Going Digital: YouTube for Business

[00:00:18] Hello everybody, I am one of your hosts Scott coming to you from Toronto. Hello and I'm the other host Andy coming to you from the United Kingdom again. Hello Andy, I almost forgot to click the button that puts our faces on the screen. It was like music was rolling in and I realized I was just looking at the backdrop. Well that would have been a real shame for all of our viewers on YouTube.

[00:00:42] Welcome to the podcast everybody. This is Tea and Timbits, Global Perspectives on Business Development to Help You Prosper. We are going to continue our theme for the month to talk about things digital, good digital experiences, what that means and put a business development spin on it. We thought we might get into a little bit about YouTube as I'm even thinking about it, introducing the topic Andy.

[00:01:12] I think it probably needs to involve a little bit of a discussion about just the general social media landscape as well, but maybe we focus on the video, but we'll get there. So it is your turn to bring us in with some thoughts and reflections of the moment. What do you got Andy? I must admit, I missed a little bit of what you said there due to a connection issue, but I'm sure you were asking me about a story that I might have for today. Well done!

[00:01:41] In which case... You got the rhythm of this podcast. Yeah, that's right. Only taking a few months to get there. I like knowing that I can just be replaced with like a robot and you'll know what... It's all your good coaching Scott that's got me here, so don't worry. Yes, that's a story Andy.

[00:02:00] This particular story, it's something that's not just limited to this particular person that I'm going to be talking about, but this person knows who I am talking about and she knows that I'm going to be telling this story at some point. She just doesn't know it's going to be today because it's a little bit fresher than I might have liked to have these stories.

[00:02:24] But anyway, her name is Charlotte and she said I can use her first name, but not the rest of her name. She's a chief commercial officer at a maritime logistics company, and she really prides herself on her communication skills and her leadership skills. And she's really, really, really punchy in terms of, you know, making quick decisions, those decisions being followed through and respected by her team and everything.

[00:02:53] And, you know, she's very good with her strategies. She's really good on getting the team to do the prospecting and all this sort of stuff. So, her leadership is really, really unquestionable. But her email inbox is somewhat of a different story. And this is something that we've been working on because basically outside of the outside of the board meetings and so on, she is very, very poor with email communications.

[00:03:21] And so, unfortunately, this means that approvals end up getting stacked up. Some of her some of her key clients and stuff who are then reaching out to the next level for clarifications are being missed. And yeah, and then other business partners and stuff looking to jump on new ventures somewhat end up losing the timelines there. And this, of course, combined with different time zones and things have had a real impact on her overall ability.

[00:03:51] And, of course, the more it comes on, the more she becomes stressed, the harder it becomes for her to prioritize those things. And then with some recent weather disruptions to some of her service delivery, it has then been even more challenging for her to stay on top of things because, of course, she's had a lot of emails going into her inbox. And then she's had a lot of emails going into her inbox about all of this stuff and operational matters that have a commercial impact. And it's just become chaos.

[00:04:20] So, essentially, what we did is we decided to confront that backlog in a way and prioritize the different emails and create a folder structure, create a structure of process because everything was just coming into the same inbox. There was no filtering. There was no, you know, allocations or linking or prioritizing or tagging of anything at all. It was all just in a list.

[00:04:44] And so we spent a bit of time on sorting that out and, most importantly, delegating. And that has been, of course, a significant change for her to take some of that responsibility off herself and allow her team to start engaging in some of that. And it was just a learning thing because I think we can all be quite guilty of that. We all want to be very good at that. But it is a boring admin task that people in commercial roles typically don't tend to favor.

[00:05:14] And this was one that was holding her back. You know, we're not in the green yet, but we're certainly on the right path again together. But certainly try and schedule a time for emailing. Prioritize, categorize, and delegate is really the key there. And, you know, don't have your life ruled by emails, but also don't then have that as a big bag holding or an anchor holding you back in a way.

