ykyz: Have your say

Part One: Where To Start

Part Two : Scores And How To Use Them

So you don’t like your score, but you’re over it. It’s time to change that annoyance, and promote yourself. The most important place to start is this checklist. This is a fantastic place to start building your brand and look. It also will have you all set on how to upload your microcast to other sources.

Twitter and other social medias are your best friend. Not only do they give you a place to show your friends your work, but they give you groups to post in. Join groups that are in your area of subject. Post to them. Follow others who have the same passion as you do. They WILL follow you back. Start conversations and don’t give people a reason to talk, BE the reason people talk.

I have a once a day Twitter rule personally. This means AT LEAST one Tweet a day. I use other medias as well, but for simplification sake I will stick to the most popular one. Wording is everything with these posts. I HATE clickbait, but attention grabbers are completely different. Right now there are millions of tweets about the coronavirus…how will people find yours? Go for honest, yet intriguing.

Challenge yourself every week. Maybe a post on Monday had one hundred impressions. Go for one hundred and fifty next week. Use the numbers to motivate yourself to want more. Not hold you back. Take time to find out what words such as “impressions” means for your favorite social media. I challenge your next step to be knowing what the numbers mean this time, not just the numbers themselves.

*Please read Stats And Where To Start before moving forward if you have not already

With more and more statistic information becoming available, you may be asking yourself “why?”. Is it to hurt your feelings? Is it to make you want to quit? Maybe it’s to show you do not belong in microcasting? Obviously none of these items are true. If you fail, YKYZ fails. If YKYZ fails, you fail. Every side needs as much information as possible. But why?

Personally I have not been here long, but I have heard casts or bleats about others being in some type of managerial position. If you have not been that’s fine, I intend to make the connection as simple as possible. Most leaders or managers know about the Net Promoter Score. This “NPS” stat has become so popular, that even people who never worked in management know about it. Net Promoter Score: a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a company’s customer relationships. At least that is according to my very scientific research on Wikipedia.

This definition is the best place to start. The manager is you. The company is your content. YOU manage your content. No one else. Not even YKYZ. Imagine YKYZ is just the building where you conduct your business. Now think of ANY job where you have worked. Did the building create a customer base? Or was it the business inside? Who created return customers? It was you. You made those relationships into a thriving business. What does that have to do with NPS?

It appears over the next few weeks YKYZ may be giving us more information of the stats work. This should make you excited. Now the control is in your hands. Own it. To some, using this kind of information may be difficult. Maybe even overwhelming. I’m hear to tell you, you’re making it way more complicated than it needs to be. You’re making it complicated because of emotion.

When a company’s or store’s NPS score comes in A LOT of associates freak out. Most companies now live off of it. You know those customer surveys you may have done in the past? They usually consist of five to ten questions, but only one or two matter. Usually they are phrased as “how likely are you to return to this location?” or “how likely are you to recommend us to your friends?” blah blah blah. They really do not care about the other three to eight questions one bit. Of course, most people go to surveys only when they are upset, so most employees hate seeing these numbers.

Much like how you might hate seeing your microcast’s stats. I’ve always told coworkers “who cares what corporate head honchos say, use these numbers for what they are meant for”. Yes someone’s bonus may be attached to it, or maybe your next promotion relies on it, but an over abundance of associates use these numbers in such an unproductive way that they never see that bonus anyways.

Example: “The food came out cold, and you are uneducated”. Despite how hurtful the comment was, never look for the emotional response to solve this equation. “The food came out cold.” This may be a reoccurring theme that only the numbers from NPS would show you. Take out not just your emotional response to the comment, but the customers as well. They’re just mad and there’s no reason to dwell. Only use the informative part of the sentence: Cold Food.

Now that emotion has been removed, you know you have a “bad” number, and you know why. What’s next? You fix it. Most would go back to sales that day, and break down labor. Others may look at talent and training, but the fact you at least know WHERE to look changes the game completely. You turned the “bad” number into a good one. Maybe you notice one episode of yours is performing better than others. You listen to it and realize you had an intro that was really catchy. So now you use it on all episodes. Possibly your multi-episodic deep dives perform twice as well as your ninety second quick fire news. Use these numbers to ably to future episodes, not to hinder them.

Now I may have been of subject a few times, but just remember NPS. People hate to see the number, but it’s how they use it that determines if they are successful. Do you want to be successful talking about what you love?

We are offering a prize of US $5000 to the microcaster of the year for 2020 (CotY 2020). This will go to the most outstanding microcaster during 2020. To be eligible, the microcaster must have at least 100 microcast episodes during 2020.

To determine the winner of CotY 2020, we will find the top microcasters based on the level attained (see here for more information on levels). If there is a tie at the highest level attained, then we will split the payment among all microcasters at that level.

For unpaid microcasters, who are not officially at a level, we will judge them on their “as if” level. The main considerations remain consistent with microcast quality and high popularity.

The winner of CotY 2020 will be publicly announced no later than January 15, 2021.

It’s that magical and somewhat exciting moment when someone takes the time to listen to what you have to say and actually respond to it. You are instantly filled with a sense of joy after having your opinion listened to and are thankful that someone took the time to have a conversation with you.
With that being said, this magical moment can sometimes be hard to come by, which is why it is important you do everything you can to maximize the possibility of engagement on your micro casts.  Now that might sound like a daunting task to accomplish and 100 or so questions might be running through your mind about how to do it, but it’s actually quite easy when you break it down a bit.

