer" video like you see of coming attractions in the theaters. Note that this trailer was released just before Halloween and the name of our employee community is the UBM Wiki:



We "leaked" the new video last week by posting it in a group in our community where all the new features of our upgraded software are explained -- yes, those training materials we desperately want people to see (and we've learned to make them more appealing, too, as Tracy Maurer builds innovative Picasa slideshows in PowerPoint that resemble online children's books with lots of pictures and only a few words). The word started to spread...

Today we officially launched our upgraded site and put links to the video on our home page. And the video is also live on YouTube, where you are invited to watch it and see how we at UBM have fun while we get the job done: http://bit.ly/4pt5comesalive



Everyone in the cast and crew is a UBM employee, participating because it was fun and they want to help increase engagement in our community across the company -- and around the world. If you like it, spread the word!