[00:05:44] Yeah, absolutely. As you're going, I've got so many thoughts and I'm like, this could be the entire episode. You're like email prioritization. Do you have a system for yourself? I do. What I've done, though, the problem is because I have sort of tried to adapt to different companies' ways of doing things when I've gone into different companies. So I've kind of taken in different versions as time has gone on.

[00:06:09] So some of my older inboxes, email inboxes, are structured in a very clear particular way with folders for different customers and categorizations. And there's a lot of automation in that. And yet some of the newer ones, they're a little bit more haphazard. And I can sometimes find myself getting a bit confused because I'm like, oh, well, why hasn't that categorized? Why hasn't that gone into these? Oh, yeah, that's right. It's one of these inboxes. So, you know, I try to have that. But, you know, I have multiple inboxes.

[00:06:35] I have multiple businesses that I'm dealing with and it can be at times confusing. But I try to allocate time to each one as I go throughout the day. And I try to categorize and I try to make sure that I have an empty inbox every Monday. Yeah, there you go. I was going to say, like, there's all kinds of these mechanisms and we could fill a whole episode for whatever it's worth. My strategy, I don't have to manage multiple inboxes, at least not as many as you do.

[00:07:05] If it's an email that I see and I know, like, when it comes in and I look at it, if it needs a response from me, there's a pin feature, at least in my book, where you just go, okay, that one I need to reply to. Everything else just keeps going. And I might scan down and there might be some things that are FYI or maybe I'll go back to it. Or, you know, like, but basically if I need to, if I need to be the one to reply to it, it gets a pin and then it goes to the top and it stays there until I've dealt with it.

[00:07:35] And then sometimes that list of pinned emails gets a little bit unwieldy. And that's a good signal to me to like, oh, I have to carve out time and I have to prioritize getting this through. Because I think that's also something that she did as well is if she'd put a flag on it, oh, that's really important. I need to deal with that. Yeah. In her mind, she'd kind of dealt with it. Right, right, right, right. So this was the thing.

[00:08:01] It was like, you know, don't take an action to take action later. Right, right. Take that action, complete that task and then move on. And that was the thing because for her, that was just not working. So mentally she was like, oh, I've dealt with that because I've already flagged it. I've done this and I've done that later. And then a week later, she's still not responded to it because it's no longer priority and there's 700 new ones coming. Yeah, I try to make the filter though being like, I'm the one that has to weigh in. Like this is, I'm the one blocking this.

[00:08:30] There's a difference between that and like just wanting to stay on top and read all the important emails. They're all got some level of importance. Yeah. So anyway, there you go. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for getting our, everybody's now thinking about their inbox hygiene. Maybe we should do an episode on it another time then. We can go a bit deeper into it. Maybe we can get Charlotte on the show as well. That would be a good idea. I'm not sure she'd do a link, but yeah, we could try.

[00:08:59] So shall we talk about leveraging YouTube and perhaps that we'll get into sort of social media and video in terms of business development. Where do you see this impacting your world? I mean, does the maritime shipping industry have YouTube channels? Where do you see this? Yeah. I think all businesses of all sizes and everybody should be paying attention to YouTube.

[00:09:30] The main audience for YouTube engagement is at the younger age. It is in the late teens and sort of mid twenties. That is the ones who are most engaged in YouTube. However, there's a big portion of potential staff, employees and customers who are in that demographic.

[00:09:53] And if they are now, of course, engaging in it at that age, then they, of course, are going to still see that as a primary medium for them as they get older, as they develop.

[00:10:04] And so I think now is a very important time to be embracing YouTube, using YouTube and understanding that there is a difference between the long form version of YouTube and the YouTube shorts and things like reels and stuff which are on Instagram and other platforms such as TikTok. If you still live in a country where you can have that. So I'm going to challenge you a little bit there.

[00:10:33] I think we're painting with a really broad brush. I mean, you're not wrong when you say it's a younger generation that is consuming most of YouTube's bandwidth. But I think in terms of business development and the conversation that we're having, it really depends on your business, whether or not that is even a factor you need to worry about.

