I was working yesterday with the Northfield Young People’s Forum (no website yet) here in Birmingham, looking at ways they can use online social networking to widen the conversation and attract more interest for what they do.

We explored youtube – citing the number of comments attracted by this Birmingham councillor for his film on graffiti tagging. The group I was working with all saw the possibilities, and highlighted the need to combine being entertaining with making a point.

Johnnie Moore spotted the video below, which shows how one person who is autistic communicates with the world. It is entrancing and intriguing and it part of a series of youtube films made to suport the work of www.autistics.org – a site which is also using second life to make their case.

The key lesson hear is that to be engaging you don’t need to set out to entertain. You do need to be authentic.

Couple this with news that Google is close to releasing a means of earning advertising income from you youtube videos and (ethics of taking advertising as a proviso) being engaging may also help your group raise money online.