#H2HChat Building a Video Strategy that Works with Mark Fidelman

Hey everybody, how are you doing? This is Bryan Kramer. We're back with another H2H Weekly Chat, and today I'm really excited to have my buddy, my friend, my pal, and also a really, really smart guy, a guy that I met years ago. I think now I can finally say years ago, and we met at a conference. He was kind enough as he was speaking at the conference to take some time to talk with me about book publishing and all kinds of things, and really, really appreciate the time he gave me then and now. And so really excited to have Mark Fidelman here on with us. Mark is the CEO of Fanatics Media. He has also written a book, a really well-known, great book called Socialized, and he's done a lot of other awesome things in his career, but I'm going to let him give a brief intro of himself as well. Mark, how are you doing today?

I'm doing well, Bryan, and I think you did the right thing by ignoring all the advice I gave you and you just went for it, and I see how successful you are with it. So well done.

That's funny. No, I don't think that's the case, but thank you so much. And tell everybody, for the people that don't know Mark, give everybody an idea as to who Mark is. And let's talk about you as though you're in the third person. How's that?

All right, well, okay, that's gonna be tough to do.

I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

So I started my career in sales about 20 years ago and kept finding myself bugging the marketing team about, yeah, you should be doing this and that. And, you know, had no clue about marketing, but I still felt like, you know, this was something that I believe I should be moving into because, A, you know, I didn't see the quality of leads that were coming into sales. And I felt I could do it better, and I saw all this opportunity for creativity. To make a long story short, although I was in sales, I was more of a right-brained salesperson. I wanted to come up with creative things to move the needle, to drive leads to sales. And so when the internet started to take off and we all started to see all of these types of activities, social activities that were occurring, especially in the mid to early 2000s, I said, here's my opportunity to kind of jump in, learn it, You know, put my money where my mouth is essentially, and do both this quasi-marketing and sales. So I then bounced around between corporate sales and marketing positions, you know, Fortune, let's say 250, then to startups and then back again. And so I'm kind of oscillating back and forth, and I finally figured out, hey, I should just work for myself, start with a small startup, build it up into, you know, a mid— corporation and hopefully retire. But my focus at this point is primarily on marketing and now a little bit of sales. It was flipped 20 years ago. I don't know if that helps, but—

It helps a lot. And it's funny, I'm laughing with you because that's such a normal response from a marketer, you know, quality marketer that kind of goes with the change because there is so much change that happens, you know, in a couple years. And now all of a sudden the change is happening almost within months. There's so many different new things that are happening, and we're trying to keep up not only with that, but also the companies that are asking us to do that. You've pivoted recently into even more specific, kind of this whole Fanatics Media approach. What made you do that, and what is that all about?

Well, I mean, the influencer— we're still heavily with Evolve. I still run that company. That's only influencer marketing. But there is so much competition in influencer marketing. You've got a bunch of platforms that are out there. You have quite a few full-service agencies like Evolve. And so I saw, you know, I'm trying to skate where the puck is going, not where it's at. And I'm starting to see some things. And I know today we're talking about video. I'm starting to see some that we need to get ahead of. So Evolve and Fanatics are separated due to legal constraints. Fanatics is more focused on some of these other things that we're going to talk about, more of a full-service digital agency as opposed to Evolve, which is just an influencer agency at this point.

Okay, so a large part of this and what we're talking about today is video, and video has changed the way that people can influence but also educate. It's taken on a whole life of its own, and it's not anything new when it comes to YouTube. YouTube has been around for years, you can't say it's been around for longer than maybe a decade, but it's been around for years, and so how do you see video being used now as opposed to the last 5 years that YouTube came out? I mean, there's a lot of changes, you're using it in a different way I think than most.

Well, I'm still trying to figure out how to best communicate our value as an agency to our prospective marketers. I mean, it's not like marketers are tuning into YouTube in masses and droves. I'm gonna have to spend a lot of money to get them to come to my YouTube channel to take a look and subscribe. So I'm doing that. There are, and I'm gonna have a post coming up pretty shortly, there's like 10 good business channels that are really doing well. But beyond that, there's not many. Whereas the influencers we work with on YouTube, there's tens of thousands. that are really killing it on YouTube every single day. It's just that the business community hasn't quite moved over to YouTube for whatever reason, but I know they're going to, so I'm just trying to get ahead of it. That's all I'm doing.

When you say there's that many doing really well, what do you mean by that? They're doing really well?

I mean, this is shocking to most marketers I talk to, which I don't know why. Maybe because I spend too much time in the YouTube universe. It doesn't matter what subject you choose. Like, I'll say woodworking. There's a guy named Steve Ramsey that we work with. He's got 700,000 subscribers on YouTube. All he's doing is putting wood projects together every single day, and I've got people lined up to want to work with this guy. And, you know, there are thousands of Steve Ramseys just in wood and steel and home projects that are out there, maybe not as big. But, you know, they have their own audience, their own impact on YouTube that I've only seen— the only other place that I've seen this is when Facebook was more organic around its fan pages. I mean, these people on YouTube are just crushing it. Every time they put out a video, they get hundreds of thousands, some millions of views, and the comments just keep going and going and going, which is why I think YouTube is going to make an announcement that they're going to become more of a social network coming up. We can talk about that later if you want.

Let's talk about that right now. They failed at Google+. Even Hangouts, the thing that we're on right now, is going to be taken down in September and moved over to YouTube Live. Right. Social has taken on, and you wrote a book called Socialize, so I'm really interested in what you think about this. has changed, maybe the definition of socialized, social, has changed since maybe you first wrote that book. Would you agree, and how so?