1.  Ask a question.
Believe it or not, this is one of the easiest ways to get people engaged with your Microcast on YKYZ.  It is also a way to get some pretty unique discussions going on the website, which will only help your channel grow more.

Whether the question is about a current event, a moment in your life or just something you are generally interested in doesn’t matter, what does is that you ask something that a wide group of people are interested in and can solicit a response.

Now, you can do this in several ways, starting with the title of your bleat. For example, you can name it something to the effect of did I go too far. Or what would you do in this situation? Or even something along the lines of should I apologize for what I did. Not only will this make other users curious, but it also gives them an incentive to listen through the cast and answer the question.

Secondly, make sure to leave an audio reminder to your audience about your question. Maybe make it rhyme like let me know in the bleats below. It just has to be something that reminds your audience to engage with you at the end of the bleat.

Lastly, promote the living hell out of it! Send it to some relevant Facebook or even put it with a few hashtags on Twitter. Just something to get the word around about the conversation.


2. AMA’s
Do you have a unique point of view? Of course, you do. We all honestly do to some extent and that is something you can use to drive engagement to your channel. All you have to do is is say that you are such and such and are opening yourself up to questions about a specific subject.

For example, let’s say you’re a former Trump supporter that is planning on voting for Bernie Sanders in the upcoming election. All you have to do is record a bleat saying the above statement and invite your fellow microcasters to ask you anything about the topic.

This will surely get a discussion buzzing on the website, open the door to new listeners stumbling upon your channel for the first time and even some of the most engaging and fruitful conversations you have had in quite a while. It’s all here waiting for you!

3. Relevant topics.
There’s a lot of news that happens in a 24 hour period and some microcasters like to take it upon themselves to report upon it. This has overwhelmingly proven to be a good thing, especially with engagements on previous topics and could be a great way to help grow your channel.

Maybe it’s something stupid some politician did, a global incident or just something you find hypocritical. Either way, it is a way to put out interesting content that fellow microcasters will want to engage with. Furthermore, it could even lead to news stories becoming your channels bread and butter.

In the end, not every relevant topic you pull out is going to be successful and it’s going to be a lot of hit and miss along the way. However, it is very worth it once you find your stride and are able to actually get people to engage with the news story.


4. Take requests.
Several microcasters have done this already and it is honestly one of the easiest ways to get fans engaging with your content. Not only is this due to the fact that it gives fans a sense of power to pick what kind of topics you do, but it also shows them that you care about their opinion.

If nothing else, that’s a strong way to build a relationship with your audience and could definitely help drive up engagements if the right subjects are presented. It even invites your fans to find your social media pages and request more topics there, which allows you to slowly grow an audience.

5. Get creative.
Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel and that is honestly been some of the most compelling content on YKYZ so far. In fact, between Brewful Mind’s beer quiz and Music and Peace’s live covers, it’s pretty safe to say that YKYZ is breaking the mold on what a microcast can be.

Of course this question is different for everyone, but what is that you think you can do to separate yourself from the pack?.  Maybe it’s interviewing random people on the street. Or, maybe it’s playing around with sound clips from the daily news videos, but do something that makes you unique and worth engaging with.

In the end, microcasters are still raising the bar on how to engage fans, which makes this an ongoing process, but this should at least give you a running start when it comes to getting the most engagement out of your episodes. As always. let us know your thoughts in the comments below and feel free to send over any suggestions of what you think we should cover next.

To start, the fact that you are going out of your way to create content is already a better start than most. The bad news is the market for content creators is extremely saturated. What does this mean for you? Well it means you’re special, and you just need to find ways to stand out. I will not be going over any stories of how to clickbait titles, or how to grow your SEO (maybe in the future). Rather, I will attempt to ease some minds over stats, and the instant “I stink, I quit” reaction numbers give people.

Numbers do not care if you’re feelings are hurt. They do not care if it destroys your motivation to continue. Most importantly, they are merely informative. Obvious, right? Wrong. Remember when YKYZ introduced viewership stats? How did you feel when you saw those numbers? I’m including the people that were ecstatic about their results as well. These numbers gave you an emotional response when they were simply just numerical digits that represented who clicked that play button.

Start there: they’re just numbers. If low, they’re used to grow and make action plays. If high, they’re used to grow and make action plans. The outcome does not and will not change. This is immensely important to receive the best results. Think of your favorite YouTuber, blogger, or podcaster. I challenge you to find the very first episode they ever made. Most likely it was terrible. I mean bad. My first video was full of so many “uhs” and “ums” I cringe just listening to it. Refuse to actually.

What made your favorite creator great? I guarantee you they had the exact same results you did. The difference was they took those same stats, and used them to build. Stats are not final results, they are place holders. A place holder to show you where you stand at any given moment. They will go down, but they CAN also go up.

Your viewership results are your child. Your baby. If you had a child, and you allowed it to do anything it wanted. Then every time it performed an unacceptable act you just did nothing and gave up, where would that child end up? How can you grow and develop something with out knowing what acts are going on?

Use these stats as something to grow. I can go on forever about different statistics, and how to use them. In order to start that journey you need to remove the emotional response. Use the numbers as a current location, not an end point. “I only got one view yesterday?” That’s one more view than most of your friends. That’s one more view than the person who gave up before they even began.

You began. You started. You already took the hardest step there is. You will see numbers and stats you don’t like. So fix them. Math is meant to have a solution at the end. Be that solution to your own problem. If you see one view, be excited to know who’s watching. You can’t fix a problem you don’t see.