Burke Holland 0:19 Hey, all right, thank you so much for having me here at code word comp. I’m excited to be here, and today I’m going to tell I’m going to tell you how to grow your YouTube channel to half a million subscribers. Guaranteed this, this plan can’t fail. You can only be successful, and it’s only going to take you 24 hours. And all of that was a lot, but what I am here to tell you is how we were able to actually grow our YouTube channel to half a million subscribers, and how we did that using Tiktok, which is a little weird. We’ll talk about that, and let’s talk about that. So first of all, and find my mouse. Here we go. Who is we? So we would be the Visual Studio Code channel at Microsoft. This is our YouTube channel, and I think we’re this. I took this today, so we’re right around 540,000 subscribers. This channel’s been around for quite some time, and it has not always been this sizable. Now I should couch everything that I’m gonna say in that, when you work on a product that is as popular as Visual Studio code is and and, as my kid says, so let me get this straight. You get paid to talk about a product that’s free, then it’s this is easier to do. Okay, so you you may be working with more difficult material. I’m definitely working with the easiest possible setup here, but my team’s job at Microsoft is to help get the word out about new features that are in Visual Studio code, because it releases every 30 days, and there’s always new stuff in there, and so it’s really hard for us to make sure that everyone knows about what that stuff is. And of course, with all of the AI stuff happening, this is even worse, right? It’s even more pronounced. There’s just tons and tons of stuff in VS code and GitHub copilot that we need to tell people about, and it’s my team’s job to help you know what the engineers have actually built, which is essentially what developer advocacy does, right? We take the message out, and then we listen to what you say, and we bring the message back in. So here’s my receipts, because I wanted to bring some proof, right? Seriously, the channel growth over lifetime. We’re looking at subscribers. That’s not the only metric that you can use to to gage the success of a YouTube channel, but it is one. There’s a reason that YouTube sends you a plaque when you hit 100,000 1,000,010 million subscribers, right? It isn’t because subscribers are worth nothing, but it is not the only there are other metrics, so this is the one we’ll be looking at today, just because it’s sort of the canonical metric for growth. And there’s kind of two inflection points that I want to point out in this particular graph, which is pixelated because I blew it up quite a bit to make it fit for the slide. But the first one is here, which is like March of 2020, actually, that error probably should go over a little bit where we would see, sort of like a slight uptick here starting really, it’s probably here. And then the other inflection that I want to point out is right here, which is where YouTube shorts arrive, right? So you can see, like, a slight uptick here. And then here is where things start to get to go, hockey stickish. And it’s, you know, this sort of flattens out as as we’ve been over the years. But for the first year, this was like, just looked like it was headed straight to the moon. Um, so, yeah, that’s been our subscriber growth on the channel. Those are my receipts as that’s the proof. You’ve seen it straight, straight from the the studio analytics. And so we kind of need to start with though, like, how exactly did we get here? And so covid changed everything, right? I’m not telling you anything that you don’t already know, but things will never be the same. They’ve not returned to being the same. They will never be the same. And I don’t even need to tell you all the ways in which they change, because you all know, everyone lived through this and so. But the problem is that we need to fully digest the reality of exactly what changed during covid, specifically for content, because it was pretty drastic, and think I’m muted at exactly the right point. That’s skills, all right. So the reality is, for people that worked with content, and I talked about this from a developer relations or developer advocacy point of view, is that that we we had to make some changes, right? Like we can’t. We couldn’t continue to do the same thing, same things that we’ve always done, and expect the same results. And this. Is for a lot of reasons, right? I mean, people consume content much differently now than they did before