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Steve Dotto here. How the heck are you doing this fine day? Me? I’m feeling pretty good about what’s happening with our community here on the DottoTech YouTube Channel. I want to share today in our vlog of Growing Your YouTube Channel to 100,000 Subscribers, I want to share a little bit of a story of the power of community and the power of social media and corporate engagement, brand engagement in the channel and in social media. So we’re going to be taking a look at one of the strengths of community, of the YouTube community today on Growing Your YouTube Channel to 100,000 Subscribers.
A couple of weeks ago—what is it about? Three or four weeks ago now—I posted a video on address book tool. It’s called FullContact on Gmail. Basically, it’s almost like a replacement for Rapportive on my mind. It’s a tool that allows you to get contextual information about people in your contact list and who you’re typing to, giving you social media information, etc. It’s a nice tool. The company seems to be a pretty solid company. I liked it so I did a demo on it as I do as it is the basis of our channel.
Now one of the things I’ve been really encouraging and I think is really important for channel growth is encouraging comments. I’m sure I’ve mentioned in one of my previous vlogs that I religiously make sure that I read and try and comment on each and every comment that happens in the channel. That’s getting really increasingly difficult because it’s now taking me about a half an hour every morning to spend time going through and answering questions in comments, a lot of the comments that we get in social media, in the channel. We’re talking about the comments area in YouTube now which is all related to Google+. A lot of them are just “Love the videos,” thanks for Steve. For those that I give thumbs up or a quick thanks. I appreciate the comments but they don’t really require a thoughtful response.
But occasionally, we get lots of questions and sometimes questions are beyond me because I look pretty much at the surface level of most tools. I can’t necessarily get into the details of problem solving with tools but occasionally I can. Anyway, this is all just back story for what happened and I think it’s a great example. This isn’t the only time this has happened but I think it’s a great example of the power of social engagement and the power of community.
So with FullContact, I’ve received a couple of questions. If we take a look here on the form, where was the question that really started it? I’ve got to find it here because they’ve commented back and forth. You can actually see what’s happened here is people with FullContact have actually gotten engaged in the community pretty big time here. Here it is.
So Deborah, one of our regulars that view the channel, asked me a question about where do the contacts reside. She was asking because what happens is this is a contact tool that basically syncs all of your address books and she was concerned about security. I didn’t know and I said I’m not sure but perhaps someone, and I plus Full Contact, I said +FullContact is monitoring your social feed and they can pop in with an answer. Now I will often do this when question’s asked about a brand and I don’t know the answer to it. I’ll say I’m not too sure but maybe somebody from their firm is monitoring social media so I’ll @ mention them in Twitter or I will + mention them here at Google+ here the YouTube channel.
Indeed within I think a couple of hours, the social media team from FullContact was in with an answer, a technical answer. But they didn’t just stop there. They then engaged and read through all of the comments in the thread and started to pop in answers to all of the different questions and concerns that individuals had. Actually, there was one thread that ended up coming out of this that was quite a difficult one as far as they were concerned.
One of the anti-virus programs, Avast, was actually recommending people to uninstall the FullContact plug in, giving it a 1-star or a 1-level of security rating and you should be at 4 starts, which I don’t think FullContact was aware of but our viewers were aware of. They were getting concerned because Avast was saying don’t install this plug in because it could be a security hazard.
So FullContact saw the comment, commented back to us, let my community know what was going on, went to Avast, worked through it with Avast and they just came back in I think yesterday. They got an email from Avast saying that they’ve been updated and now reflects a four+ stars so it’s nice and secure. So they’ve actually come back into our channel here and commented back.
Now FullContact didn’t have to do this. This video is doing quite well. The number of views of this video is nearly 5,000 so it’s a reasonable engagement in YouTube but they took the time and made the effort to engage constantly with the community through the process. This as far as I’m concerned is just full of good karma in all fronts. First of all, it really helps FullContact because they show that they’re engaged. So anybody that’s reading through the comments sees that a company is monitoring what’s going on in social media, monitoring the comments, listening to the questions and concerns and then responding to them. This issue with Avast wasn’t the only one. They also updated a pane issue where they were having trouble in especially small notebooks. They were having trouble viewing the different fields of information correctly because of something that was going on in Gmail. They actually ended up addressing that and letting the community know that they’ve fixed that little bug as well. So anybody reading through the Comments threads gets a really warm and fuzzy about Full Contact, recognizing that here’s a company that’s listening and engaged.
