Tom Guarriello has made 299 YouTube videos and 110 on Vloggerheads, but says the videos matter less than the people watching them. He wants to focus on building community connections in 2009 and asks viewers to help figure out new ways for people to meet and share ideas.
I just told Karen not to be too alarmed when she hears me talking to myself. She's sitting over there reading the paper while I'm sitting over here talking to this computer. Uh, so I just checked and, uh, I have made 299 videos on YouTube, and I have made and posted 110 videos here on Vloggerheads. Now, I defy you to tell me more than 5 of those that you remember. Go ahead, think about it. See what I mean? I mean, you know, my videos aren't really very memorable, but I'm memorable, right? You remember me. You know me. I'm Tom Guarriello, right? You know me. You know a lot of things about me. You know a lot of things about what I think and what I believe and the kinds of values that I have, but you don't remember my videos, do you? Why is that? Well, it's because what's important to us are the impressions, the images that we have of other people. People are important. Videos aren't important. I mean, videos are, are a means of getting to know one another. That's really all they are. And that's why videos are kind of, you know, they're sort of forgettable. But every time I see one of your faces pop up in the video line, I say, oh, there's a Tree video. Oh, there's a Raven Laughs video. Oh, there's a You know, a you video. It's you, it's you that are important. And that's what this is all about to me. It's all about getting to know you and you getting to know me, and then us interacting with one another about things that we know we either do or don't see in the same ways. And if we can do that in ways that are engaging and interesting, then we keep doing it and we do more of it and we want to do more of it. And that's the secret. That's the trick. The trick is getting people to come together in a place where we can get to know one another and engage with one another about stuff we care about, and we can have all kinds of different points of view about. So, uh, Paul and I were having this conversation yesterday The, the trick is to keep the focus on you and not to keep the focus on your videos. Yeah, your videos are interesting and they're important, but they're only important— well, they're only important because they're how we get to know you. I mean, look, there are a lot of people that we've gotten to know here through their blogs. They don't make videos, or they make just a little bit of video, and they do a lot of blogging. Why does this matter? Well, because in 2009, what we're gonna do is we're gonna keep trying to figure out new ways to help you get to know one another and to bring new people in here to get to know you too. And we're gonna need your help to help us to figure out how to do that. So get on it, start thinking about it. It's almost, you know, New Year's. So how can we get to help— how can we— let's try that again. How can we help you get to know one another better? That's the question between now and New Year's that I want you to think about. So I'll see you. Let's get on it. Take it easy.