No, it's funny. I look back on that book, I'm like, oh, if I only would have done this or that. And the problem is it's really a 3-and-a-half-year-old book because even when you finish the book, there's still a 6-month process to get the publisher and everybody else lined up to put it on the bookstore shelves. Regardless, so social has changed tremendously and it's going to continue to evolve. And now we're getting into VR and AR applications. It's going to— it's the only way I see for us to survive as an agency is to stay ahead of those things and start experimenting and start working with it. I haven't done any VR or AR things yet, but you can bet after, you know, we go through this YouTube process, we're going to head in that direction. I don't know if that answered your question or not, but that's what we're

doing. You have put an immense amount of hours into figuring out YouTube, and you did it well. I've been watching your growth and seeing what you've done, kind of stalking you a little bit, if you will, in a good way, as only a friend could do. I was looking at some of the videos that you've done, and you really have taken something quite simplistic and made it— made some really, really incredible growth. And so maybe you could talk about that. Like, first, why did you do that? And then second, how?

Okay, so 80% of our traffic comes from our YouTube videos. So that's why. I mean, I always put the first line, you know, fanaticsmedia.com. Other ways in video to get people to click through. What you're seeing now is 120 videos that are just one big massive experiment. Now, marketers aren't lurking on YouTube, so I've had to pay to bring those people in. I still do today, not a whole lot, not like I was before, but pay to bring a whole lot of people into that environment. We were also asking everybody and their mother to follow us on, on YouTube. So maybe if you follow me on Twitter, you got a DM saying, hey, if you like our Twitter content, go over to YouTube and subscribe. So I did that to my 65,000 followers. We're still doing it in hopes that they subscribe. I know it's a little spammy, but I'm hoping if they see how put into our content on Twitter, they say, hey, he's putting that kind of care into it, let's go over to YouTube. Like 20 of— I've hired somebody specifically to promote me on YouTube. So there's like 20 we do, uh, in order to grow that channel. And still to this day, Bryan, it's not as engaging as I want it to be. We might average 5 to 10 comments on some videos, 20 to 30 on others, but, you know, I want it to be a lot higher.

We— I want to go back to that statistic. You're sending 80% of traffic from YouTube over and you're seeing a higher value of traffic coming from YouTube than you were from Twitter, Facebook, anywhere else.

That's correct because we're essentially laying out what we do in a very clever way. Like if it's a marketing hack or some kind of review of a marketing campaign that just occurred, you know, our call to action is subscribe to us, number one, but number two is, hey, if you want to do things like this, Just, it'll take you right to our homepage. So we've just given ourselves a commercial, and that commercial's video as opposed to a little tweet. I think I can count on one hand how many times people have hired me directly from a tweet. Now, over time, as we develop relationships, Twitter's fantastic because it's easy to set up meetings and get meetings. But, uh, YouTube, it's— you've just watched my commercial, but it wasn't about us. It was about doing or trick that we use in our practice, and they look, think to themselves, well, Mark's only half crazy. I think I can work with a guy that's half crazy, and maybe his team's not crazy. So they'll pick up the phone or they'll just email us and just say, hey, we've got this major problem, this marketing issue. What can you do to help us?

I love it. I'm gonna ask you in a second why you think either Snapchat as a commercial or Instagram moments as a commercial, 'cause those are the same kind of concepts, Why you didn't pick those or aren't using them, so you can kind of start thinking about your answer there. But before we do that, could you give us— you said there are 20 things you can do on YouTube or that you did on YouTube. Maybe you could just give us a few.

Sure. Well, one is the DM on Twitter. I mean, if you've got a large following anywhere, the first thing you want to do is start driving subscribers. And a subscriber on YouTube is very cool because every time you put out a video, YouTube sends an email to them and says, hey, check out this video. The other thing that we did is we did the 30-day challenge, which I'm still in the middle of it. But we did, we did a similar type of challenge. It wasn't every day, but we're doing a video every day for 30 days. Now that sounds spammy, but our topics are like the Pokémon Go craze, you know, that are topical and, and people don't mind seeing something like that every day. Today we're going to do something on Kaepernick. You know, and his antics and, you know, kind of a lesson there for brands as to what not to do, or for people that are trying to personally brand themselves, you know, and what not to do and how to recover from it.

Will you be sitting down or standing up when you do that one?

Well, that's what we're trying to figure out. Will I start it like this with my hand over my heart, or will I be sitting down with a grimace on my face and messed up hair? I don't know how I'm gonna do it yet. We gotta figure it out before this afternoon. But so that's number 2 is like, Do a 30-day challenge. Come up with 30 videos. If you can't do it, if you can't come up with 30 videos, do something topical every single day. We look at the Twitter trend, see what's trending on Twitter. We look at anything that Kardashians are doing and just kind of using that as a lesson on what not to do in most cases. Those are the things that you can do not only for great SEO value, but for great social sharing value. Another thing that we'll do is, you know, we'll message other YouTubers. Oh, I can't tell you how many. I've had this guy send out thousands and thousands and thousands and say, hey, can you follow us on YouTube and we'll follow you? You know, kind of the Twitter trick, but for YouTube. And the point is you want to reach out to, to people. And we've made a mistake. We've made several mistakes, but you want to reach out to people that would potentially watch your channel, not just any Joe Blow. You know, you really want to reach out to other marketers if you're us, or anybody that— maybe salespeople or other, other people with channels that are similar to yours. So you, you want to build it up that way. And then you'll find that we spend a lot of time focusing on YouTube tags and the description. So SEO value for me is ultimately what's most important. So we might get 750 to 1,000 views the first 2 or 3 days, And then over time, because the SEO value is so good from the title, description, and the tags— and by the way, YouTube is listening to what's going on in the video because, you know, they can transcribe it for you. I've seen it. So they're listening to that. You got to make sure all those things align and you'll get great SEO value. I don't have a lot of competition on YouTube because there's not a lot of marketers that are doing it consistently and doing it well. So if you're in marketing and you want to set up a YouTube channel, I'd say Have at it. I mean, you'll be a competitor to me, but at least you'll be driving more marketers that I can go to and say, hey, you're following Bryan Kramer, why don't you follow me? You know, I did that to Gary Vaynerchuk subscribers. We've done it to everybody. So that's the other— that's kind of the other trick. And maybe I'm thinking to myself, maybe we should just come out with another 30-day, here's what I did on YouTube. Every single day is a new kind of tip or trick. I'm thinking maybe that's what we'll do.

