A community is a family thing. The Private Media Channel too takes that notion and diversifies the feature. Wondering, what does the ‘Communities’ tab do? Here’s what.
In the Private Media Channel, the ‘Communities’ tab holds all your users, the roles they play in your channel, the permissions they have to perform actions and, last but not the least, the video that they can watch. There’s more to the feature than just my two-line explanation. So let’s look at it in detail. It’s fun learning deeper into the feature, fasten your seat belts.
First of all, what you need to know is that the ‘Communities’ tab (a default system generated name for the tab) can be renamed. Where do you do it? Have you read the 'How to rename generic community terminology' under the 'How To' series of the Private Media Channel in our support portal ? You should take a look at it. If not here’s a short run of where you can rename it.
Login to your channel. Go to ‘My Site’ tab and click on ‘Terminology’, and you will see this:
Under ‘Terminology’ you can rename the term ‘Communities’ to anything you want. As you can see, you can give it a singular and plural name. So in our demo channel, we have named it as ‘Course’ and ‘Courses’.
Now let’s dive into the ‘Community’ tab (Note that I am using the default name here, so do not get confused with the name provided in the screenshots).
So we start by creating a community. This can be done to organize your video and your users accordingly. Create the community according to your business model. Say, for example, you are handling marketing executives. So you create three different communities for a sales pitch, in three mediums—on-foot, online, and investor meets. There you go, you have three communities going. So accordingly you can segregate your employees (considered as users) in the three channels, depending on the type of medium they handle.
Here’s how you create a community. Go to Communities > Manage Communities > Add New Community (on the right hand top corner).
When you click on ‘Add New Community’, this is what you will see. The first bar displays all the communities present in your channel. The second bar collects details for your new community. In the next bar you assign the members to your community, with their respective roles played within your community.
Let’s look at the bars in detail:
*I have split the bar and explained each part in detail*
- Add Community
In the first part of creating a community, you can assign a logo to the community. Then you can upload video for that community (this can also be done after creating the community, no to worry). Next is the status. If you wish to keep your community live, then select Active else you can keep your community dormant by clicking on the button, which will make it In-Active.
In the course type, when you click on the drop down, two options appear—public and private. What do these do? Public, allows the community to appear in search results and also if a user wants to subscribe to the channel, he/she can do so. However, if private is selected then the community will not be visible in search results. The user too won’t be able to subscribe. The only way the user can be added to the community is if the Site Admin adds them.
Moving on to the next part…
Fill in the course name and description, as it suits the community that you are creating. Coming to the ‘Instructors’ drop down, wondering how it came there?
Let me jog your memory:
Seen this before? Yes, it is a reminder from ‘ How to customize my Private Media Channel ’. Here’s a gist of what this is.
What you see above is adding information to the community type. When you rename the community terminology, you see a list of user fields below. What do they do? They specify certain details that you can give to your community while creating it. For instance, here I am listing instructors that would, in the community, provide more information about the community later.
You may ask, why do I have to do this roundabout procedure. Well, that’s because we don’t want to hassle you by asking you to fill in a number of forms. So these are pre-defined metadata, in the form of a drop down list that can just be selected and you move on with creating the community, instead of typing out the names each time you create a community.
If you take a close look, all the four metadata forms (Instructors, Subject Matter, Target Students, Prerequisites) are pre-defined in the Community’s Terminology tab under My Site.
Clear so far? Now what is this ‘New’ that you see? Okay now this too goes back in history.
Remember this? Under the ‘General’ in Terminology of My Site. Would you like to set a particular community as a special or featured one? It could hold special or high-priced video with which you can market well to your users. Here’s where you can rename it if you want to. So I have named it as new, and that is what will appear in the bar when I create a community. Look at the image below, when you switch ON the ‘New’ button, a text box asking for the reason appears. There you can provide a reason as to why it is a featured community for your users.
Next, as you scroll down the ‘Add Communities’ bar, you will see the following:
So here’s the thing. There are two types of community—free and paid. For a paid community, here’s where you set the charge. The frequency remains the same as set in My Account > Charge Model. Take a look at it here:
Look at the charge model, the default payment frequency is set to monthly; therefore in the community charges the payment is by default, monthly. You then set the price and whoever subscribes to your community will be asked to pay the fee.
Scroll further and you will see Social Media.
Here you can connect your social media sites to your channel.
Towards the very end of the bar, you can keep track of the date and time in which your community was created and when it was updated.
Phew! We have completed the start of the process here. Now let's look at
'How to Manage Users in the Private Media Channel?'