the pandemic. That’s partially due to the pandemic and partially due to just the fact that the way that we produce, distribute and consume content on the internet is ever evolving. When I first got into this business in 2010 or 11, it was primarily a blog driven content consumption, and then at some point, we sort of pivoted to a video driven content consumption, and then video has different modalities. There’s also much less events than there were before. For those who weren’t, those who are new to the industry or weren’t big into events prior to 29 to 2020, and 2019, events were sort of the primary way that we as developers would get together as communities. I mean, we were online, but events were huge, and you had events for various different frameworks and languages. You know, there’s a TS conf and a React comp and an angular ninja comp and all sorts of comps and and I know that there still are, but it’s not the same way today that it was then, in the sense that that was sort of like the main gathering place, and that was super important, because that’s where you would meet other developers, and you would hear what they’re actually working on. What are they actually building? What? What are the things that they struggle with? What are the things that frustrate them? What do they what gets them excited? This is a really difficult to have these conversations on the internet. It’s extremely difficult because the way that we have these conversations is often, we’re either talking at people and we’re doing it in a form that is that’s one way, right? And so the whole nature of the game just changed. And really, now I’m just telling the sob story about what it was like to be in this profession. When you are you are not able to do your job, but asked to also still do your job. It was, it was an existential crisis. So there’s just much less connection for everyone, right? Like, if you’re sitting out there and you’re thinking, Man, I don’t feel connected to anybody or anything, you’re not alone. And that has always been the case. We’ve been trending in that way, but it’s been worse since the pandemic. A lot of us feel that, I think, and we’re sort of still in that mode. And again, we had much more video. We sort of turned to video from in the pandemic as being maybe like a two reactionary of a way that we would communicate. And so then we have to ask, well, what does advocacy do to adjust to these, to these new ways of talking, specifically video? And so one of the things that a lot of folks did was that they turned to streaming. Now the streaming, if you’re not intimately equated with acquainted with platforms like Twitch, this is live streaming, right? So it’s a platform where you can stream literally anything that you’re doing for any moment, the world, right? And the world can interact with you via the chat, and you can interact back, and it’s very real time. Twitch is very popular with video gamers, with gamers, I shouldn’t say video gamers. I think that makes me a boomer or something. There’s anything wrong with it? Maybe I am. They’re very popular with gamers, which is what you might associate it with that. So, for instance, let me, let me give you an example of this. Man. This is a busy screen, so this right here, is my favorite streamer. His name is yidl, and he plays a game called Overwatch, which I really like. I’m a huge fan of Overwatch. I got into it during the pandemic. It’s a very unique kind of game. I will argue all day about this, about how it’s not an ordinary kind of game. It’s much more like basketball than it is like a video game. We can fight about that on the internet if you want to, and a lot of people don’t like this game, just totally fine. But I watched a lot of this. I still watch quite a bit of this. People can also so the chat can interact, but it’s free. You don’t actually have to pay to interact. But a lot of times, the chat will donate money to the streamers. They’re basically giving them money, and they and they can also do that by subscribing. And so the chat can then also offer gifted subs. And gifted subs are because streamers would prefer to have more subscribers, not just a $100 one time gift, right? And so by getting gifted subs, you get more subscribers, which is what streamers are really after, because that’s how they that’s how they make their living. Is reoccurring revenue. Same for businesses. Businesses want reoccurring revenue, so do streamers. But hopefully what we can take away from this is that the community of Overwatch individuals are gathering around this guy.