My community members are thrilled because they’re being listened to and all of their questions are being answered which is often beyond my ken, beyond my ability to come up with all of the answers. I just don’t have time to research all of those answers and sometimes I just don’t know the answer. So all of those questions are being answered.
As far as I’m concerned, as the content publisher I’m thrilled on multiple fronts. I’m thrilled that a company is paying attention to what’s going on in social media and in my channel and honors my content and my audience by taking the time and spending their resources to respond to us and alleviate our concerns. Ultimately, it does benefit their product but there were times early on in the conversation where they didn’t have a great answer. They said here, it’s somebody else’s problem, it’s not our problem and we’re fine. They said we don’t know what’s going on here, we’re going to find out and we’re going to let you know, which I really liked.
So overall, I still don’t have any personal contact with anybody at FullContact. It’s not like their coming onto to the channel now and giving away free product or anything like that. But the level of respect that I now have for the company and how much more I’m going to be willing to recommend the product, and I imagine that it will be reflected if I do another demo in how I position it, there’s a big plus there, the fact that we’re giving them quite a bit of credit in this particular story here.
And I do want to point out that they aren’t’ the only firm that’s done this. We’ve got lots of great connections. Troy Christmas from TaskClone has been engaged in the group, engaged in the forum a lot. In fact, he engages in our EverNote forums and other places where his software is relevant. So we see other brands engaging similarly in the conversations going on. But it just goes to show you what good can come from paying attention to communities of interest.
Now there are companies as well who I’ve + mentioned who have completely ignored it and there’s been no response back and those threads wither and die. I don’t think it really hurts them that much but they lose an opportunity because what’s happened here is this thread, this conversation thread because they’ve come back into it has risen, it’s bubbled back to the top of the Google+ chat several times. Consequently, more people are going to see the video and of course YouTube is looking for lots of engagement in order to rank a video, making that video more relevant to recommend it in Search and in Recommended Videos.
So this video, I expect it to continue to perform very strongly, partially because this is a pretty good video, partially because it’s a pretty good product, partially because I’ve got a great community that does talk a lot about different products but also now because FullContact themselves engaged and helped to kind of like a rising tide, raise all of those ships by their engagement, by adding extra energy into the conversation around the product.
So it’s not a long video today. It’s kind of a lesson for brands and a lesson for content creators to encourage conversation with interested parties. Drawing people in who are relevant to a conversation is I think a probably a very healthy thing for us to be doing in our social media space. Now this would be the same in Facebook, in Twitter and in other areas but when you’re dealing with a question about a brand and you don’t necessarily know the answer or you’re wondering or you want them to explain themselves, even if it’s on a negative connotation where they should be coming in and there’s an issue around the product, plusing them or @-mentioning them to invite them into the conversation and dealing with them honorably when they do come in, I think that that is something that’s really going to benefit content creators big time over the long haul.
I hope you found this little video today to be useful and interesting. This is part of my series on Growing Your YouTube channel to 100,000 Subscribers where I’ve vlog and I’ve talked about my journey in growing my YouTube channel and all of the little lessons that I’ve learned.
There are three ways to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech. First is please subscribe to this channel that I’m trying to grow. Second is you can sign up for our newsletter. About once a week, we do a webinar on different topics. Some of them are related to content publishing, some of them are related to productivity but they’re always chock full of good information. So sign up for our newsletter then you’ll get notification for all our upcoming webinars. And finally, you might notice there were no ads running in this particular video. That’s because this series is brought to you by my patrons at Patreon. DottoTech is a crowd-funded community, crowd-funded channel, and there are benefits and perks to supporting this channel beyond just the creation of what I consider or I hope is good content. I encourage you to visit our Patreon page and have a look. That is it for today. I am out of here. Until next time, I’m Steve Dotto. Have fun storming the castle.

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