I love it, man. You know what I love about you is you're never opposed to trying everything possible to see what works and what doesn't, even if it has to break the internet. We have a lot of people on right now that are asking some really great questions. Let's see, JS, Lenka Kapova, and tons of others. Kathy is on. Mia Dan, Don Renshaw, and the list goes on. We've got lots of great people. Everybody, I want you to please join #H2HChat. That is #H2HChat on Twitter, and you can ask questions, which I'll be turning around and asking of Mark on your behalf when we hit 12:30 Pacific Standard Time, so in about 15 minutes. I'm going to take your questions and ask them using your name, obviously, to give you some attribution, and we will ask those questions. Mark, we've got some great ones coming in already from JS and Lenka, so keep them coming. Mark, I wanted to ask you what your thoughts are of the video that you're getting on YouTube versus the views that you get when you upload a video to Facebook. Facebook has some— when I upload a video or do a live video, the views are astronomically bigger. I haven't put as much time and investment in YouTube as you have, but you've seen the difference. What are the benefits? What do you think are the challenges?

I can tell you for a fact that we get more traffic from YouTube with less views than I get on Facebook. I attribute that to a couple of things. One, counts a view even if somebody's scrolling by it and it starts running, I believe. I don't think they wait. you know, 5 or 6 seconds to count that as a view. So it's kind of— you're kind of forced to watch it, whereas on YouTube you have to hit the play button or you have to go there physically to see a video. So the quality of views on YouTube I think are far higher than on Facebook. But most importantly, if you're only doing videos on Facebook, I would highly, highly, highly convince you to start with YouTube, then go to Facebook for one simple reason, and that is SEO value. Your videos will not be found on Facebook unless somebody specifically is searching for your video on Facebook, whereas on Google, of course, they're showing a lot of YouTube content in the search results, and YouTube is the number 2 most used search engine in the world. So if you've got how-to content like we do, you've got entertaining content, especially if you follow the SEO strategies that are out there, you'll do so much better on YouTube in the long haul than you will on Facebook.

Great, great. I always wondered about that because the views— there's a lot of what we're calling social proof or vanity metrics, but at the end of the day, and I know you think like this because these are always the questions you drive that get some pretty inspiring conversations going on Facebook with some of our mutual friends. I use inspiring loosely because there's some pretty interesting conversations. If anybody out there is watching, Mark, and I right now. Make sure you follow him on Facebook, and you'll see some really fun, interesting conversations come together with some of the luminaries, if you will, of social. So anyway, I'm curious too how you convert. I mean, you, if anyone, looks at ROI differently, or maybe straight the way that marketers should, and that's conversion of email address. Or conversion of something, like an actual conversion. How did you approach your YouTube strategy with a conversion strategy?

So because we worked with a lot of influencers that we have now almost 80% of what we do with influencer marketing is on YouTube, we know how they're converting those people to Either buyers of a product if it's B2C, or if it's B2B, more download something or visit this page. So for me, it's very important to say, if I give you $10,000 and you're not able to return that $10,000— not on YouTube, it'll last a year, that video, maybe even longer— but if you're not able to return that, that video, uh, what I paid for that video, 6x or 10x, then For me, it's probably not worth doing it. So let me give you an example with YouTube. It doesn't cost me much to produce these videos, especially the daily ones where somebody's holding an iPhone 6 at me and I have nothing else other than just an iPhone 6. I mean, it literally costs me nothing. And then I just use Camtasia to quickly edit it and throw it up. We've gotten— I'll tell you today, it's either a $60,000 or $70,000 deal from a large cable provider because they saw one thing that interests them on influencer marketing by watching these videos. The ROI for me is pretty clear. I'm going to keep doing them until it doesn't work anymore. The value is there for me. Now, if I'm selling a $1 widget, it's a different dynamic. I've got to work with influencers that can bring millions of views and then hopefully not pay a lot of money for that and see if they are able to sell over time $6, $7 million in product. It all depends on what you're looking for. We've got other companies that come to us and say, we just want awareness. We're not worried about conversion. We just want people to know we exist. That's a very easy thing to do on YouTube, much better than buying TV spots on cable TV. I mean, we've got families— there are literally families on YouTube that every time they put out a video, they get 4 million views, and that's a very targeted market. Why you'd go to TV when you could spend, you know, far— like 1/10 with this family is beyond me. You wouldn't do it if you saw, you know, if you compare TV to this family.

