Unleashed: Building A Community Workshop by Sage Lewis

Sage Lewis of SageRock.com heads up this community workshop session.  Sage is well know for building up a community through his popular videos that can be found out on his YouTube channel.

With this workshop Sage really begins with YouTube and how you can easily upload video.  Using a small video camera, the new Flip video and even a video camera on a cell phone you can easily start a video show or channel.  The thing to remember is "Being Perfect is the Enemy of Good Enough".  Sometimes we are our own worse critic. 

Most people just want the information, so they aren't going to be critics of the video quality, your hair, how your voice sounds.  Only few and far between criticize about this type of stuff.  Your followers will criticize you about wrong facts though, so make sure you have the fact of the content you are presenting right.

To encourage your community to start to build make sure you allow comments.  You can moderate them, but make sure you allow them.  If you don't, it seems like a one way conversation and people won't really want to join your community.  Allowing video responses helps too.  (Sage also demonstrates adding a "live" video response during this session.)

YouTube makes it really easy to optimize your videos.  Making sure you've got a pretty descriptive title, and a description with a URL (even though they are nofollowed) in it as well as adding tags.  Tags are very important in YouTube, so make sure you've got the right tags for your videos.

The nice thing about YouTube is that you can promote it through Facebook, MySpace, Deliciou and Digg.  It's really simple to share your videos through other networks, but a quick hit of a button your video can be published into your profiles on these types of site.

From here Sage moves over to Facebook and how it also is a great place to start building a community.  Facebook allows you to share your videos, photos, links, blog entries and things you do on other networks with your friends.  Facebook also allows you to create groups, and groups are a great place to build communities as well.

Facebook also allows you to add videos like YouTube does as well (add them through live feed or uploading).  This can be another way to promote building a community through video.  The key though is to be active in  your community

Final thing that Sage points out is that it's about participating.  Whether it's leaving comments,  or responses or even writing on someone's wall, it lets someone else know you've been on their site.  These are basic building blocks of community building.