So What? Lessons Learned from a Year of Weekly Livestreams

Well, hey, happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show. In this very special edition, it is our one year anniversary of doing So What, our live stream. And as all of the Peloton instructors like to say, an anniversary is just a celebration of consistency. Um, and in this case it is, because we have consistently, you know, barring all of us being wrapped up in something else, uh, we've consistently be doing this show every Thursday at one PM Eastern on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, you know, you name it, and then uh sharing it as a blog content the following Friday morning.

So, what we want to do today is cover sort of our lessons learned from doing this show for a year. Um, because each of us is going to have a different perspective of what the experience has been like. Um, so Chris, do you want to kick us off? Um, actually, I was going to suggest since you are our fearless leader that you kick us off with some of the things that you've seen us do well and and do poorly. Um, fearful leader.

No, uh, you know, it's it's interesting. Um it's not it sounds like it would just be easy, like okay, just set up a camera and go, but I'm naturally very introverted. And so for me, week after week having to sit in front of a camera knowing that you know, even if it's just a handful of people, a handful of people are going to see me, you know, having to get over that for whether it's this or public speaking or whatever it is, for me has been a lesson to learn. And so it's funny, whenever I see, you know, the calls to action of come camera ready. Um, that the camera ready call to action always breeds some sort of level of anxiety of like I have to have like full makeup and my hair done.

And really, people aren't coming for that. People are coming for the information. Like, yeah, I should probably look like I've showered and put on clean clothes, but they're really more so coming for, yeah, even then it's a little sketchy. Um they're really coming for the information. And so for me, it's almost been a lesson in letting go of that idea of having to be perfect all the time, of like fully fully put together, like everything in its place and those kinds of things.

Like, yeah, I don't want to present myself slovenly, but I also don't need to stress myself out to make sure I've had like a blowout and you know, full makeup and whatever it is people do, because I clearly don't do those things. So that's my own personal, you know, lesson learned from a year of sitting in front of a camera broadcasting out to an audience. In terms of things that I think we've done well, we've really treated it like every single week is a speaking opportunity. And so we do that preparation. We make sure that we've thought ahead, what's the topic?

What's the agenda? What are people going to learn from this show? And so we always have those three bullet points of here's what you're gonna get if you tune into this show. So I think that we've done that consistently, and it's worked really well to make sure that we stay structured and on topic, but that people know what they're getting into and can decide this is something that I want to tune into because I'm going to learn the following things. So I think that we've done a really good job of making sure that it's always educational, hopefully entertaining, um, and consistent.

So those are sort of my big things. One of the things I think has been really interesting. So we made the decision early on, we're gonna just stream this. Pretty much anything, and if StreamYard will connect to it, we're just gonna plug into it, you know, just hit broadcast and see what happens. And it really emphasizes the um the importance of treating each channel as its own audience and not assuming that it's the same people because it really isn't.

I'm gonna uh share uh my screen here. I was doing uh just a quick look in our YouTube analytics, and uh, so these this is my personal YouTube channel, which in the beginning was you know obviously much larger, um, although the company has caught up pretty nicely. Now, these are the top shows, uh the top five uh from uh that have aired on my channel. Number one, how to do a UX audit 457 views in the last year. Uh email marketed deliverability was number two.

The real the first show uh was number three, uh, personal brand Martech Basics part one is number four, and then uh do Instagram hashtags improve engagement was was number five. Now, if we contrast that with what has aired on the Trust Insights channel, very different. Uh natural language processing, number one, 639 views uh since it aired, uh basic attribution 534, data studio 258, uh LinkedIn algorithm 11, and then YouTube's algorithm uh uh 83. So it's very interesting to see these are not the same audiences. These are the the what the YouTube algorithm shows to viewers is not the same recommendations.

And so it's really important that yes, while there's only us doing our show, we are speaking to different groups of people. It's kind of like it almost like imagine being on stage at a conference and you know it's being streamed, and in every conference room, there's a different crowd, like totally different people. Like us, there's realtors in this room, there's architects in this room. You're like, who am I speaking to? Well, this is a really, I think an important way of saying you don't know who your audience is, but you probably should assume that they're not the same.