So, Mark, I've seen a lot of people that have put up the— sorry, I can't remember the name of it. It's the script is actually readable on, on the video. I can't remember the terminology for that. And, and they're playing— they're using it mainly on YouTube because people— the video plays right away without audio and you can read it. Are you finding that that also helps on YouTube? And, and, and is that something that you're, you're putting into your, your mix, into your strategy?

I keep hearing I should do it. You mean where the words just pop up Based on what you're saying?

Yeah, the entire script comes up and you can read it if you don't have audio, which most of the time people are watching something and they don't dive into the video to hear it at first unless it's something interesting. If it doesn't have that, you skip over it. And so I'm wondering if that's something that you agree with and, and if you're using.

We're not using it. I haven't tested that out. Uh, that's a service that you have to subscribe to. I think TubeBuddy— by the way, TubeBuddy is a great tool to use with YouTube. I would not use YouTube without TubeBuddy. It's just a Chrome plugin or Chrome extension, but they have a service that's pretty inexpensive where they'll transcribe everything and you can just add it to your video as a closed caption. I think that's a very good move on Facebook to do that because it is coming across silent. You can start reading it and then decide whether you want to click on it. We just haven't done it yet.

Okay, and what is TubeBuddy?

So TubeBuddy is a YouTube extension not made by YouTube, but it's something everybody should get even if it's just the free version that allows you to do very complex tasks easily. So for example, I'm not putting in all my YouTube cards, if you know what YouTube cards are, or annotations. I'm just— YouTube Buddy will templatize that so I can just hit one button and it'll populate all my videos or one video with all the annotations or cards that I need, so I don't have to keep doing it each and every time because it's tedious. That's just one of the 50 things that they'll do for you. They'll recommend tags, they'll look at your competitors and say, here's what Bryan Kramer's doing. Not that you're a competitor, Bryan, but you know what I mean. And I can see what's working for you and what's not. And it's a free extension. Now, if you want the advanced features, you have to pay for it, but it's— I think it's under $100. It's a no-brainer.

Awesome. Okay, that's great.

Yeah.

The questions keep rolling in, so if you see my eyes darting off to the right, it's because you've got a pretty awesome amount of questions that we're going to get to here in 5 minutes. You still have time. Thanks, JS. Closed captioning is the name. Lots of questions coming in. Keep them coming. Even if we don't hit your question, we'll make sure that it gets turned into Mark. So Mark, what's next? For video, is it the same channel? Is it Instagram? Is it Snapchat? What is next for you in terms of your testing and your methodology for video?

Right now, all we're doing with Instagram is uploading a minute of every video that we have, and we point right back to our channel. We're not big Snapchat. We don't like Snapchat because the content disappears, and again, I'm very big on SEO. I have a business where you'll search on it. You may or may not have heard of me, but you'll definitely be searching on things like influencer marketing or video marketing, and I want to be found. I don't want to have to rely on Snapchat where nothing's— you can't even link into Snapchat. Nothing's findable. So for marketers, you know, I've said this 100 times, got beaten up for it, but I think over time I've won more people over, is that it's not a good marketing tool. It's a good tool for personal branding. It's a good tool for awareness if you want to reach the millennial audience. But if you're a marketer, now's not the time. Instagram, because they allow advertising, because they leverage Facebook's advertising, I think is a good tool. And you can link in, of course, have a little button now, the contact button, which helps. And within the ad itself, you can do a call to action as well.

Yeah.

So we like Instagram. They made one mistake in that they copied Snapchat, where the content disappears in 24 hours. I just can't figure this out. Even if you want it to be episodic content every day where it's, you know, you're uploading new content, why not just archive it? You know, why do I have to save it to my phone? My phone's going to run out of space pretty soon. So that's a huge mistake. I don't know why they did it that way. I suspect they'll change their mind once they start to see reactions.

Awesome. We're I think we're having just a tiny bit of breakup of the video or audio, so we're going to let it catch up here real quick, and and I think we'll be okay in about twenty seconds. So hang with us, and usually it catches up, and we're we're pretty clear. Thank you, Mia. Dan just put the post up about TubeBuddy. So if you guys want a link to that, it's in the the text feed. I know that Kathy. Klotz guest just asked that she was a bit unclear on the FB transcription, and basically what he was saying is that he hasn't tried it yet, but that's something that is in the works. So hopefully you can try that out, and YouTube Buddy, as I understand it, will help you do that. We'll get to questions here in just 2 more minutes, but my last question before I do that with Mark is, Mark, what is your ultimate goal with what you're doing with YouTube? What is your ultimate goal?

My ultimate goal is twofold. One, because I'm going through and experimenting with YouTube, I'm much more effective in negotiating with YouTube influencers because I know what works, what doesn't, what to ask for, even more importantly. So for me, that's been a godsend. The other, and I'd say even more important thing, is to create kind of this web TV concept for marketers, you know, that helps drive leads to my business, helps drive awareness about what we're doing, and it gives me another platform to kind of promote some of the things that I think need to be promoted out there.

Awesome. Okay, so I think that now is a great time to dive into the questions. Keep the questions coming. Again, even if we don't hit it, we'll still make sure that they get to Mark, and I know he's on Twitter as well, and we'll be able to probably answer a few of those if we ask him nicely, then we'll get to those as well. So let's start with Lenka Kapova. Great question. Agree, auto DMs with a link to your website is annoying. Is there a good way to use auto-DMs? How do you get past the— I know you think like a marketer on this and probably hate DMs that you receive, but yet you're sending them out. Where are you finding the balance?

