Rounding out our last field trip for the year – we rendezvous’d over to San Bruno to visit YouTube HQ! Thanks to Jarek Wilkiewicz, Brian Glick, and Shiva Rajaraman for hosting us.

Brian kicked it off with a presentation on how to engage your audiences online via YouTube.

Among the many nuggets of valuable info in his presentation, this one in particular was interesting. The 4 rules of engaging audiences online, per Brian:

 

Create Buzz

 

Build Loyalty

 

Optimize for the Platform,

 

Cross-Promote

 

 

Next up was Jarek, who talked about the YouTube APIs and some interesting tips and upcoming features. Interesting to note that several 500 Startups companies utilize the YouTube API, includingSwitchcam (who’s also in the current Accelerator batch), VidCaster, and 955 Dreams.

 

 

Finally, we couldn’t bear to publish a blog post about YouTube without including a video or two, so here are a couple of the 500 Startups companies having fun on YouTube’s indoor slide.