And this is only two YouTube channels. This is not LinkedIn, this is not Twitter, this is not Facebook. Although nobody watches on Facebook. Uh so I would say be rigorous about looking at your data like we do and saying, okay, is the audience different? Is what they want different?

Like, so this would to me, this would say like there's a lot of very algorithm heavy stuff in the top five on Trust Insights YouTube channel. So, you know, if we were making content for that channel specifically, we'd say maybe we need to do more content on that. Whereas when you look uh we go back one and we look at what's on my channel, you know, email is is up there, personal brand, Instagram. Uh, you know, so it's it's it's less around one specific topic, which I think is really fascinating because I know personally, I've tried to focus more of my content on the data science and AI stuff, and yet the company channel has more interest in that. Which makes sense.

It's what we do. Um, you know, this says to me that you know, we have an audience that's really interested in learning more about SEO uh specifically, more about you know, the Google marketing platform. Those are things that for us, yeah, let's we can double down on that and create more content. Um, you know, I was just looking at our data yesterday and the self-report data that we collect from people who fill out one of our forms. You know, we ask the same question every single time, you know, what are you struggling with, or what are one of your biggest challenges?

And it's always uh useful analysis, always useful analysis. That is the that has been the number one challenge for the past two and a half years, followed by data collection. And so if we can learn from what we've done over the past year in terms of what people are engaging with and what people are watching from, that to me should be a fairly easy, you know, next step of like, okay, how do we focus more of SEO and Google marketing platform and really make sure we're teaching people about developing useful insights and data collection? Like that to me is sort of a no-brainer. So that'll be the focus of our next you know, quarter's worth of shows.

Exactly. I think the other thing we could take from these the the charts is if we're looking for topics to pitch to conferences and things, we can take what we've learned from our live stream and say, okay, you know what we can show you pretty good quantitative evidence that people want more on attribution modeling in Google Analytics for. I mean, you know that qualitatively as well. But maybe a session on how does LinkedIn work. I mean, it's done that's a relatively recent show, and it's number four in our in our playlist.

Um that that's pretty interesting. So I think one of the lessons, you know, the meta lessons I've taken from the live stream, aside from the fact that you're right, we are on stage. We are doing a webinar effectively every week is just the difference between a webinar and a live stream is that one asks for you to fill out a form first, and that's really it. Um there's no difference otherwise. Um we've been doing this, producing this a lot.

And it's yeah, I find that you know when I'm talking with people or when like somebody emailed me earlier today saying, Hey, I'm not gonna be able to make a a talk coming up. You know, do you have any materials from like I just point them to one of the shows on our channel and say, You just go watch this this live stream. Yeah. I think what I like about um, you know, what we've done with the live stream is that it's helped us retain that muscle for webinars and public speaking. And so the same amount of prep goes into, you know, choosing these topics that go would go into doing a webinar.

Maybe we don't have a full slide deck. And so the difference here is it needs to be more conversational and inclusive of you know the people representing the information. And so that brings me to John. Uh so John, you are often the bad example that we use in the live in the live stream, you know, and you know, we pick on you a lot in terms of like, hey, John, you have to do this. But I feel like, you know, the balance of the three of us, you know, I ask, you know, all of the pretend I'm new to this, you know, Chris, you do the majority of the presenting of the information.

And John, you bring that third perspective as the person who's even a little bit more farther removed, but you understand all the technical stuff. So you know, what are some of your lessons learned? Or what have you enjoyed over the past year, aside from us just consistently picking on you? Right from a massive to-do list. No, the thing is is that I do reflect just the average you know VP marketing or somebody that's in that marketing slot of having to get all this stuff done and not enough to do.

You know, it's that the position is overwhelming. It's not that I am an idiot. Those two are independent of each other. So um yeah having an eye for okay here's all the here's all the concepts and theories but here's where it all meets the road and how you actually get that over the finish line. So you're bringing in some business and your customers are happier.

That's just a huge ugly mess. And yeah the a huge part of what we do here is we're always introducing concepts and topics that you know marketing managers and marketing ops people need to know and understand. And so it's our really our introduction to just their world you know if they just have some simple questions about a few things going on or thinking about doing something new they come across this content that we've got out there. And you totally nailed it Katie is that you know normally it would have been that we would meet them at a Martech show or at inbound or at marketing props or whatever and we'd be doing a session on here's how you do this thing. But in the over the past two years while that's all vanished and gone away it we can actually bring it to the rest of the world, which is a mixed bag.