Let me just be clear. I'm not auto-DMing. What's happening is I use a tool called RapidMessage to DM longtime subscribers to say, You know, if you're enjoying our content on Twitter, we're moving a lot of this to video and to subscribe to us on YouTube. So I don't want to auto-DM people. I just want to go and say, you've been following us for a while, you know, you maybe liked something or retweeted something, just try us on Twitter. If not, sorry for bothering you.

So

yes, we're using it in that way. It's not like I'm sending out 65,000 DMs every day. Right. Once every couple of months.

And what did you say the tool was?

Rapid Message.

Rapid Message.

Rapid, like the animal.

Rapid Message, okay.

Now there's other tools like SocialBro that'll do it, there's a lot of tools that'll do it, but I just use Rapid Message.

Sounds good, I just want to make sure everybody got that. Next question is from JS Gilbert, Mark, do you think people are falling in love with live video? Because it's sexy as opposed to really planning out content. I think our friend Mark has gone dark on live video, so I'm going to, I'm going to answer that question until Mark gets back on. JS, hopefully you can see me just fine. I believe that there is a lot of live video people out there That are not planning their content. And I do think that when you look at what Mark is doing on YouTube, and I do hope again you'll check out his channel because it's very much planned, unplanned. He's planning, yes, we're going to do 30 days, yes, we're going to do it in this format, yes, we're going to do beginning, middle, and end, and there's a storyline for each one of them. The unplanned is the actual content because it's built on what's going on currently. And so I think that that is way better and should be addressed on live video as well. Why not, right? Why not plan 30 days of live content, beginning, middle, and end, and what's going on? So Mark, I don't know if you're with us. Nope. I'm here. Okay, all right.

Sorry about that.

That's all right, it's all right. Um, tell me about your— did you hear what the question was? You want me to rephrase that?

If you don't mind rephrasing it.

Yeah, Mark said, what live video platform do you like? for conducting live interviews? Sorry, sorry, that's his next question. Mark, do you think people are falling in love with live video because it's sexy as opposed to really planning content?

I'll be honest with you, I haven't found a decent case for live video that's ROI-friendly, marketing-friendly. Now I could see a future QVC that's done with live video where you're selling your own products. Um, but it's, if it's not at a pre-programmed time, then you're, you're not going to hit everybody that you want to hit. So why not just record the video anyway? So I haven't quite figured out the use case for live video unless it's like announcing an event or doing something that requires you to be live, like news.

Yeah.

So I'm still trying to figure this out myself, which is why I don't do a lot, a lot of live events. I see all these Facebook live events and I'm like, why? What's the purpose here? Why couldn't you have recorded this and done some better video editing and presented yourself, you know, a little bit better? Yeah. So I'm not saying there isn't one, I just haven't found one that works for us yet.

Got it, got it. Um, okay, so next question from Emily: What do you think about BuzzFeed separating news and entertainment, moving towards a video-focused business model?

Yeah, I think it's very smart. I hadn't heard exactly what they're doing with video, but I see a lot of their videos. They do a really good job. The problem they're going to have is how do they— you know, to me, they're kind of like the Kmart of news and Kmart of content. How do they move to something that's a little bit higher quality and that resonates with more people? And I'm starting to see that. I think it's with the Yellow Channel on YouTube. BuzzFeed's Yellow Channel, but still, it's just, to me, it's just not quite there yet. I know they get a lot of viewers, I just don't know what benefit that is to their advertisers yet, but it remains to be seen.

Great stuff. Chris Yates said, if prerecorded and for social media, is 60 seconds or less the best?

No. Are we talking specifically on YouTube?

Let's, uh, let's, let's go both. Let's say one for YouTube, and because he didn't identify, so, uh, one, let's, let's say social, answer one for social and one for YouTube.

Okay, so yeah, for social, definitely if you're sharing it, you know, little snippets, not Vine short like 6 seconds, but a minute. Uh, but for YouTube, you know, I, I shoot short and long video. YouTube wants long-form content because they want to keep you on the site longer. It's hard to produce long-form content that resonates with people unless it's some kind of a how-to video or an interview that's just super engaging with all sorts of things flashing up and down. You're going to see a lot more of this from us going forward as we up our spend on the production. YouTube is very focused on long-term content. It's just Or long-form content. It's just figuring out a way to keep people engaged that entire time, which is not easy. From our numbers, most people sit through our 90-second videos, but about, you know, I'd say half to three-quarters drop off by the end of our 30 to 60-minute video. We're trying to fix this, but that's just reality for us.

Yeah, it's certainly a trial and error perspective as I'm hearing you talk through it. Rachel Miller asked a great question, is it easier to get likes on a Facebook page to leverage Facebook Live viewers or subscribers on YouTube?

Likes are far easier, I think. Subscriptions, because people know what that comes with, like an email every day, at least from us, are a lot harder. Yeah, I'd say a lot harder. There's still a bunch of people that don't understand how YouTube works. I'm shocked by that, but most people just go to a YouTube video and watch it and then And they're done. They're not thinking about subscribing to some of these individuals. Now millennials have a totally different mindset, but, you know, people in my generation, Generation X and baby boomers, still haven't really grasped what this YouTube environment is. And it's, it's a massive ecosystem with quite a few people in it. And I'd encourage all of you, if you haven't already, just really study what goes on there and start your own channel.

Awesome, awesome. Aldo Maragoni said, whether video, live or recorded, and email, etc., it comes down to planning and answering the question, why?