And this particular stream, if you look at it, has 11,000 views, but, and I capture this after the fact. But while live, you know, usually pulls in around 2500 live. Viewers, which is an exceptional amount of people. That’s really high. It’s not the highest. There are people who pull in a lot more than that, but that’s high. You’re making pretty good money at that range on Twitch, from what I understand. And he’s doing this for six to eight hours every single day. But Twitch is not just for video games. There’s all kinds of streams out there, right? There’s people who play music. There’s even streams where people travel and just live stream the thing while they travel, like that’s the thing. So it’s logical that people would want to tune into a stream about programming, right? Or web development, or whatever it is, whatever community that you’re a part of, but, but you have a problem straight out of the gate. When it comes to streaming, you have to answer this question, why you? Why would an entire community congregate around you? Right before we had events, we were congregating around the events themselves, and now we need everybody to come to where you are, and that’s tough. How do you do that? How do you get people to congregate around a certain thing? How do you turn yourself into the center of attention? Which I think, I know that’s sort of a bombastic way to say that, but that’s actually what’s happening here. Some people are very good at this, and I think we can learn a lot from our friend Edel here. So let’s analyze exactly what’s happening. So he, if you had to guess why so many people tune in to watch him stream. Can you imagine? Do you know what the answer is here? Can you can you think? I’ll give you a second to think, and I’ll tell you, is it because he’s charming? Is it because he’s got great personality? He’s entertaining? Maybe he yells a lot. Streamers like to yell for whatever reason. Get all animated and worked up. Great storyteller. He’s all of these things. But the difference is, is that he’s also a top 500 player. Okay, we’re not just tuning in because he’s a magnetic individual. That’s great. He’s a top 500 player in a game that has hundreds of 1000s of players or more, right? He’s literally one of the best, and that’s why you tune in to watch, is because he’s one of the best. So if you’re like me, well, you just think, well, then where does that leave me? I’m not one of the best, right? Even if you’re charming, which I’m sure that you are, is where do you go? Not everyone can do this, right? The opportunities for streamers, and there are some people who stream about programming, they do very well. These people are highly talented. This is a very niche sort of skill that these folks have. And they’re also extremely good programmers. They’re very good so the question was, for us, as we started to stream, a lot of people are streaming. They’re streaming to like, 10 people a week. That’s what ends up happening here. And they think it’s, you know, it’s me, it’s my fault. Well, it’s not you, it’s it’s not your fault. It’s just that this is a really, really hard way to reach people. And so as part of the VS code team, when we were looking at this, we tried some streaming, but we got the same kind of results. And we’re just looking we just thought, there has to be a better way. This can’t be it. We can’t go from conferences, large conferences and blog posts with, you know, 10s of 1000s, 100 1000s of views, to the same 10 folks every week, even though it’s wonderful to see those same 10 folks. So this is exactly the problem that we were trying to solve. And so, on top of the fact that the pandemic, when the pandemic started, that people got more isolated, is that the things that they might have been interested in before begin to wane, because everybody is was is stressed out. There’s a lot of anxiety about everything that was going on. People are working from home. A lot of people had small children. They’re trying to balance that their spouse works. It was extremely difficult, right? And so we what we noticed is that just interest across the board in the things we were doing was waning, was declining. Right about this time, there’s a new app that came out that was really taking off, right? It actually hit. I want to say it hit before the pandemic started, but my mind escapes. I think it was May of 2020, that it was really started taking off. And it’s actually, there’s not a space between tick and tox, so forgive me for that. And it took off like a rocket, right? Like, I think it was one of the fastest growing apps in history. And originally, there’s a whole, the whole history behind Tiktok of how it they actually bought a company that allowed you to do lip syncing to music, and made that, I forget what the name of that app was. It was a different app. Made it part of the Tiktok platform, and that’s really when it when it took off, right? And when people think of Tiktok a lot of times, that’s what they think of now, it’s changed a lot over the years, right? A lot of it’s now like influencer content we think about. That. But for a lot of folks, when they think about Tiktok, what they think of is videos like this. So let’s just watch this. Back in the sixth grade, I got the bad grades. I was in love with my musically low she trapping. Man, most of you raps. Man.