We can it's it's much more convenient and simpler for everyone, which you know, on one hand is great, but on the other hand, it's you can always say, Oh, well, I'll go watch those videos tomorrow, and you never do. And then of course, there's this whole uh grab bag of lunatics who have also managed to show up that would normally be refused entrance at Martech or you know, inbound, but they're on the internet more than happy to chime in on our chat and you know, thank God for StreamYard and our ability to block people and things like that. But uh, you know, it all works, which is is great. Um so yeah, it's you know it's been a great year. And I I definitely have to echo what you guys have of just exercising that muscle of presenting and talking and explaining and learning.

And it is cool. I think it's more interactive, actually. And I I've talked to a bunch of people that have echoed the similar thing of you know, yeah, it is kind of rough having these huge Zoom sessions and things like that, but you actually do get more interactivity. You know, when like if I was at Dream Force in front of 500 people, I might get four or five questions in a 40 minute session. But if you're doing a an interactive Zoom or a session like this, like we can chat with six or seven or eight people at the same time and field their questions and get um, you know, if we really like them, we could even put their face up on the screen so you could see them and hear from them also, um, which you know, we usually discourage, but it can be more interactive and you can actually learn more and get more done.

So it's yeah, I think we've just kind of made the best of of what the world's thrown us over the past couple of years, and it's uh, you know, it's it's created something fun and interesting, hopefully. I think it's definitely done, um it's it's helped us create additional content that we wouldn't have otherwise had the bandwidth to create. And so one of the easiest things, at least for us, um, has been to just, you know, set up a camera and record a video and talk about the things that we know. Um, and the way in which we process content is we have the video, then we can, you know, take the transcript and turn it into a blog post, other content. Um, and I think that it's that's worked really well for us in terms of scaling, because it's an extra piece, an extra couple of pieces of content that we then have that help us talk about the things we know, but also demonstrate how we solve problems.

And I think that it's also helped us, you know, test out a few ideas that we've had that, you know, maybe they don't work, maybe it doesn't have legs underneath it, maybe there wasn't a so what to it, but this is sort of our safe, you know, almost like it our RD space where the three of us can get together and with an audience test these ideas. Uh, Chris, I remember we were doing this not too long ago with um some sort of analysis. It was the Twitter analysis that you were testing out. And, you know, we were we actually based the show around, you know, solutions in search of a problem, which is a very common thing that a lot of companies run into. And so I I liked that we kind of went really meta with it and were able to say, like, we're doing the same thing, let us do it in real time and show you what that looks like.

And maybe we're not gonna have a positive result, but we're okay with that because we'll learn from it. Yeah, it's definitely one of those things where having the test bed is very useful. Um, again, you can look in the data and say, okay, what what landed with people? You know, and there was there's some shows like the our dark data mining show. That didn't land with anybody.

Like that's not the top list of anything. It was one of the shows like, yeah, nobody cares. And I think that's that's useful information for us for our for content marketing otherwise too. To say like yeah, this is a topic that if people cared about it, we would get would have more views. And that's that's just the the easiest way to put it if because we upload you know captions and things so that so it's searchable and findable on YouTube and stuff.

And we we know that the YouTube recommendation engine uh looks at all that stuff and and what people are searching for. So all we've got to do is say okay what is getting eyeballs and is that something we can do more with um or is it something that yeah there's a whole uh you know looking at the the you know analyzing content curation for your personal brand that did that didn't do particularly well right okay maybe we don't need to to spend a whole lot of time on that so yeah it has been a a very useful um I think exercise to see what we can talk about coherently uh for at least 30 to 40 minutes a week and where does it go with the audience and particularly one of the things that we don't have the ability to keep track of but hopefully will someday is the amount of interaction we get per show because even if the show doesn't get a ton of say views after watching if that was a show where there's a lot of commentary a lot of people asking questions that would be something good to know like this is a topic that maybe people aren't searching for because they don't even have the words to search for it. They don't even know what to ask but like last week when we did Postmaster tools there was a lot of of chat on it because people were like, ah I don't even know what half these words mean. Well, and you know, uh there's an episode that sticks out to me, and it's the episode that John and I did where John was talking about basically how to start a podcast, and it in terms of live audience, it's still one of our highest watched live. And I'm saying that anecdotally because, you know, as we're recording and broadcasting, I'm trying to pay attention to the metrics because unfortunately, with the software, those metrics disappear afterwards.