So the question for me is, why do I do it? Or the question is—

I think the question is, it comes down to planning and answering. So basically planning. Why is planning more, um, more, uh, successful than live video that's— that's— and I'm interpreting this question for, for him, so hopefully I'm getting this right, but I think it's planning is, is much, uh, much more, um, successful than, than a live video where you just get up and start talking like, um, some of our friends do.

Well, you know, it's funny, uh, I have only met a few people that can do recorded video well and live video well. I think they're two different people. So people like me are better recorded because I can edit it like crazy, and if I'm not interesting, I can make it interesting by popping up a bunch of stuff or having fun facts that pop up during my boring monologue. So live, I don't think I'm as interesting at all. I just don't have that type of personality, and I'm thinking about 3 other things while this— even this interview is going on. So Whereas there's other people that could just get so focused on the moment that everything comes out about who they are as a human being, the emotions, the— just the raw energy that you could feel through the lens. And those people are perfect for live video. They never have a shortage of things to say. And, you know, like somebody like Brian Fanzo, he just keeps going and going and going, right? And it's all interesting. It's all unique. It's all great content. That for me is just not me. I'd rather plan it out and be very strategic about what my approach is and what I'm trying to do and trying to accomplish rather than just turn on the camera and go.

Yeah, no, I hear you. You know, and it's— there's a quality to content too. I mean, you can talk for— and this is just my own personal feeling— but you can talk for 30 minutes I could talk for 30 minutes if I wanted to, but I feel like, you know, really 5 minutes of it is going to turn out to be quality, and I really want the quality to fit the timeframe rather than the timeframe to fit what everybody else thinks is important. I don't know if that makes sense or not. Mm-hmm. But Alan Berkson asked, how do you handle video UGC for your brand? Embrace, support, promote? I'm not sure if I know what UGC is. Do you?

No, I don't. But if you're talking about promoting it, how do I promote it?

Yeah, how do you handle— and maybe he'll tweet us here in a second to let us know what he meant by UGC. How do you handle video UGC for your brand? Embrace, support, or promote? Why don't we wait until he answers back to see what he means, because I don't know, I don't think— it doesn't sound like you do as well. Let's see here. We have a bunch more questions, but I'm going to ask you one that I have been meaning to interject. Oh, here we go. User-generated content.

How do I handle user-generated content?

How do you handle video for user-generated content for your brand or probably for your clients' brands? Embrace it, support it, promote it.

Well, we do way more than that, by the way. Most brands— and I hope we do dive into this, Bryan— really don't know how to produce content for the digital age, specifically on YouTube. And so we script it, we do the ideas, we give them ideas, they approve some ideas, we script it loosely. If an influencer is involved, we let the influencer do their own thing. We just want certain message points That are put into it. We make sure the lighting's right, the video's right, and we make sure that it's promoted. Half of doing these videos is, okay, so how are you going to promote these things, make sure that this quality video is actually seen? We plan from A to Z for our clients because most clients aren't equipped to be able to, A, shoot quality video that's interesting, but B, get it out there on YouTube and have an audience for it.

Do you have any tools or tips for generating your own video if you were to get started today as a user generating content? What would you say could make the video go from a quick little thing on your iPhone to just the next step up where it looks like you put a little effort into it? What does that?

I know on the Mac there's, I think it's iMovie. I think is what it is. You know, have an intro and an outro and, you know, make sure your name and company is listed somewhere in a lower third, at least initially. It depends on the video. I mean, if you're doing a product video, there's a totally different way of doing this, but you want a little bit of video editing done to every video. Just don't upload something and expect people to find it, A, and B, uh, because they're looking at the thumbnails. Uh, to think it's a quality video. So the next thing would be you want intro, outro, put information in that video, but next is come up with a quality thumbnail. And there's sites like Canva, and we use Usine. They make really quality images and they have all the specs there. You just have to, you know, fill up— they have templates too, so you could just modify a template. So you definitely want to make the thumbnails very appealing to the eye. When and after you upload. So it's pretty easy, do an iPhone video, but, you know, do it consistently, have some editing. If you've got a Mac, use iMovie. I think there's some equivalent for the PC. I use Camtasia, by the way, and my video editor has got some advanced system. And then make a quality thumbnail and then a quality title.

Great.

Just to start, that's what I do.

And just so everybody, if you have a Mac, ScreenFlow is the alternative to Camtasia on the Mac side. And so let's see, we've got a whole bunch of people chiming in here on a whole bunch of numbers and views based upon questions surrounding length. Have you found the perfect length? Have you found the 2-minute versus 5-minute versus 10-minute? Um, what, what, what are the lengths of time that, that you find?

As you can imagine, this is a very complicated question for a couple of reasons. One, shorter video works better for me in the short term, but longer video works better in the long term, and, and there's a lot of reasons for this. Primarily, it's about what YouTube wants. YouTube wants long-term, long-form content because they want people on their site. Longer. Also, there's more SEO value because YouTube's listening to your video and they're trying to figure out what it is that you're talking about. And so you have a longer script, which is the equivalent of a longer blog post, uh, to draw people to your content. So there is no right form that works in my mind. It just depends on what your goals are. So I just do all of it. So I do short, medium, and long. And the longer videos are winning out, but they don't win out initially. They win out a year or 2 years later. The short form, it's just easier to consume and very quick hit, but Google doesn't like that over the long haul.

You have applied different— you've done a lot of trial and error with your video and you've seen Different things show incremental growth. What, what gave you the highest amount of growth? What was the one thing that gave you either the most views? Was it a topic? Was it the size? Was it the quality? What gave you that?

