Notes from PDF: YouTube Candidates

Who thinks John Edward’s hair flip-n-comb video is the equivalent of the Howard Dean yelp? It’s no macaca, and pretty dated, but still. Well, if anyone could predict, it’d be the folks hanging out at the Personal Democracy Forum, which opened in New York this morning (or maybe Craig, who’s been covering this closely for NewTeeVee).

The PDF conference looks at how technology is changing politics and had speakers like NYT writer/author Thomas Friedman, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and marketingsmith Seth Godin. The online video folks were all hanging out too, with representatives from YouTube, and Blip.TV, among others. Here’s the lazyblogger’s list of 3 bits for the ‘YouTube candidate’:

1. TechPresident and TubeMogul have collaborated on some slick charts (screenshot above) tracking cumulative views for each candidate up to the day, as well as views for candidates for YouTube’s spotlight series (in case you were wondering how affective that series is.)
2. The Pew Internet Project’s Lee Rainie says 21 million Americans have watched a political video online.
3. YouTube’s Steve Grove gives a few tips on making political videos, via Jilltxt, who took better notes than me:

   1. Keep the camera rolling – get as much footage as you can. To capture authentic moments you need to be capturing everything.
   2. Keep the content fresh. Upload new videos, keep new things in the stream
   3. Reach out! Don’t think of YouTube just as a shrunken TV-screen. Ask for responses.
   4. Be personal. Some people thing YouTube is about being hip or edgy, but really YouTube’s demographic is 18 to 55. Be authentic.