There's no reporting. But that one that's one that stuck out to me of there was a lot of questions and there was a lot of people who tuned in live. Now, the flip side of that is Trust Insights is not set up to teach people how to start a podcast. So is that an opportunity for marketing over coffee to create some kind of a master class? I don't know, maybe John, I'm adding more stuff to your list.

You couldn't get through one episode without us making your to-do list longer. It wouldn't be the so what show if we did that. But, you know, I think that we're always trying to look at the data coming in to see where does it fit into the grand scheme of what Trist Insights does. Because if we're being completely truthfully, you know, honest with ourselves, this is a sales tool as well. It's for us to demonstrate what it is that we do and what we know and to establish credibility in those areas of things that we want people to buy services from us for.

And so, you know, we'll branch out and cover things that we don't typically offer services for as that RD space to test, and we'll see, you know, okay, there's no interest in this, or a lot of people are interested in this. And, you know, as John, as you know, our head of business development gets questions from potential customers, like, Hey, what do you guys know about this? He can, similar to what you were saying, Chris, just pull up an episode and say, here, watch this. You know, we we talk about it for you know 20 minutes. If you want to watch that far in, you know, here we can demonstrate what we know about that topic.

And you know, we can answer those questions that people have, demonstrating our capabilities. Yeah, you know, it's funny. One thing that came to me from the chart Chris had just shown about CX being so huge. I was surprised to see that dominating so much. And the thing that goes straight to me with that then is we should just stop calling it digital customer journey, like it should be UX journey or UX map or something like that, because we have to train people what digital customer journey is, because that's not a any kind of industry phrase.

But obviously, CX just has gravity on its own. So we should just let you know, move to take advantage of that. And I think that is one thing about the show, too. As I was talking about classic events, is we have no problem coming up on here and being like, oh my god, this is a total failure here. You know, this has not worked at all.

And that's totally not what you get. You know, when you go to an event, it's always a cherry pick case study that's going to be perfect. And you know, you would think that you get the wrong idea of marketing, which is you've got to put tons of content out there all the time and stuff fails and it gets ugly, but that's how you you know move ahead and make progress. I agree with that. I think that one of the things I really like, not just about this show, but about you know, our organization in general, is that we're not afraid of failing.

We're not afraid of things that don't work because we're always learning from it. And I think being the people to show those things to the rest of our audience, like, hey, not everything that we do works out perfectly either. Helps people be like, oh, it's okay to fail. It's okay to not get it right the first, second or even third time, as long as I'm continuing to learn from it and try to improve upon it. And you're absolutely right, John.

An event planner is not going to bring you on as a speaker if you're like, yeah, I'm going to show six out of seven case studies where things went really poorly. But there has to be a space where that happens. And I would like to think that we've created a bit of that space with our live stream to be like, you know what? Sometimes we really just shit the bet on that thing. Like it just didn't work.

But that's okay because here's what we learned from it, and here's what we're going to try differently. Yeah, no, that's where depends come from. That's how we do it. You know, it's so funny. Um, another thing though, is this setup and medium is fantastic for every week we can just roll something out because I was thinking one thing viewers and people that go to events totally miss out on is the rest of the infrastructure.

Normally for a show, it's you there'll be a day of fighting over travel, there'll be a day of actually doing the travel. You'll be on site, you know, and then there's a day cleanup and getting home with there's like four days that get burned in a pile to do a session like this. Whereas us being able to just, you know, on Monday whiteboard the topics and do some research and get things ready for Thursday, you're just getting pure content without, you know, we're able to crank out three, four times as much without having to go through all the going through the airport and the all the foolishness that goes with that. Yeah, I've I've been a fan of that. Speaking of events, one of the things that that you just made me think of is with enough shows under our belt, uh or collective belts on all these different topics, we could actually cluster them together by topic and say, like, here's a half-day trust insights conference, right?

