Building a YouTube community

Grant Leboff: Danny, one of the things I’m interested in using YouTube for, is building a community around you on YouTube, getting users involved and other things. Are there any techniques, tips, you can give the viewers to understand perhaps how to do that better?

Danny Bermant: I think where social media works best is getting your audience involved with what we call, user generated content. You don’t just put out video but you also encourage your audience to contribute themselves. There is a brand called Orabrush who have done that very successfully. Oral hygiene can be a bit of a taboo subject – people don’t necessarily talk about it – but they have encouraged their audience to go online and submit reviews about when they’ve use this oral hygiene product and what they think about it.

People are quite narcissistic. I don’t mean that in a negative way but people love talking about themselves. We often talk in YouTube about the four important words; ‘make me feel important’. So make your audience feel important by inviting them to contribute and saying; if you send in your contributions we will share those with our audience. In some cases it’s incentivising them, it’s using some kind of competition or some kind of the incentive to actually encourage them to take part and engage with them once they’ve taken part.

Grant Leboff: A lot of the conversations I have with customers will be; that’s great, good advice, but that’s all for business to consumer brands isn’t it… competitions and things like that? So when you are a business to business brand, I believe you can still get user generated content, but of course, you get businesses saying ‘Oh it’s all right for the consumer market but not for us’. What do you think businesses can be doing in a B2B situation to try and generate user generated content from themselves?

Danny Bermant: I think they need to actually engage with some of those business owners. For example, if you are creating a YouTube channel and you are, say, an accountancy firm and you want your audience to give their feedback on what you’ve done for them, I think you actually need to be a bit of a facilitator. You need to say, we love your feedback and would actually like to do some interviews with you. They might be quite happy to do that because that will help to get them promotion as well. It will help promote their businesses, so they’ll be up for that.

With B2B I think you need to be a little bit more involved in actually drawing them in and getting them to contribute. Testimonials is one easy way, another way of getting B2B YouTube to work quite well is to actually interview remotely. If you are using video conference software like gotomeeting you can actually interview clients and actually record the screen interview and then share that on you Tube using tools like Screenflow on the Mac and Camtasia on PC.

Grant Leboff: And of course  there is leveraging  Google+ as well, in terms of hosting webinars on the hangouts and then feeding their live into YouTube as well. Can you please explain a little bit more about that?

Danny Bermant Google hangouts are a great way to leverage your network. You can invite up to nine people to join your hang out and even if you have exceeded that number, you can create a hangout on air, which is basically a large streamed video which audiences can watch. I think the more audience participation you have, the more credibility you have. If something is staged, if something is scripted, they are not sure about it, but if your audience is getting involved, people have more confidence in you and your brand. Of course, the beauty of it all is once you’ve produced it, it’s there on YouTube. It’s easy to share.

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