Help!

I’m trapped in a Word document!

Meeting 13

This was a rather brief meeting, we discussed the Intro and Conclusion for the final document as well as how chapter 3 can be improved.

The Intro:

  • what I’m going to study
  • divide it in chunks discussing the chapters

Conclusion:

  • reconnect to the learning agreement
  • connect to the intro
  • what has been done and why

I’ll get into writing those soon, right after I’ll have a draft for chapter 4.

25 days to go. Jeez..is coming fast!

Thank you Nalts!

Nalts is a YouTube legend, from the very first generation of successful YouTubers. He is also a marketer and he worked in the advertising industry (yes, sounds like the same career I’m pursuing). He is now stable at one of the Johnson&Johnson’s satellites company.

He is also the author of Beyond Viral which is the book my research is revolving around.

I made a video specifically to ask him feedback about the channel and the response was overwhelming, while I was expecting for a quick email he blew me away with lots of love.

He talked amazingly positively about the InfographicGuy and one of the video on his blog willvideoforfood.com:

He then tweeted about it:

He left a great comment on my YouTube page:

and then he also left a comment on the “Calling for help, I need your feedback video”:

Nalts is like a mentor to me and all this is a great boost at 4 weeks to the final submission.

Thank you man, I appreciate it.

300 Subscribers

300 Subs! Awesome!

Endeavour for feedbacks

Tick.

Off the to-do list, aaaaaaw such a relief. I made two unlisted videos for the case.

One for Kevin Nalty, writer of Beyond Viral the book which has been the focus of my research:

Another video was made for someone I will refer to as Jesus for a whole bunch of reasons I can’t really explain. He works in the industry doing what, I would love to do in the future:

Now, let’s see how it goes.

As discussed a post ago, I’ve also published a general video asking people for feedback. Hopefully I’ll have enough to start a discussion in the evaluation chapter.

Meeting N12

This meeting was all about feedback.

  • What should I ask to YouTubers and people from the industry?
  • Why?
  • What is the point of what I’m going to ask? 
  • If I ask what I will ask, will it work for my feedback chapter?
  • Am I ever going to finish this project?…no wait! This is not related.

Alrighty then, we came full circle in the end, and we decided to make people talk, and ask 3 generic questions:

Do you like the channel? How would you improve it? Why?

Here is the video:

If you feel like leaving a feedback, please do. You can even leave a comment down here.

Thanks!

Meeting N11

This little unreadable picture down here represent my next weeks trying to sort out the final Honours Project sprint.

…anyway.

Meeting 11 today, chapter 3 is on its way to be done. John is on it, I’m looking forward to have it back so that I can start making the last few changes before to proof read it.

The meeting was really productive and John had great ideas about the chapter. Wheels are spinning and the light at the end of the tunnel is not that far at all.

Action to take after the meeting are plain and simple (click on the image to have a better idea):

  • Finish the video I’m working on at the moment to ask people for feedbacks
  • Chop here and there chapter one, with the aim to re-purpose it a little bit
  • Write Chapter 4 (or at least start writing about it)

Good, back to the video now. Aye!

Revising, revising, revising.

Chapter 3 (Critical evaluation) is on its way to revision.

Love and Hate, I’m ok revising my own stuff, it is just that it gets boring after a while, however, this is a another step forward.

I’ve just got a whole new chapter to write ASAP..

..YAY..

..not really

Meeting N10

Today’s meeting was more about awareness. 

7 weeks left and:

- I’ve got chapter 2 to finish up and correct

- Write chapter 3 (feedback and conclusions)

- Write another case study in the Lit. Review section

- Make a poster for the poster presentation

- Stress out massively

- Cry myself to sleep..no wait that is for next week..

Thanks John, now I’m back on track..straight to stressland! 

Coffee anyone?!

Life is a bit**

..when you lose 2 days worth of writing. Word, you just killed my happiness today.

Thank you.

P.s. John, all my notes from the meeting are gone. If you have recollection of what we said, please drop me an email.

Here it comes a bit of exposure

I’m a Shaycarl fan, the guy with his daily vlogs (video blog) started a whole new trend on YouTube, which became very popular before to develop into a standard; a new way to interact with the audience which, many YouTubers now adopt.

Probably the most catchy thing about him is his positiveness. He also have a great family, a lovely wife and a very interestingly active life. ShayCarl is a professional YouTuber therefore his YouTube Partner income sustain him and his family.

Two years ago he started a channel called ShayLoss (about losing weight), which he never really updated that often, until few months ago when together with a bunch of friends and YouTubers he started a competition on losing weight living a healthier life.

The 22nd of September 2011 I came out with this:

..an opening for his videos on the ShayLoss channel. Shay always used user generated intro on his vlogs, and the fact he didn’t have one for his ShayLoss channel videos combined to my desire to

A) do something for him (..’cause he is a great guy!)