And it's these five episodes of so what on you know the email marketing episodes or the uh attribution episodes or the Google Analytics 4 episodes, and packaging that up for people, I mean, you know, we've said many times one of our our largest failings is our failure to promote ourselves well, um, and our failure to to make things easy for people to just pick up, you know, what's what's the expression is put handles on something so they can pick up and carry it away. You know, looking at the topics again, we've we've done personal branding in Martech and stuff, you know, so we could literally have enough videos to have a personal brand half-day conference. We have probably a full-day conference of Google Analytics stuff that we've just done naturally. And so, as you know, for folks who are thinking about doing your own live stream, if you do take the time to do the planning and stuff, then you can actually build out you know a conference for yourself of just you, you know, you so you don't have to have get sponsors involved and you know sales sessions and all that stuff. You don't have to, you know, rent expensive conference software.

You can literally hand someone a YouTube playlist, say here is the the you know your company's conference on this topic, make it easy for people. And in turn, um, you can see like, does the topic overall resonate? Maybe, you know, when I look again at some of the charts that we're looking at, some of the shows on uh on Google Analytics, like the three easy wins show didn't do as well. Now, is it was it just timeliness? Did we just miss the boat on that?

Or was there something else happening? You know, maybe there's a big conference happening at the same time, but if we bundled that together with all the other shows, would we see that actually, yes, it it starts doing really well because it's part of the Google Analytics 4 package. Are you able to share a playlist link on social media versus just a video? Oh, yeah, for sure. All right.

Sean, write that down. Yeah, exactly. Well, no, the thing I was thinking of the way to go with that is we really need to rip off the whole Seth Godin model of you set up a Discord group. And it's like, okay, for 295, you get into the group and it's just each page is one of the videos. But the key is you've got a discussion group in there, and you say, okay, for the next two weeks, when you have questions and comments, you know, there's the whole group is going to be in there learning from each other, and we will stop and to answer questions and keep things going.

And so you time box it, you create scarcity, you lock out the rest of the world. Um, and yeah, you know, he's just printing money. He like looks down upon us from his mountain fortress. So obviously that you know that thing is working right. So yeah, set up Discord server.

And then I got that on my list. Um, you know, so we've been talking a lot about the things that we've done well. And, you know, in order to be uh us and be authentic, you know, we would be remiss if we didn't talk about the things that haven't gone well. So we've talked a little bit about some of the episodes that maybe didn't land as well. I think, you know, Chris, you just touched upon this.

One of the things we don't do well, especially for this show, is promote ourselves or you know, promote it after the fact. And so some of that is due to it's just not, you know, it doesn't come naturally to any of us, even though we're marketers, we're not true tried and true marketers, we're all sort of like accidental marketers um and I think also it's partly you know resources you know the you're looking at the entire company and so it just tends to be a lower priority for us but I think you know we don't do enough reflecting on the things that we do you know separately and so all the different pieces of content the shows but Chris you just sort of hit upon like if we bundle them together maybe that's a thing you know and so that's something that I think that we could do a better job of um you know something else we don't do a great job of is you know forward thinking in terms of the types of shows that we want to do and so you know yes every week we plan out the topic we get one week ahead of it so that we can promote it on social media but we have all of these tools that we tell our clients about in terms of keyword research predictive forecasting and again due to you know call it laziness call it lack of time call it bandwidth we haven't used those tools ourselves and so Chris when you were just talking about you know uh a specific Google analytics episode I can guarantee we didn't use our own forecasting tools to plan the timing of it we just said hey let's cover this topic so those that's something that I feel like we should get more disciplined about in terms of planning out our shows. It's interesting you know I like that you mentioned the laziness in there I was watching a a thing on Instagram recently uh Gary Vaynerchuk was talking about how the different personality attributes. And he actually had a really, I think it's a thing to say about laziness he says, laziness is a good thing. Laziness tells you when you know you are bad at something, or when you know uh that you don't enjoy doing something, right?

You you get lazy about like, yeah, because if you really liked it, you could love doing it. Like you'd be doing it like that, like all the time. Like it kind of like how I feel about email newsletters. If I could send an email newsletter every day, I would, because I love doing email marketing that much. Um, we don't have the you know, we it's not a priority to do that, but compare that to uh, should I, you know, reorganize our our YouTube channel into playlists and bundle things up and you know put a post on YouTube and and and do all the things that a good YouTuber would do, make your end cards and all this stuff.