[00:10:59] I have a feeling that people in the commercial maritime shipping industry would kind of hear that and go, oh, well, I guess that means no YouTube for me because I don't need to talk to that's not a priority for me. But the reality is that, yes, fine, there's still lots of because they're consuming shorts and reels and pop stuff.

[00:11:23] They're not, they're consuming a completely different kind of content on that channel in that medium than what we're referring to here. So from a brand perspective, if you, if that's your target audience, if you need to reach those folks and they're the ones with the dollars that you're trying to, trying to influence. Yes, absolutely.

[00:11:44] But if you're in the B2B space, what, what, what's your answer to, you know, leveraging? Is there a place for that? How would you advise somebody in that scenario? Yeah, I, I've certainly seen companies in, yeah, in maritime shipping, logistics, entertainment, music, and so on, all engaging it in very different ways, sometimes with, you know, good effect and sometimes less so.

[00:12:13] And the ones that do it less well are the ones that just dump content out there, go, oh, we've got YouTube, let's dump content. What's very important and is the difference between a successful YouTube platform and not is that consistent and branded content that when someone sees it, they have that visual cue that indicates that this is part of that organization's communication.

[00:12:41] And so whether it's a moving video communication, whether it's a presentation, whether it's a printed document or a PowerPoint, that should, that experience should be seamless. It should be clearly identified as part of that brand. And I think that's where a lot of companies fall down.

[00:13:02] The advantage with doing long form YouTube is that you then have the possibility to break that up into things like shorts, into other content, into even taking stills from that and using that in some of your other corporate communications. And this is for both internal and external communications. That's important that YouTube isn't just for, you know, promoting your product to potential customers. It's about communicating internally as well.

[00:13:31] Yeah, exactly. I think it is just about making, so I guess this is where I wanted to also make sure that we're not just talking about YouTube because I want to shift it a little bit to the conversation. I want to talk about video as your medium. Yes, yeah. One, it's becoming that much easier to produce video.

[00:13:58] It is actually a little bit more natural for people to, a lot of people are uncomfortable turning the camera on and how do I look and all that kind of stuff. But a lot of people are like, whatever, who cares? This is who I am. I'm just going to hit record. And in that case, it's so easy to get the message out, get the content produced.

[00:14:19] From a corporate perspective, if there's anything that you can do to accelerate your capacity for producing that kind of content for support, like what would have been a support article is now a support video.

[00:14:34] Like a product how to assembly, how we work, anything that you're trying to communicate to your audience, both in terms of prospects that you're trying to attract and get them interested and communicate the values and benefits of what you do to existing customers and how you want to work with them and how you can support them and resources they might find valuable. There's a ton of utility in producing that as video content.

[00:15:01] The really cool thing, and we do it on this podcast, is when you're done, all these tools now give you a transcript. You can use AI to turn that transcript into the blog post that you need to accompany that. And then you've killed two birds with one stone. You've just been kind of stream of consciousness. The transcript comes out that turns into a blog post for, you know, if your audience is more predisposed to that. So it's a very, you know, efficient, effective way to get your content out there.

[00:15:29] Now, YouTube can be a really useful content library. I've got all this content and instead of saving it on your own hard drive, create a corporate YouTube channel and upload, upload, upload. You made the point, like, don't just create content for content's sake. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying you've created this content because you've thought about it. You know how it's going to serve your objectives and you're going to be producing it at some sort of cadence. If it's once a month, once a quarter, whatever, once a day.

[00:15:59] But post it, publish it. The minute you do that, all of that gets consumed by the algorithm. And then it increases the likelihood that you're going to resonate with somebody. They're going to find you. We did a video about three years ago about what is a content management system for web development. And it's about 10 minutes long. And every single month, it outranks every other piece of content that we've produced. Amazing.

[00:16:28] And it's years old because we just hit something. People search for that and whatever. And then it kind of, it's a self-fulfilling situation because then the algorithm goes, oh, this is a popular video. So it makes it more popular. Yeah. So, and then it doesn't need to be just out through YouTube. So you might be producing these shorts and there's, you know, those are great pieces of content for social media.

