I am old, like I have a very clear memory of getting our first color TV old. Sometimes my job forces me out on to the thin ice of something completely new and I have to lean what many now know instinctively. Now many of you kids will find no new information in the tale I am about to tell, but take heed of my words, you too will one day be baffled by the wonders of the age that follows you.
As a company we have been working very hard over the past several months to produce a short video to quickly and accurately explain one of our products. Now that we are days away from seeing our first “rough cut” (I feel so Hollywood saying that, and I think that Brad Pitt should play me in the future Aaron Sorkin movie about Twocanoes) we have to get all our logistics together to get that short video out.
I was given the task of putting the video up on youtube and that led to getting the company youtube channel set up and then a crash course on tagging. The process to create a youtube channel is like a Chinese puzzle box, that is the more you struggle with it the harder it will be to open. See, I was raised in fortune 500 companies so my instinct to maintain brand and company control of brand assets.
Keeping this company level control on the youtube channel and our brand is not an easy proposition in the world of Google and youtube. Don’t get me wrong all the tools for brand control are there. the controls are just hidden so deep in walls of icons and assorted menus that we had started to look for a wizard and a hobbit to help us find the link to rule them all. As it turns out branding control resides in the heart of Google Apps accessed from the “domain administrator panel”.
Once the admin panel was defeated (and it was the kung fu of Tim Perfitt that is wholly responsible for vanquishing that foe) we were able to link the twocanoes.com domain to our youtube channel. Now we were now ready to customize the page and brand it up (and control behavior on the page and moderate the comments etc.).
The graphics and logos uploads and color selection are all straight forward. Layout of a youtube channel are locked so the good news is I had to spend zero time thinking about layout. Our web Guru supplied me with the “hex color codes” so matching the look and feel back to our web page was easy.
Logos and banners all loaded up no issues thanks in large part to Google having zero concern over file size. Then a quick cut and paste of the company description we were in the home stretch to uploading videos and going live. One last hurdle, we had to figured out the key words.
This whole Keyword thing we put lots of pressure on ourselves to get this part right. So we compiled a long list of every relevant word we could think of. Then I ran off to the internet for 3 hours of reading, supposedly about tags. Instead I learned a lot about why Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young broke up and I watched WAY too much K-pop. After all that I came to the conclusion that common sense will guide us in the world of tags so we pared the key word list down to something manageable and loaded that up.
Our masterpiece was now complete, our brand was protected and we were ready to show that rebel alliance the power of our fully armed and operational battle station….But I digress. With youtube at our back we were ready to showcase our product and tech support videos and maybe even a video of a cat running into a glass door.