Okay, so when you see a video like this, you know your first thought might be like, This is not a this is not the platform for programming type content, right? Like, if this is the kind of content that’s super popular, perhaps this is not the same platform I want to be, but the numbers that are on a video like this, and by the way, this is, I’m sure everybody, if you don’t know who this is, I shouldn’t say which. Everybody knows. This is a young lady named Charlie demilio. She now has her own show. Was she was a phenom on Tiktok, both her and her sister. This video has staggering numbers on it, right? Specifically, I want to point you to the nearly 90,000 comments on the video. Point me to another platform that gets that kind of engagement. I challenge anyone to find another platform that sees this kind of engagement. I don’t know why this is. It just is people like to comment on short form video. But there’s also people like this. Let’s watch this one. This micro tip will show you how to automatically change the color and size of emails from certain people, like your boss, for example. First off, go to the View menu up here, and then click on View Settings. Then I’m going to go down and click conditional formatting. Now, Outlook already has a bunch of these pre set up, but I’m going to click the Add button, and we’re going to add the boss rule. Then I click condition and I’m going to say from. So this is where I add my boss’s name. My boss is Ella Taylor, and I will select her and hit from and hit, OK. I could check on this box and say, hey, if it’s sent only to me, I want to flag it or on the CC line, but I’m going to uncheck this. This is just any mail from Ella. I’m going to flag as red, hit, ok. Now I choose the font, and we’re going to make this font red, so any mail from my boss is red, and I can make the actual text much bigger. Hit size, no. Bigger hit, OK. And now hit, OK. And then okay, the View Settings dialog and watch what happens. Now, any mail that is from Ella, you can see the font is really big and it’s red. Hit the plus button to follow along for daily Microsoft tips. So this is Mike Tolson. He works at Microsoft. He’s a product manager on the Office team. And I don’t know if you picked up like there’s the Office theme is playing in the background, but it’s like, no. But it’s like, not quite the Office theme. It’s like a, like a Office Theme knockoff, you know, I guess, for copyright reasons. But it’s pretty funny. This video has 3 million views and 1680 comments. Now, why? Right? A clip on Outlook. Because we all use it. We all use Outlook, right? Like, this is something that most people can relate to. And this is about the time that we realized that Tiktok was actually full of this stuff. There was people doing spreadsheet tips. Like, that’s all they did was do spreadsheet tips, and they had millions of views. And so we could see that there’s, like, there’s a market here for this kind of thing. And what these folks were doing was sort of giving people very interesting tip content. They can teach people one thing in like 60 seconds or less. At the end of time tick is like three minutes or less. YouTube shorts is still 60 seconds or less. You can teach people one thing, and if it’s good, they’ll watch and they’ll engage. So what makes Tiktok super interesting as a platform that isn’t just the engagement, it’s also the demographics. So again, this, this information is a little old here the time I want to say this. I put these slides together originally, a couple years ago, there was 800 million active users. It’s probably more now, although I think it’s been banned in a few places, maybe the USA is soon to follow at some point. Who’s to say? Right? We can’t control those things. By comparison, Twitter has approximately three 30 million active users. Again, I think that might be a little old. This slide was put together prior to the acquisition of Twitter, and I don’t know where that number stands today. I have no clue what the what the what that platform actually looks like. The average user spends 1.2 hours per day in the platform. But what’s really interesting is look at the demographics. So 60% of users are between the ages of 16 and 24 so it skews really, really young. And on this on the right side there that you’ll see that 64% the audience is female. It’s quite interesting. If you compare this to YouTube, YouTube has an almost inverse and in fact, for YouTube, I think it’s closer to something like 90% male. So if you are a technology, technology company or like VS code, this is a this is a demographic that you otherwise can’t get to from a place like YouTube, which is great. So Tiktok was extremely compelling for us. And I should point out that I’m not the person who came up with the idea to do this. The person who came up with the idea to do this was a lady on the team named Sana who has since left. And gone somewhere else. But it was her idea to do this. She saw the potential way before I did. So I want to make sure that she gets