[00:16:57] Social media does not want you to post long form video, at least for the most part. You know, LinkedIn and TikTok and Instagram and whatnot are looking for sound bites. And, and, and so definitely think about, you know, the, the, the content that you've got, where your audience is, where to put it and use video to your, to your benefit for the right channel there.

[00:17:20] But absolutely use, use YouTube as, as a library for posterity, for, for, for search, for, you know, AI to understand what you, what you are and how to drive people to you. What's your perspective on individual contributors? So team members, management and so on in having their own channels? In terms of just in general or in terms of their own channels?

[00:17:49] In terms of with it having a purpose that links somewhat to the business narrative. Like, like people would do on LinkedIn, let's say. Yeah. Okay. So let's use LinkedIn and I have my own LinkedIn account and, and I post out there to, to, to nurture my own audience as an extension of the brand that I represent. That's your scenario. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I, like, I just, that is so effective. That is so smart. That is so useful.

[00:18:18] There are so many brands that just, um, I've seen, I've seen. There's sort of two ways of managing that. One is the, the company actually manages your personal page and then, and then you don't adopt a persona. You, you just end up, the company ends up just regurgitating their marketing stuff and it's so inauthentic. It's a terrible thing.

[00:18:42] And then the, the second, uh, I've seen is, is a, is a ban is a, is a, is a blackout on now that no, you, you know, anything has to be approved by and it has to go through. Now, listen, I think there's, there's compliance people that make a lot of money and there's regulated industries. And there's, if you say the wrong word at the wrong time in the wrong way, it's going to come back on us.

[00:19:09] And that's unfortunate, but I appreciate the fact that there is a reality in certain industries. Um, I still think those businesses, oh, they're doing themselves a disservice by just reacting that way. Absolutely. Give your staff the boundaries, speaking points, give them the fricking script that you've approved and then have them. Read it instead. And if they go off script, well, you know, that's a different situation.

[00:19:37] You can't control, um, you know, what they say in a meeting. Why would it be any different? Um, but allowing other people to, um, to extend your brand, to give it more flavor and color, I think absolutely makes it more authentic, makes it more, um, accessible, makes it more engaging and productive. Yeah. No, I, I, I, did you expect a different answer? No, I didn't.

[00:20:02] But, uh, I, I don't have personally much experience in, uh, in YouTube or using YouTube and, um, or video format, despite, you know, being very comfortable in doing that type of thing. I don't use it. I don't use it as a medium and I, I know I should do. And we can all say that, but, uh, but I'm very much in that camp of, you know, I'm comfortable in front of the camera. I have no problem speaking in front of a group of people.

[00:20:26] I have no problem doing these podcasts and things, but I just don't do it because I can't quite think, well, why would anyone want to listen to what I have to say? You know, it's like, yeah, it's, it's really strange from a perspective. If they don't want to add it onto it, it's fine. Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. And that's the strange thing is that, but that, that still holds me back.

[00:20:47] And I know that's the case with a lot of people I go and talk to, um, the, you know, this, this podcast on a weekly basis is, is kind of my contribution to that in a way, you know, by, uh, by the fact that we film this and we put it out on the, on YouTube is, is pretty much all I do. But that's purely reactive as opposed to proactive on my part. So, you know, I, I have, I have to get better at that as well because I, I see the value in it, but personally I haven't, I haven't used that, uh, to generate value or interest.

[00:21:16] So, which reminds me, I'm pretty far behind on getting these episodes posted on YouTube. Yeah. Okay. They're on Spotify. Exactly. They're all on Spotify. Yeah. Um, but, uh, but we do many other podcasts. So please go and check them all out. That's right. Um, very good. Well, thank you, uh, for that exploration and, uh, kicking us off with, um, uh, some reflections on how to be better at managing our inboxes as well.

[00:21:46] And what to do about, um, uh, advancing our, our video content production. Um, if you want to get in touch, please go to T and Timbits.com. Uh, and, uh, we'll catch you on the next episode. Thanks, Andy. Thank you very much, Scott. Been a pleasure as always. Cheers.