I don't like doing it. I you know, it's it's just not my thing. Um I look at someone, you know, like Violet Orlandy or First to Eleven or any of these, you know, the the big musical acts and stuff that are on YouTube, and the effort and the energy and the resources they put into promoting the tech of that channel, and is that something that they love? They the audience loves it too, but they clearly put time and effort into their craft for that, and it shows it it shows that they aren't, but on the flip side, they have absolutely no content marketing, you know, they have no email marketing and stuff like that. So you can see what they know they either don't know or aren't good at or don't enjoy doing.

So I think that's a good indicator, you know, as a useful meta takeaway from the this is when you feel like you're you're procrastinating at something, yeah. Ask why. Like, what is it about that thing? Like, yep, not gonna do it. So the reason I'm procrastinating on getting our new website done is because it's not my jam.

Yeah, it's it's not your jam. It's not something that you know, it when you something is your jam, you feel confident in doing it. Like, okay, just get out of the way. I'm you know, you know, all you sit down, we're gonna do this thing. Like you're watching you run a meeting, for example, you have absolutely zero doubt in your mind about how to make that meeting happen and get all the people to behave, right?

There's there's nothing putting it, you know, putting it off. Um so it comes down to like what is it that you're good at? And so you know, when we talk about the live stream and the things that we don't do well, that's the easiest indicator. Like, oh, I forgot to you know put up this blog post, I forgot to do this. Like, okay, hell that's clearly then says that's that's not an area of strength.

It makes sense, and you know, I think that you know, we're only limited by ourselves at this point, and you know, so obviously we're trying to grow the company and bring on other staff members, but until we do that, we the three of us kind of just have to suck it up and do the thing. Um, all right. So, John, your to-do list is gonna get longer. I know more stuff to do. But it is that is the throttle right there.

Is it you do stuff that only has to be good enough because yeah, I you look at like Mr. Beast or some of these YouTube accounts that you know, there's a person whose full-time job is to optimize thumbnails, you know, like that's all they do with their whole life. And we actually have some clients, and this is another great plug is that our clients always come first. That's the reason why this stuff all sucks, is because we're making our clients happy. So, you know, you need to if you want higher quality stuff, just come talk to us.

But um, yeah, you you do the best with what you've got, and thankfully the tools have you know improved so much that we can get our stuff out there without having to, you know, work because uh this is something I just learned so early in my career is the great thing with marketing is there's never a shortage of stuff to do. You can always come up with a list of 20 things you should be doing today that could drive the business, and that list is infinite. So if you only cross five or seven off your list today, well, don't let that keep you up at late at night because you know there's 20 other pages of stuff that could easily be added to that. No, that's that's absolutely true. Um, you know, I will say a couple of things that we have started doing within the past few months that have been working.

Uh so Chris, you have started including um meeting invites or calendar invites to the live stream in the newsletter, and you're seeing people take advantage of that. And so it's a one-click way for people to just put it on their calendar for that week for whatever that topic is. And John, you've been using the live stream as your RD space for uh SMS advertising and text messaging advertising. And so I would love to hear from both of you how those things are going and if you think that we'll continue doing that into the future. Yeah, Chris, I don't know, did you want to leave it to the calendar?

I hadn't even I didn't know that was in the newsletter. It's already on my calendar. So well, yeah, you don't count, it's already on your calendar. You have to be here. Yeah, exactly.

No, um on average, the those calendar invite links get around 15 to 20 clicks a week, right? So people clicking on one of those links is you know, add it to your Google calendar, your outlook calendar, your Office 365 calendar. And it's a relatively inexpensive, like it does take somebody uh, you know, about a uh two to five minutes a week to to put those links together so that it functions as an auto invite. But it's useful and again, it's one of those things that you can use to draw attention, uh, even just in email design, like, hey, here's this thing. Here's three bullets.