So our best long-form video is something like How to Succeed on Kickstarter from the world's I don't remember the exact title, but he had raised more money on Kickstarter than anyone else. So that was our best. So it was more about SEO. Our best short-term video, I think, has been the Pokémon video. The day after Pokémon craze was announced, we did some kind of a Pokémon for marketers type of thing, which was picked up, you know, in a lot of different places because we were the only one talking about it, about how it impacted marketers. So, you know, newsjacking. Works with YouTube, especially when you've got a good social following, you could put it out there on social. And then great SEO type of content, how-to content, is fantastic for long form. But again, I'm talking about marketing. This just doesn't— this doesn't apply to some other industries. It might just be reversed in other industries. So you gotta really study what works in your industry, research what your competitors are doing.

So that's a good point, and we need to touch on that, the SEO value of YouTube YouTube is probably one of the biggest areas that I've heard that people don't focus on enough. You can use Keyword Tracker and really focus in your keywords, almost like Instagram with hashtags. SEO on YouTube is one of the biggest ways that you can grow your content. Agree? Disagree? And how do you approach it?

Yeah, I mean, I approach it— it's all SEO for me. I'm really looking at these as commercials that are going to last for a year, maybe 2 years. So I'm always looking at the title, the tags, and the description and making sure that they match what I'm saying in the video. And if you've got those right and people are hitting the thumbs up button enough, Google's going to start recommending those videos when they're alongside your competitors' videos. or alongside other topics that are similar. So you get this whole recommendation thing. And then as YouTube becomes a social network, it's going to be critical that you have these things in place when we're talking about findability and discovery.

And any tools that you use around it, or is it good old-fashioned good content meets the demand?

I use BuzzSumo to find out what's popular in a niche. So if there's been a blog post written about it, about something similar, I'll look at how they did the title and I might riff off that title because I know it's popular with the blog. Why wouldn't it be popular with a YouTube title? I'd also use TubeBuddy because TubeBuddy looks at all the popular videos for you and says, here are the tags that they're using. So they make it super easy to put the right tags into the tag field. And then the description, it's important that you've got the description that matches the tags and the video. So you don't want to go too heavy. YouTube's very smart now, but you want to put enough of the keywords into the description and make it, you know, sound like natural English. That'll really help.

And how much sales can you put down below? I notice some people put their entire signature in there with their phone numbers and their links. Some people just, just put the description of the video with one link. What's the— is there a balance? Is there a good thing, bad thing?

There's no one-size-fits-all, but for somebody like me that's trying to get people to call me, I put it in every single one of them. TubeBuddy makes it easy. Even if you have 100 videos, TubeBuddy will put that signature in all 100 if you want. That's another reason— I feel like I'm doing a TubeBuddy commercial. I assure you I have no affiliation with them whatsoever. They've never even called to thank me, but they do make it really, really easy to be successful on YouTube. But you've got our influencers that only want you— they only put the call to action in the comments because they want everyone focused on that, or they'll actually put it in the video. We haven't talked about annotations, but they'll put it in the video itself as an overlay. That's what an annotation does. You can just Click the overlay, it'll take you to whatever it is that you want to go or want the viewer to go, or in the comments or both is usually what we do.

Yeah, and that's built into YouTube, correct? The overlay, the annotations?

Yes.

Okay, so Chris Yates, he didn't really ask this as a question, but I'm going to turn it into one. He said Blab just didn't cultivate their community, Facebook is not getting into live video it's failing as much as I would imagine he's talking about Blab or Facebook. Could you riff a little bit on your feelings towards— I know you did some homework too. I was on one of your Blabs. Blab versus YouTube. You obviously turned away from Blab a little bit and went direct on YouTube. Did you see the writing on the wall, or did you just decide For some reason that you didn't want to do Blab?

Well, I mean, Blab was having technical issues. I just couldn't handle it. I mean, I just don't like that kind of thing where it's unreliable, and I've got 3 other guests that are relying on this technology. Most of them had never used it before, so I started to migrate away from it. I did like the fact that you could export Blab video right to YouTube, and then what I would do is I'd download it again and edit it. So I did like that, but when I talked to— I think his name is Sean, the CEO of Lab— and we had a discussion about this, about Lab's future, and I kept asking him a question around how are you going to monetize this, and he didn't think he needed to. And I'm like, what do you mean you don't need to? And he said, well, you know, we've got a lot of runway, and we don't need to monetize this yet. We'll figure it out. And I'm like, are you sure your investors are cool with that? cool with that. I also said, no matter what, you have to appeal to marketers. Now, it's not just because I'm a marketer, but you look at what Facebook had to do, what every one of these channels including YouTube has to do, you have to appeal to the people that are going to spend money to reach the audience you've created on Blab, for example. You can't just pepper it with, you know, you can't just hope that people are going to somehow transact or spend money on the platform. You have to build this form marketers. He didn't want to do that, and I suspect that might have been one of the reasons why the investors pulled the plug.

Yeah, I suspect the same thing. It was an interesting way to say goodbye without saying goodbye. Jacob said, before planning a video, what question does your video need to answer, or what do you want your audience to feel after they've watched it?

Great question, and I tell you, I don't do enough of this. I really wanted to solve a pain point. So we do a lot of surveys and I try to find out what the specific pain points are. And a lot of times marketers don't know what they don't know. It's not their fault because there's so much going on right now, Bryan. You know this. I mean, I can't keep up with it. Anyone that says they can is either lying or clueless. I can't— and I'm a student of this. Every single day I'm looking for new things, and I can't keep up with it. So I'm trying to educate the modern-day digital marketer on something I found, or my opinion on something, or more importantly, a pain point that I know that they're having because we're hearing it from our clients. So I'm trying to think of it in their terms, not mine, but I'll tell you, I fail about 25% of the time. I don't do enough thinking about the pain points that the audience I have needs answering.