the full credit for this. And I actually made the mistake of discounting it when she first brought it up in in 2020 right after the pandemic started, she brought it up, and I said, we’re not going to dance on video for VS code. I just don’t think that’s the that’s the way, but I couldn’t see what she could see. And so we were a year later to the game that we actually needed to be because of me. And so what we did was we created this strategy, right? We wanted to get, we did create a business account to represent the brand, and then we decided to post three videos a week for 13 weeks, and reevaluate our content every four weeks to see, like, how’s it performing, and they wanted to cross post our videos to Twitter when appropriate. We don’t actually, we don’t have an Instagram account. We didn’t actually do that. And then we had this, like, live stream where we’re going to promote these was called Hello World, where we promote these at the same time. So we had a lot of different motions to try to get the word out. The initial goals that we had for this were 1 million views for the 13 weeks. This is what we wanted to see total, right? 1.5 1000 comments, 150,000 likes. We took this. We figured this out by taking sort of like what we thought were aggressive goals based on some of the really successful tech stuff we were seeing around spreadsheets and people like Mike talking about outlook, where we were 13 weeks in, was way, way higher than that, right? So we were at 2.2 million views, 4.6 1000 comments and 222,000 likes, right? So we sort of destroyed our own metrics, which was a delight. It’s not often that you do something like this and that you see success, right? I don’t know about you, but more times than not in my life, I see things don’t work. They don’t work. More than they actually work. It was almost too easy. So today, this looks quite a bit different. I took this screenshot today, so on the right side, you’ll see where we are, which is right around half a million followers and 3.6 million likes. So quite a bit of growth. But then the question here is, like so far, we’ve set like seven minutes left in the presentation, and it’s been about Tiktok. What does this have to do with YouTube shorts? So short YouTube post shorts right about the same time? Well, they were later to the game. But what we what we found was is that as we were cross posting, we would cross post from Tiktok to YouTube. We just post in both places. And what we saw was just a massive increase in subscribers and in views and in watch hours like just look at the comparison between January and December, right? So, 84,000 views in January and by the end of the year, 1.5 million views. But we went from 2.8 1000 watch hours to 32,000 watch hours inside of the year, right? Like, that’s just crazy content growth. That’s crazy content growth. And so we’ve, we’ve done three shorts a week for at least three years now, I believe, maybe a little bit longer. And what have we learned in the process of that, what makes, what makes a good short? So I’m going to play a couple of our most high performing shorts for you, and then we’ll talk about a little bit about

what we can learn from them. In JavaScript, this is a keyword. Now the value of this depends on where it’s being used. You can use it out in the open like this, not inside of a function, and it just returns whatever the global object is in a browser. That’s the window in Node, that’s the global object. And that means that we can check to see if this is equal to the window and it is. And that means that the document is available off this the same way it is available off the window. Now, if we check for the value of this inside of a function, you’ll see that it’s equal to the window object, unless we put that function inside of an object, and now the value of this is the object, unless we check for the value of this inside of a function, inside of a function, in which case, the value is back to the window. Now we should note that all of this changes if you use strict mode. In strict mode, the value of this is undefined when checked inside of a function, and this is because strict mode wants you to call the function and pass in the context for this. In this case, we’ll pass in the window object, and we’re back to the window. But we don’t really call functions this way with the call keyword, which is why you’ll see a lot of people do this, which is to say that equals this, and then they will check for the value of that in their code instead of this, because they know that that will always be equal to the window object or whatever they set the value of that to in their code. So this is undefined when in strict mode, unless you are using the new fat arrow. Function type here, which is new in es six. And in that case, the value of this is back to the window, unless you put that function back inside of an object and then check it, in which case, oh, it’s still the window. And this is why the Old Joe goes that when I’m working with JavaScript, I