Oh, like what's it was oh, add it to my calendar. Okay, that's something that's useful. Um, what we do see perform much better uh is actually getting people to the videos uh either on YouTube or uh in the blog post uh post show. You know, so there may be 15 or 20 people who watch during the show, but then you know, obviously hundreds of people watching after the show has aired. So one of the things to keep in mind is that you know unless you have a compelling business reason to have content vanish after it's aired, um treat it like a regular YouTube video as well.

Obviously, if Facebook is your jam, if that's your platform, do that there. I I've had we've seen good interaction with LinkedIn, um, but we have not seen the you know the post-event uh videos do well at all. It's like once it passes out of the feed, it's it's gone from memory, whereas YouTube obviously shows up in search. So uh those calendar invites are good for the appointment media side of things, but at least for us in our experience, um the real audiences after the after the show's over. The the text front has just been fascinating.

I've been loving it. I mean, the one thing with the text though, it's kind of easy fishing, you know, because those are the most engaged people. These are people that do want to actually get a text message from us and hear about stuff real time. So those are kind of the best fans, the most passionate fans. And it really doesn't take a lot of work to get them, you know, involved in it because they want to hear about it.

The real challenge, I think, is getting the folks that are a lot earlier in the cycle, you know, that have never heard about us or the show getting them to check out a new show and able to grow things. Whereas uh yeah, text is just kind of an extension of the email address. You know, I think you can definitely anybody you have on your email house list, you give them the option to sign up via via text and get text messages, and you're just gonna get that 10% that loves everything you do, are gonna be the people that are in that. The only other thing that an interesting learning from all that is how they've applied some machine learning to the tool now, which has been really fascinating. And that, you know, with email, you do a blast and you get these 35 emails in and now you have to go through your inbox.

Hopefully it's at least getting the bounces out and you're just answering, you know, the ham and no spam. But the uh text message platform will group them. It intelligently groups them. So if for example I send out a text and say hey the Jabra 75T earbuds are on sale this week you know we've talked about them on the show everybody loves them. You know, if I get four or five responses back of where can I find them or where's the link or what's the discount code, it will actually bundle those together and say, hey, these six text messages are all you know send me the link so I can get that and I can answer the one and it goes back to the six.

So that's really a one-to-one marketing thing of you know I'm not spamming an answer back. I'm giving the individuals that want that stuff back but it's been optimized for me so that I don't have to send six messages. I can just do it at once. So yeah and then when you add in all the weird stuff going on with email now and over the next couple months with opens and clicks and losing tracking over there. Yeah text is just a really great place to be the challenge with this is you know our marketers going to ruin it again are you going to be getting 65 texts a day and just throwing your phone in the trash because you just can't take it anymore.

That remains to be seen that's a solid point. And I I hope not. Um, you know, it's enough that we're getting all of these spam phone calls now to start getting the spam text would be just that much worse. Um, you know, so Chris, uh, you were mentioning, you know, the content after the show. So one of the things that we've done is create a very simple blog template that um, you know, I have it literally sitting up on my computer in BB Edit, where every week just copy the template right into WordPress and then change a couple of links and maybe not even 10 minutes, depending on how slow you're moving that morning.

The post is up. And so the post is already shareable, it's already ready for people to consume the information. And so I would say, you know, if you're trying to recreate or write a whole new fresh post right after you've done some sort of like a live stream or video, give yourself a break and maybe just create a super simple template to just plug the link into and let the video be the content. You don't have to recreate it in this blog template because if you're posting the um transcription from the video, the content's already there. So I I made the conscious decision to give myself a break and keep the template really straightforward, and it's the same every single week.

It introduces like here's the live stream, here's where you can watch it, here's the topic we covered this week, here's the video, here's the three learning takeaways, which we had planned from the week before, and here's what's coming up next week, and then the transcript. Super straightforward. It takes maybe 10 minutes to put together every single week, and then that's it. It's done, it's out there. Yeah, it's less people.

Okay, John. I was just gonna say so many people fail to close a loop like that. Like that's you just have to do that. Yeah, I would I'd say, you know, on the topic of what would we if if we were to start over today, having those those processes in place would be, I think, save us a lot of headache. You know, if we were starting up a new show.

