Community Clips was a concept test – or experiment – to explore whether it was possible to create a community around how-to videos about Office. When we started this project, we knew that videos could be a great instructional tool, and we believed that Microsoft customers would prefer watching videos to reading help articles. We had a feeling that letting other Office users create the videos themselves would add a layer of warmth and honesty to the community. But we had a lot of questions. Would people want to make instructional videos to show other people how to, say, use Mail Merge or create a Pivot Table? Would people’s videos be accurate, or would they show workarounds that aren’t the best way of doing things? How susceptible would we be to spam and inappropriate content? These questions led us to build a trial community video site, which we called Community Clips.

When we first launched Community Clips, we included a small set of features:

• Free video recording tool
• Ability to upload videos to the site
• Commenting
• Rating
• Tagging
• Favorites
• Email Notifications, so that video producers would receive an email when their video was rated or commented, and a weekly summary of all of the activities on all of their videos

Every two to three weeks, we launched an additional feature. Some of these features included:

• Video requests, which allowed users to request a video if they couldn’t find one and other users to respond
• Avatars, which allowed users to select from any of the following images to accompany their profile

What we learned:

We were surprised to grow such a vibrant community in such a short period of time. Over the course of the project, Community Clips received nearly 900 videos, 310 comments, and 425 ratings. The site received an average of 40,000 visits each month. We saw active discussions (5 comments or more) on a high number of videos, and we saw a high number of videos receive perfect 5-star ratings from more than one user. We even saw the community self-police for offensive or inappropriate content: posting comments discouraging further uploads of that type of video, giving those videos low ratings, and flagging those videos as inappropriate. 11% of our visits each month were from people who had visited the site within the past 30 days, meaning that this portion of our users were regular/repeat visitors. The rest of our visitors each month were new to the site, or had not visited within the past 30 days.

Overall, 74% of users reported being satisfied with the site.

User interviews and surveys produced overall favorable comments, like the following:

• I believe this is a great learning and teaching tool
• Good work, great idea and nice to be able to watch the content.
• I like what I see thus far! I will continue to return see how the community grows and to benefit from and contribute to helping people solve business issues.
• Easy to access. Doesn't treat the user condescendingly. Clear, concise demos.
• Watching screencasts is often a lot more informative and interesting than reading tutorials.

And with any project, we had our fair share of naysayers, as well, providing comments like:

• I think you could improve the sound quality of some of the videos. Also they could be longer with more depth
• Well, right now it’s a young site, so a lot of the videos are more on the newbie side. For my personal preferences, I’m looking for things that a little more robust. It has value, but for me personally where I’m at, I’m trying to get some of the pivot tables to work, how to get VBA going.  You know it’s young, you’re getting people started in something that’s gonna go along.
• The video I saw involved someone showing workaround rather than showing the functions available in Word 2007.

The features that we found to help grow the community most were:

• Comments. We saw a high number of comments and a high number of discussions between users in comments. Allowing users to interact with each other contributes to the site feeling like a true community.
• Ratings. A high number of users rated videos, and ratings proved to be an effective way for site visitors to find the best videos. Subjectively, we agreed that the highest-rated videos were in fact the best videos on the site.
• Email Notifications. We sent notifications to producers when activities happened on their videos (such as comments and ratings), and we sent notifications to commenters when another user commented on the same video after they did. Mails to producers had a 72% clickthrough rate, and mails to commenters had a 79% clickthrough rate. These mails contributed to Community Clips’s stickiness.

The features that were used least, or least effectively were:

• Favorites: the feature was used properly but had low overall usage.
• Tags: medium-to-high usage. The feature was designed to allow users to provide extra information to improve search results; however, users rarely provided information that improved search results. Most often, they duplicated information that was already contained in a video’s metadata. 

Thanks for your interest in Community Clips, and we appreciate your early involvement! Community Clips might find a home in Office Online in the future.