want to throw my hands up. Say this is bull crap, but I can never remember what this is. All right, so this video has done really well. It continues to do well for us, and we should, sort of, you know, let’s point out some of the elements here. It’s a common concept. It’s fast paced, it’s kind of cheeky, right? It’s poking fun at the language, but it’s also using some built in features of VS code, like the built in debugging and VS code, right? It’s happening down here in the console. And if you’re a programmer, you’ll watch this, and you’ll pick up on that. You don’t need me to say that you’re smart, you’ll pick up on that yourself, and you’ll be like, Oh, how do I get that in my console? Right? So that’s how it ties back into the product. Here’s another one where we talk about coding on an iPad. I’m going to jump over this one real quick. It’s engaging the viewers by teasing them to have an inside look at what VS code might look like outside of VS code. What if it could run on your iPad? And in this case, and it can, in a way. I’ll let you go check this out. Check that video out. Here’s one I do want to show because this one’s probably done better than any of our videos on YouTube. There’s this nightmare Story on rprogramming, horror about someone who had a bug in their code and it ended up being a zero width space character that they could not see. And I thought, can that be true? So I googled it, and yes, there is a zero with Unicode character. So here’s what this looks like in the editor right here. This looks like code that should run, but it doesn’t, because there is an unexpected token. There’s a zero with Unicode character somewhere in here, but you can’t see it. But we just shipped a feature that enables you to do Unicode highlighting for invisible characters. If we go back now, you can see its highlight, and if we mouse over it actually says, Hey, this character is invisible. So we could just drop in here and then actually remove that invisible character. And now this code works so that you don’t end up making posts on our slash programming horror All right, so this video uses a very interesting story from Reddit, but it’s also doing some things that you may have noticed, like in this video, it’s using Jupyter Notebooks, but it’s running JavaScript inside of a Jupyter Notebook. Like there’s so many concepts that I’m demonstrating here in this video that I’m not actually saying anything about, because, again, the viewer is very smart. They will pick up on all of this stuff. They don’t need you to tell them that, but looking at zero with space Unicode characters, which is just fun, right? Instead, said to say that, like good shorts, sort of creatively tackle a problem without being very in your face about it, right? You want to tackle a very creative subject and let the viewer figure the things out for themselves. Because, remember, your viewers are very, very smart, very smart. There’s this. All right, let’s jump ahead. There’s a video I made where I just taught people about, you know, HTML tags that did well. And then here’s another one where we’re just talking about some Jupiter Notebooks. All right, so just as a recap here content changes. Don’t be afraid to try new things. Don’t be like me. Don’t be a year late to the game because you wrote off someone’s idea about making Tiktok videos. Don’t discount things that you don’t understand or like, right? If you see something and you’re like, that’s not for me, but you haven’t taken a lot of time to look at it and see, I’d urge you to go back and don’t prejudge things. Don’t be like me again. This whole session should just be called, don’t be like me. Be like my friend Sana, don’t be like me. And then lastly, use short form video to grow your YouTube subscribers. That’s the whole secret. Make good shorts and you’ll get subscribers. People love to subscribe to good shorts. They watch a lot of them. So lastly, y’all like and subscribe right there’s nothing left for you to do, but head over to our YouTube channel and LIKE and subscribe and we will see you on those YouTube shorts.

Sean C Davis 29:18 Thanks. Bert, that was, that was great. Yeah. I mean, you hit on so many points and struggles that I’ve had over the years, and I have a handful of questions. If you all out in the audience have any use a little question mark icon to the right of your screen, and we will surface those. But let’s, let’s dig in. So it seems like to me that no matter what the medium is, unless you have this really rare circumstance, that it does take a bit of time to build an audience and and you, you just finished the presentation by saying, yeah, don’t be afraid to try new things. But earlier in the presentation, seemed like you had moments where you knew things weren’t working. And I’m wondering what. So how do you know when you’ve tried hard enough, it’s not working? Something’s different. We where you need to do something different in the current medium, or we need to move what are the signals that you’re looking for?