B) gain some exposure

I just went for it and I post it as a video response, I also send a personal email to Shay (I didn’t get any response though). The cool thing here is that TheSurvivalTheory picked up the video, created a song for it, uploaded the video with his song in his channel and he tweeted it to Brett, Shay’s friend. Brett loved the opening and showed it to Shay. A week later, BOOM! Shay uses the intro in one of his ShayLoss videos:

Is your head spinning? Cool, mine too.

Meeting N9

Waiting for Week 12 again, today we had a good catch up considering we didn’t meet the past weeks. The big difference with the first part of the Hons project is that writing now is quite easier, although the academic style is expected, there is less reading due and it is easier to explain what I have been doing rather than researching the topic. 

There is not much due for next meeting apart to catch up with writing and keep doing as much as possible.

I’ve got 2 chapter to write plus a video to make in the next 8 weeks, I can hear the time ticking quite loudly.

200 Subscribers!

Yay! The channel keep growing, another milestone reached, 200 subscribers!

:)

Ok, this is flattering: http://bit.ly/pPYOpS

Now and then. Comparing past and present.

In an excess of positiveness and will to do the 23rd of April I published this post.

Uni with the last semester is on its way and I wanted to draw a line from now to back in the days when I still had to get my hands dirty, when the project wasn’t up and running yet, therefore when the world was still made of rainbows and polar bears.

ACHTUNG!: I’m going to be quite frank in this post before to get back writing my academic paper where everything has to be filtered, polished and refined.


This is a S**tload of work

Excuse the french, but I had only a clue of how much effort was due to see any results with this project and most of all I didn’t plan with enough accuracy the amount of time required to make a decent video: all considered it takes me 3 weeks. I could rush the job it like I did with the “Angry Voicemail” video and let the YouTube channel totally overwhelm my life (it cost me a missed flight that time), but I quickly realized that it was a bad idea. Some thought process is required as well as going through some kind of design process. However, there is no such a thing as pre-production, it all moves from notebook to Adobe Illustrator/After Effects.

Making the video is not the most difficult part though, as Nalty states in his book “Beyond Viral”, market yourself is the most difficult part. Tough! People don’t care about you and what you do. Even collaborating with other YouTubers is not easy, don’t get me wrong, as I stated in the old post I’m happy with the results so far, although until you reach a wider audience the whole process is frustrating as hell (I doubt it will change in the next future).

Past-Present

Now, to be more in line with the intro of this post, I would like to reconnect and compare to the old myself. Here is an answer to a post I published 4 months ago:

Build a persona: I need to put down few ideas and build up my own persona. I think I will focus on the “infographic guy”. The idea is to represent myself using a cartoon character, so to appear in the videos as that character

This was a decent idea, but I decided to go for a picture of myself instead for different reasons. Mostly the amount of work necessary to build a whole new character would have been huge, too many details to look after, and having a cartoon character would have added extra time on the video making process, where the character should have been animated in some way. So I had to wisely consider the amount of time available for the project and focus somewhere else. I also wanted to personalize the graphic of the YT layout, certainly the right thing to do, however, an approaching new YouTube UI stopped me on spending any time on that aspect as well.

A plan, I need a plan: write a plan is a priority, I need to put down at least a draft of what I’m supposed to do in the next months.

I had a plan, It was wise, shining and very encouraging. Until I started, and I had to flush it away. Don’t get me wrong a plan is important however what I understood during the process of building up the channel is that you gotta be versatile, ready to change your ideas without falling in love with it. When I started I was wrong on few things, now I know. My only complaint against my past me was that he lost the direction at one point getting by following the flow, which is not necessarily a bad thing, however so far it didn’t pay back. The morale of the story here is: keep working this thing out, and you’ll know more every day.

Keep writing the Lit review: the lit review is not finished yet, I’ve got other few thousands words to chew, enough to keep me busy for few weeks, gotta got back to it as soon as possible.

On this point I had quite a wake up call lately. My lit review is already twice as big as it should be. This didn’t motivate me on writing more stuff, because it felt like a waste of (precious) time. I think I’ll rather have to shrink down what I have and embrace the fact that adding more chapters won’t really make a difference anymore. This whole thing has to be discussed with my tutor though (John, are you ready?), we’ll see.

Content is king: I also got to write down the content for the videos I’m going to produce. I’ve got the first idea lined up and few bits and pieces for the future videos, I’ve got to keep my eyes wide open and look for inspiration everywhere.

Bless me. Write the content of the videos months in advance is wrong, period. Is more important to try and predict future hot topics (not content that might go viral, which is impossible. Fact is that you don’t really need a crystal ball to predict that the last Harry Potter movie will become hot topic for at least a week..I arrived late) and make something along that line.

Conclusions

I’m, by no means, stating that now I’ve got everything figured out, because I don’t. I’m just saying that some of the stuff the paper taught me was not accurate (most it was though), in this business is tricky, and you have to dive into it to understand more about it. I’m still scraping the surface here, and to be of some sort of help to the neighbor, this research should carry on for at least another year hoping the channel would fly much higher than is doing now. That said, re-reading this post in a few weeks from now, I’m sure it will sound pretty much wrong, but hey! C’est la vie.