YouTube Taught Me

Branding. It’s a huge part of everyday life and you may not even realize it. Say you are walking down the aisles at Publix one day and realize you’re out of mouthwash at home. Which brand do you buy? Do you stick with Listerine because of its reputation with dentists or do you stick with the good old generic brand because it says “comparable to” Listerine? All of us are different but almost all of us use branding in some way, shape or form to formulate our opinions on things.  Branding has been categorized as “the process of creating value through the provision of a compelling and consistent offer and customer experience that will satisfy customers and keep them coming back” (i-Branding: developing the internet as a branding tool.) But this definition excludes a growing segment of branding that has been proliferated due to the rise of social media. That segment would be Personal Branding. Do you have a blog? If so, how many followers do you have? What about Facebook or Twitter and your number of followers on those platforms? YOU are a brand to those people. When they think of a spunky or sassy individual maybe they think of you because you’re always posting funny commentary on your day to day interactions with people. Personal branding is a vital part of life in today’s digital, social media obsessed world and we all have to learn how to create, manage, and cultivate our brands properly. 

An incredible example of personal branding would be the rise of the Youtuber. I was recently helping out at an elementary school and I asked one of the little boys I was helping what he wanted to be when he grew up. I was expecting the basics…astronaut, firefighter, policemen. But no…he said he wanted to be a Youtuber! The word Youtuber seems like it would be hard to find a proper definition for but nope: it’s easily searchable on the Oxford online living dictionary. Oxford defines the term as “A frequent user of the video-sharing website YouTube, especially someone who produces and appears in videos on the site” (Oxford Living Dictionary.) There are all kinds of Youtubers to appeal to every type of viewer. There are beauty “gurus” who specialize in makeup and hair tutorials. There are lifestyle Youtubers who cover things on their channels such as home décor, fashion, and the latest trends. There are gamers who film themselves playing video games for other people to watch (how meta is that?!) There are even family vloggers who film weekly videos about their families lives in the span of a day or week (my personal favorite of these has got to be The Michalaks!) There’s a Youtube channel and Youtuber behind it for just about everybody.  And these channel curators are making major money off these channels by harnessing the power of their own personal brands.

While many of the top Youtubers do make money off Youtube via Googles AdSense advertising many other popular YouTubers leverage their online notoriety to partner with brands (e.g. Bethany Mota's partnership with Aeropostale) or to become or launch brands themselves (e.g. Michelle Phan's Ipsy). (How top Youtubers Launch their own brands.) Through lucrative book deals, podcasts, and in some cases even movie deals (Camp Takota and Dirty 30 are both movies that were written, executive produced, and star Youtubers,) these creators have forged a new path to fame and notoriety without the help of traditional media. Most Youtubers pride themselves on being authentic, on delivering only content that their viewers want to watch. This strategy of branding themselves as authorities on whatever they create has served these Youtubers well. They have all managed to take their personal brand – the reputation and image that you intentionally create- and make it into a successful business (Fundamentals of Personal Branding.) Youtubers have also figured out that careful strategy of leveraging social media platforms to attain greater influencing power. Most beauty “gurus” on Youtube for instance all started out with blogs. Those blogs grew to YouTube tutorials, which grew into brand endorsements and sponsorships, which in some cases has grown to having their own beauty ranges. Zoella in particular is a big phenomenon in this realm. A survey of 13-18 year olds recently showed that “YouTubers were judged to be more engaging, extraordinary and relatable than mainstream stars, who were rated as being smarter and more reliable” (Why are YouTube Stars so Popular?) These trends show that the phenomenon of the Youtuber is not going away any time soon.

As strategic communication professionals, we can take these lessons from Youtubers and apply them to our organizations. It’s about so much more than maintaining the company blog anymore. Blogs can allow us to control the message being presented to the public about our organizations, in much the same way our media buys and marketing items can. However, these are not enough anymore. We have to be compelling and own our content (we need to be THE experts,) be consistent in our usage of and posting to social media and above all be streamlined. Everything has to flow (much like Youtubers progressions from blogs to the video platform) and the more it flows the more appealing our organizations brand becomes. We can’t depend on a Facebook like anymore to guarantee that somebody out there is talking about us. We have to strategize, make other brands come to us, and make our demographics work for us not against us. If we know our target audience is primarily women aged 25-34 then we can personalize our marketing efforts. Personalization allows us to “precisely and cost effectively target segments and develop more one-to-one relationships” (iBranding.) This is one of the most powerful aspects of the internet and social media. Everything can be personalized to suit somebody’s specific tastes. Our brands need to find their niche much like Youtubers have. The more we appeal to those niche markets the better off our brands will be. We won’t be everybody’s cup of tea that’s for sure. We need to make our communications with those people who DO like us count and personalizing our communications is a great way to start.

Thanks for checking out the blog this week! Only two more entries to go regarding Emerging Media before we change gears. Stay tuned!