Making Video Widgets More Effective With Office Documents And PDF Support

This weekend, we’ll release a feature that will add Microsoft Office documents and Adobe PDFs as media types that can be shared within our social networking workspaces.  You’ll be able to do everything with these types of documents that you can do with videos and real estate shows at http://social.vidlisting.com – seamlessly and quickly share them with other members without cutting and pasting links, include them in individual and grouped widgets, and know how many times that the documents have been viewed.

We have two unique features related to documents that we’ll demonstrate in detail once the functionality is live.

– Easily associate an office document or PDF file with a video or real estate show: This is more than just adding a document to a video bar or grouped widget. Once released this weekend, your video and real estate shows widgets can carry along and display an associated document that viewers can click on from either the embedded widget or the player page. These associated documents can be added at will to Youtube videos, real estate shows, or videos uploaded to vidlisting. They can also be  removed or changed at any time via the newly designed widget creation interface.

– Directly Communicate Through The Widget With The Person Posting The Document With One Mouse Click: Like videos, viewers of document widgets will be able to communicate directly with the member that posted the document using the messaging platform built into http://social.vidlisting.com. The messaging capability will function from anywhere that the document widget is posted

Let’s use real estate as an example.  A member of the vidlisting social network has a Real Estate Show of a property in their workspace, a PDF with the listing information, and an Vidlisting agent introduction or even a local community video posted on Youtube. The member can easily combine all of these into a single video widget specifically for the property that has a link to the listing PDF as well as a link to the agent’s profile video or community video. The listing virtual tour remains the primary focus of the widget but rich supporting information is now part of the video widget as well in a variety of different media formats. 

Any interested buyers can get to each of the disparate media types from either the video widget for the property or the player page.  In addition, interested sellers in the same area can also communicate directly with the agent to request a listing presentation. At any time, the member can review where the widget has been posted, how many times the widget has been viewed, and how many clickthroughs it has received.

Now that’s making web 2.0 work for you. Stay tuned…

How To Add YouTube Videos To Any FSBL Personal Media Catalog

Adding existing YouTube videos and Real Estate Shows to any media catalog available on the FSBL platform takes just a few seconds and is exceptionally easy. We’ll cover adding YouTube videos in this blog post and we’ve previously discussed adding Real Estate Shows on our real estate video blog.

How To Add YouTube(r) Videos

The first step is to to create a new personal media catalog or open an existing one. Among the top row of buttons, you’ll find on that appears as follows:

Once you’ve clicked the above button in your personal media catalog, you should have the youtube video URL handy for the next step.  You’ll be redirected to a short and simple form as follows:

There are only two required entries on this form: the full link to the YouTube URL and the language of the video. All other fields are optional.  If you do not add a photo, a default image will be provided. You also can add two lines of 18 character titles and text of up to 36 characters that will appear on your video icons.  If you dont add these optional items at this step, you’ll be able to add them later by selecting the icon in your catalog and clicking the “modify” button.

Once you click the send button, a representation of the the YouTube video will appear in your media catalog as you see below.

That’s it. You now have a playable and shareable representation of YouTube videos that you can send to social contacts as well as build custom widgets. We’ll cover much more in future blog posts.

If you are a video content provider and/or have your own media player, contact us to join us as a FSBL infrastructure partner and have your content available to others via the FSBL media platform.

Analysis of YouTube Real Estate Video Results Before And After Universal Search

We recently completed a second analysis of the number of times that real estate property videos are viewed on YouTube in the first two weeks of being posted.  It is an interesting comparison with the first analysis that we did before Google’s Universal Search implementation which allows real estate property videos to be viewed inline with search results.

We posted the results over on our ActiveRain blog. Here is the link to the analysis:  http://activerain.com/blogsview/120016/The-Data-Again-Shows

Thoughts?