TED Conference YouTube Presentation - Part 2

Hi guys, it's Tom Guarriello. Welcome back to part 2 of my TED conference presentation on YouTube. Hope you enjoy it. At the same time that I was establishing my presence here on YouTube, I was also in the process of writing this book, Work Different: Design for the Rest of Us, which is about ready to be released online in the next week or so. And I'm gonna be using my YouTube channel to promote the launch and to talk about the ideas in the book and to really gather relevant stories about the ideas in the book from those of you who are interested in doing so. This is a book to try to help people who do not work in the design world to understand the power that design thinking can have in helping you to become more successful and more effective in your work. So the question I asked in this TED presentation was, why should you video blog on YouTube? To? Well, from a personal watching perspective, there's a tremendous amount of entertainment out here. In Quadrant 1, forget about copyright, take that aside, there's an enormous amount of entertainment, there's an enormous amount of music videos. I happen to, you know, like to watch people like Jascha Heifetz, but I also love Steely Dan. There's plenty of drama in the soap opera world of Lonelygirl15 and all kinds of other sorts of things. There's the Ask the Builder, all of these how-to videos. There's thousands of how-to videos out here. If you want to learn how to do something, you'll find somebody able to help you. And who— nobody has any doubt that YouTube is going to be a tremendous force in the '08 American presidential election. They've, you know, started the You Choose section for all the political videos. So from a, just from an entertainment, information, and politics perspective, as well as learning about other cultures, watching is a great idea. How about producing videos? Why should people produce videos? So what I said was, look, it's a lot of fun. You really get to express yourself. I never thought I was going to do a 12 Days of Christmas video, believe me, when I first came out on YouTube. Here on YouTube, but it is a lot of fun. There's a lot of things to do, and you know, you also get to learn a lot of skills. Here I am in front of a green screen because I wanted to learn how to do things like chroma key, and YouTube has really been a great opportunity to learn and to practice. Well, how about watching videos? Why should people watch videos from a business perspective on YouTube? And here, you know, what I said was that Look, the only limitations for reasons to watch videos for business purposes on YouTube are the limitations of our own imagination. There are— you can learn about so many things. I said in the presentation, for example, that if you hire young people or want to sell anything to young people, it's imperative that you watch YouTube because this is a place to learn about what younger people really think and really believe about things. Not to mention, you know, old codgers like myself out here actually talking about what we think and what we believe. There's also all these special interest groups that are really just starting to gain traction, and I call that offense. This is offense, offensive reasons for watching YouTube for business purposes. But there's also defensive reasons for watching, which is learning what customers are saying about you and your competitors, and I showed this video as a way of doing so. Unfortunately, I need some sleep. I'm not going to continue with that, but if you want to watch this video, you can look at it. It's a video of a Comcast technician who fell asleep on this user's— YouTube user's couch, and the user went ahead and made a video about it, and it was a pretty heavy-duty, let's call it an indictment of the quality of services presented by Comcast. Other reasons to produce videos in Quadrant 4, I mean, these are the numbers, you know, over 30 million unique visitors a month. 100 million videos more, north of 100 million videos a day being watched. Why wouldn't you want to produce videos for your, your people to take a look at it, to people who are interested in your business to take a look at? Obviously big companies are doing it. This is the GM Fastlane blog. GM has been blogging for a couple years, and here we see a video by Vice Chairman Bob Lutz. And if you look down in the corner of that video, you'll see the YouTube YouTube logo. Now the question that I asked was, why would General Motors put their videos on YouTube first and then put them onto their blog? I mean, it's certainly not to save bandwidth costs, right? This is General Motors. You know, I think the answer is that associating yourself with YouTube is now a pretty cool thing for businesses to do. And look, you don't have to be a top a Fortune 50 company to take advantage of YouTube. This is Gary Vaynerchuk, who has WineLibrary.com. If you've ever seen Gary's videos, they're hilarious as well as informative, as he talks about and does wine reviews. Most of us have probably seen Tom Dixon in the Blendtec videos. You know, we know that what we've got here is a company, a company that sells blenders, for crying out loud. 13, almost 14 million views, 20,000 subscribers. This particular video in which they show in their Will It Blend series, will golf balls blend, uh, 2 million, over 2 million views at the time I screencapped this. You know, it's a great free promotional outlet for something like Blendtec, and of course they then promote it on their website. So, uh, All kinds of companies can, can do that. And when I asked you guys about, you know, how can businesses use YouTube, um, you gave me some pretty interesting answers. There was this answer from, uh, from Nivik192 about, uh, the solar website that he runs. And, uh, before having audio on it, they had a conversion rate of 3%. Put audio on it, conversion went to 5%. Added video, conversion went to 9%. Those are pretty impressive numbers. Here's another video response. Unfortunately, this is probably going to perform in the same way. Let's see. I think certain— yeah, I'm afraid the video description is incorrect. This video, which is a terrific video, really does give some great examples of how businesses can use YouTube to connect with their customers. Thank you very much, apostrophes. So how do you video blog on YouTube? I quickly went through for people, look, you can video blog using webcams. Apple makes it easy with built-in cameras. Every small camera in the world today has video capture capability. We've all got editing software that we can get to very reasonably— Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, So now we come to kind of the— alright, so let's fill in the 2x2 matrix. And this was animated, I won't animate it here. Okay, what are the reasons in quadrant 1, personal reasons to watch? Well, you find out what's new, there's plenty of entertainment, all the politics, all the learning about, you know, how-to kind of things, plugging into global culture. How about Quadrant 2, personal reasons to produce? Well, you can express yourself, you have fun, you develop skills, you've got Flickr for video. How about Quadrant 3, why should you watch videos from a business perspective? Well, there's offense, customer and employee insights, there's cultural trends, and there's defense, find out what people are saying about you. And in Quadrant 4, up in the right-hand corner of the axis of impact, you get to early adopters. Believe it or not, we're still early adopters out here. We can make a big difference in the way people think about businesses because of how we react to them. The numbers are astonishing— 30, north of 30 million uniques a month, more than north of 100 million videos watched a day. You can really demonstrate the value of your product or service, and you get to ask questions and interact with people, uh, this whole Web 2.0 business. And I said, you know, if you don't believe me, take a look at the New York Times article, which was the Saturday before the presentation that I made, where you see what's highlighted here: services like YouTube seen as a way to conduct business. And that was it, that was my presentation. So, uh, I hope you guys enjoyed it and, um, look forward to any comments you have. Thanks a lot, take care, bye-bye.