Earlier this week, Brightcove's Pro Services team published a fascinating Q&A with Greg Posten from Sun Microsystems about a new user-generated video contest they've launched for the upcoming JavaOne conference.
Here's an excerpt:
Eric: Why do a video contest to promote the conference?
Greg: JavaOne is all about engaging with our partner and developer communities. Within these communities we have a bunch of very creative, enthusiastic folks, what better way to allow them to share their enthusiasm for the conference then to make a video. It a great program for us, we get to foster even more involvement with our community and we get content to share with the rest of the world. Then of course there is the fun in giving someone a full conference pass and $1500 to offset travel expenses.
Eric: Mind if I ask how many submissions you’ve received so far? How many did you think you were going to get?
Greg: We have around 72 submissions and we're about a full week into the contest. We really didn't know how many we were going to get. In the past that would have been a big issue, since there's a lot of things that we would have to do different to support 500 entries vs. 200,000 entries. With this program it really didn't even come up, as we know the infrastructure we have in place today could certainly handle any load we threw at it.
Eric: How long did it take to implement the campaign? And how many resources were involved from your team?
Greg: Oh wow.. it was really complicated and took several weekends and late nights and some really talented engineering resources to implement... ok well that's at least what I told my management : ) [editor's note: Greg, I assume you knew I'd print this sentence] Really it could not have been simpler. We've been using Brightcove's UGC tools since day one of ChannelSun and it took us about 20 minutes to setup the campaign and email the [embed] code over to web publishing.
Read more at the Brightcove's Professional Services blog, More Eyeballs.