Okay, we need to have uh this tablet, we need to have uh the process, we need to have you know the the audio file uploaded to otter um for transcription uh after the show. The all those little things that just go in the cookbook over time, that's the biggest thing. Starting over is just take the cookbook the stuff that you know it works and move it on and move it into this. A lot of the early stuff for this show came from the Saturday night show that I used to do, like, you know, how do you stream those things and stuff? So now it's this is just continuing to evolve, you know, lessons learned over the years.

I forgot I totally forgot that you used to do that Saturday night show. Data party. Yep. That's right. Well, so as we're wrapping up this, you know, one year anniversary of the live stream, I'll guess I'll sort of you know ask this very broad open-ended question of a year from now, what do you hope we've been able to do with this show?

And I'll ask that question to both of you, and I will also take a minute to think about that. But what do you hope in the next year? Not in the you know, what happens in the world, but just you know, constrained down to this show. What do you hope that we can do with this show in the next year for Trust Insights? I think it would be interesting.

It would it would be a dynamic change, but I think, and not all the time, but I think it'd be interesting to occasionally have a guest on. Um, you know, like a hot seat show, like, okay, like you know, come on onto the show, bring your website or your data studio dashboard for um your your latest email marking, and uh we play, you know, like a game show. It's like, well, what can we do to improve this thing? Uh sort of like um uh oh gosh, what is what is this cooking show that's like that? It's it's sort of like a hot seat show where you just you know disassemble some of these things, you critique it live.

Uh, I think something like that would be very interesting to do. Um, we've when we've seen it done at conferences, it goes over usually very well because you can get a lot of learnings out of it and can you know it creates that reactive environment where like, oh, that coloring on your website's terrible, or wow, that call to action you can't use on a mobile device. You know, little things like that, but it would be fun. I would love to see that happen in the in the next year. I just yeah, that would be interesting.

Well, I think we would need to be careful to make sure we keep it as a learning and not as someone who's just coming on to be promotional. So I think that that's where for me, that's where I would draw the line of like, we're happy to help you when you get some free work done, but it can't just be you plugging your book every two seconds. Like, oh no, you're gonna come in, you're gonna get punished. Yeah, John gets enough of that all day long. I know I thought you were gonna say we don't want people just to come on to get pummeled.

Like that. Well, there's that. That's also part of it. But it's you know, if if that URL is live, buddy, you better get with it because you're already you're already taking a beating. Um yeah, as far as the next year, I just you know, it's all about more reach and better audience, you know.

I would love to make sure that we're meeting the needs of what people want to hear. And so as a result, more people want to get involved and the community gets more active because yeah, it's just amazing some of the stuff we've done, like over in the Slack group of being able to have conversations about the, you know, I was just talking this morning, we're talking about how H3 tags are getting promoted on blog posts to the title, and it's you know, it's just some crazy stuff that Google's doing, and to have a place where you can go and talk about what's going on and and figure out where to go next that's just you can't put a price tag on that really that's what kind of fuels everything and gives everybody a chance to succeed. So yeah that's where I hope we can get to in the next 12 months. How about you Katie I want us to stay consistent and continue to be able to produce this show on a weekly basis. I like the cadence of it I think that it's you know just enough of the three of us getting together to problem solve I want to make sure that we keep it a problem solving show um so that you know we're still getting to the so what like why does someone care about the show but then I want to you know I want us to you know Chris as you were just saying you know in terms of what we do different but I want us to be able to tighten up those processes around um being able to promote ourselves a little bit better.

It's something we were talking about in a different context but related you know we know what we do is valuable where we struggle is to explain it to people in such a way that they understand it. And I feel like this show is a great opportunity for that. So if we take even more of the stuff that we think is valuable to our customers and really dissect it maybe even bring someone on to be that you know customer live person to ask those questions I think that we would only be doing ourselves in our audience a benefit to really break it down to tangible actionable things of what do I do with you know a Markov chain attribution analysis. Well, first of all, what the hell is it? And second, why do I need it?

So using this platform to really dig into you know breaking it down to more simplistic terms. All right. Well, thank you for watching. Uh, whether this is your first episode or the 50th uh episode you've enjoyed if so what uh stay tuned. We're gonna be trying all sorts of new stuff in the future.

If you haven't already had a chance, go pop on over to the Slack group. You'll see a URL for it uh in a little bit. And uh we'll catch you next week. So take care, everyone. Thanks for watching today.

Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI Podcast and our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.