Good stuff, man. I'm just going to take a quick break and let everybody know we've got 7 minutes left. We are so close to closing this out, but we've got so much great content, and I've got so many questions, I'm not sure we're going to answer them all. But yet still, keep your questions coming because there's a chance that— and I'm sure you will hear back from Mark on Twitter. Rachel, I just got your question, so we'll get to that in a second as well. I'm going to take Ian's— I don't know if he meant this this as a question, but it seems like a great question to me. Always recommend that all client videos— this is Ian Gertler— all client videos are loaded to a YouTube channel. So what do you think? All videos loaded to a YouTube channel? And that means, I would suspect, like the video that you just uploaded to Facebook, the video that you just did for something for corporate, like all of your videos eventually get housed maybe as the hub for YouTube. What do you think about that?

Well, I think that's the start. I do agree that you should upload all your videos that make sense to be on that channel. You know, you don't want something about apples and something about satellites, you know, on the same channel. Although I have seen people break it into playlists and make something like that work, but you want kind of the same theme, the same subject matter. on each of these channels. So, you know, I don't mix business with personal, for example, unless there's a reason to that has a business purpose. So that's that. I would tend to agree. I would also try to homogenize the video thumbnails in a way where people know it's like, you know, you typically tell a Picasso versus a Monet every single time. So I want to stamp my brand at least on the thumbnail of each of those videos so that somebody sees it in the recommended list or somebody just sees it out in social, like, oh, I know him, and they click on it because they recognize that branded thumbnail. But other than that, yeah, I would tend to agree. It's a good repository. Make sure it's got great SEO value. We've covered this a couple times on the call. You'll see just organically over time, if it's quality content, that it just keeps getting views and more and

Awesome, man. And by the way, I just wanted to give proper attribution. That was in response to Don Renshaw asked that question, and Ian forwarded the question on. So thanks, Don, for the question. Rachel Miller said, when identifying influencers on YouTube, what metric carries the most Wait, subscribers, views, engagement, or what? Of course, we would only hear that question from Rachel. I love that girl. What do you think?

Wow, this is a tough one. I'll tell you what we do. The first measure that we look at are views, but it's not the most important. The most important is engagement, especially in a conversion event. So we've developed a formula that's basically subscribers plus engagement, whether that's comments, likes, what have you, activity on social about this particular channel, and then views. So subscribers, views, engagement, and we've come up with a formula to say, you know, this person for this industry scores, you know, 80 out of 100. I'm making these numbers up. They're all important. It really depends on the objective, but most important almost every single time is engagement. If you have a little bit of engagement, or if you have a lot of engagement with a little bit of views, it's not going to have that much impact overall. It's kind of this balancing act.

Okay. Still TBD is what I'm hearing, that there's specifics towards the actual— every situation has its own unique perspective and you can apply a set of those things to it and then the client probably— I know this in our case too where the client has to help you and it's 50/50 in terms of coming up with what makes the most sense. But it is top of the funnel, so I would tell everybody, you know, this isn't a bottom of the funnel tactic where we're driving leads, not that leads can't come from it, but this is brand awareness and top-of-the-funnel work that we're talking about, so we should probably be pretty cognizant of that. So Mark, this is the last question just coming from me. Is there a question that I should have asked you that I didn't, or something that you really wish that you want to leave everybody with?

Yeah, well, I'd say, and I hope this makes intuitive sense to your audience that as opposed to the written word, which is powerful, video humanizes the company, the individual more than anything else, or dehumanizes if you're not good on video. So the world is going to move to video. All the statistics, you know, all the predictions, which, you know, most of the time are somewhat correct are saying that of the traffic that's going to happen on the internet, 75% is going to be video. So you can bet, and we are developing a practice around this, where most companies small and large are going to develop their own channel, their own video content. A, because it's pretty inexpensive to do nowadays and distribution is free organically, and 2, the— The physical hardware required to do this is getting easier and easier and easier, and it's coming up— it's very high quality. You could go for video editing, if that's what you're worried about, you can go to a place like Upwork and hire somebody for $30 to do a complete 2-minute video, and it looks pretty good. So for $30, you get a high-quality video. It's a no-brainer. So even today, if you want to start a video web channel, which I do recommend, You could start off and start— keep building it, and a year from now you'll be glad you did.

Great, man, really appreciate it. Where can everybody find you?

Yeah, so on YouTube, it's youtube.com/FanaticsMedia. On Twitter, it's @MarkFidelman with a K, and those are the 2 primary places I hope you come find me.

Cool, awesome, thank you so much. I really appreciate you being on today.

Likewise, Bryan. Sorry about all the technical issues.

It's all good. It just goes with the territory of live video. So we next week are going to have a great guest for everybody that would like to join us. It is on Tuesday because Monday is Labor Day, so we're going to do it Tuesday with Jeanne Walters, and she is an expert on the customer's journey. And so she's going to be walking us through— sorry, the prospect and customer's journey the moments of truth, all the little things in between that makes a difference, including your website and all your digital properties. She's awesome and totally kills it when it comes to this stuff. So please join us next week, not same time, same different day, same time, Tuesday at noon Pacific Standard Time. Mark, thanks again, and everybody out there, really appreciate all your tweets, everything that you've done today, really appreciate it, and we'll see you again next week. Make it a great week. Cheers.

Thanks, Bryan.