Burke Holland 30:12 Yeah, I think so that’s why we had a 13 week period, like evaluating every four weeks. And we thought, you know, 13 times three is, whatever 13 times three is. That’s quite a few videos. If we can’t get any traction with any of them after 13 weeks, then we probably should just shut it down, right? There is a point at which you want to walk away from something because it just isn’t right. You don’t want to double down. It’s hard to know when that is. You sort of have to set an arbitrary line and then reevaluate. We never actually got to that line. But I think that we streamed for quite a few months, streaming to the same dozen or so people, before we thought to ourselves, we can’t affect this. Nothing that we’re doing is actually moving the needle. Let’s try something else

Sean C Davis 30:53 that makes sense. It makes sense. And so related to that are you’re definitely using, yeah, the metrics and the audience and the engagement to kind of determine whether or not something is working and and you also brought up this shift around the time of the pandemic, that the pandemic changed so many things, including Dev, REL and it felt like pre pandemic, it was a lot of just get the word out there and those, if those engagement numbers grow, things are good. What I’ve seen a shift in recently is that we’ve had to work a lot harder to prove the value and the existence of DevRel and a DevRel team, and that often some of some of those like, Oh yeah, you got a lot of views. Can be really good, but did that? Did it get converted into a lead, or whatever those things that your your company really values are? And so I’m curious how you and your team have approached this, because if you know some of those metrics, you might look at as vanity metrics, which ones are really engaging, and how do you sell back the time that you’re spending on social media as valuable to your organization?

Burke Holland 32:11 Oh, man. I mean, this could be an entire conference in and of itself, right? Like you’re asking the one question that in developer relations that people are trying to answer, and it’s been answered in various different ways at all the different places that I worked. And so I’ll tell you that it’s something that’s constantly being redefined, I think, for us at the end of the day, the thing that I always tell my folks is that something that I was told in one of my first jobs, I worked for a restaurant company. We owned restaurants, and somebody told me once that whatever we’re doing, if we don’t sell more burgers and beers today than we sold yesterday, then none of what we did matters. We have to sell more burgers and beers. And the point they’re trying to make is that the product that you’re working on has to be growing, right? The business has to be growing. And so that’s ultimately the metric that you want to that you want to tie yourself to, and then you want to back off from that and try to figure out, well, then what is my What part do I play in helping that actually happen? There’s a couple different ways to do that right. One of them is to show the size of an audience, engagement, I think is valuable. If you have videos where you’re getting 1000s of comments and engagement, then you know that you’re getting the word out. There’s this sort of phrase that I use, called enterprises downstream of culture. So in other words, whatever actually happens in developer culture will eventually find its way into the enterprise. It may take a while, but it will eventually do that, right? And so you’re sort of partaking in the culture that’s out there, and participating in that and being part of it. So you know what’s going to happen down the road. Now, this is a vague answer, right? Like I can give you, I can say, you know, we look at subscribers, we look at watch hours, we look at how many people are skilled on certain things. We look at how many forks of sample repos we have. There’s a lot of different metrics that we could use to to gage that, but I would say all of those are crude measurements for the real value of DevRel, which is building relationships. How do you measure the value of relationship? Right? What is the value of a good husband or a good wife or a good father or a good mother? Right? Like these things are very difficult to measure

Sean C Davis 34:21 for sure, but and then when it comes to the content, do you feel like, okay, so if you get a bunch of followers, you have folks following what is clearly the VS code account, and then you have expanded the the the engagement and knowledge of that product. Does that need to then translate to the content that you put out there. Do you always need to use VS code in your Yeah, in your videos? Or do you see yourself doing other community type of focus where you might just be helping someone, but VS code isn’t the focus on it? Yeah?

Burke Holland 34:56 Yeah. So I think from the brand account, where all. Is trying to help people be better with VS code, right? We want to enable them to build cool stuff, because it isn’t VS code that’s amazing. It’s what people build with VS code. I mean, people are building incredible things with the editor, and so we just want to enable them to do that. That’s the whole point of of the brand accounts existing. So when we’re talking from those accounts, we just want them to know about the new features, which may take, may shave a few more minutes, and especially with the AI stuff, it’s even more important, right? How can we help you leverage this productivity for, I think, for personal accounts, it’s quite different, right? Like then it gets quite a bit larger and it’s a little bit more generic. But from the brand account we do, I think a level of focus is pretty important when it comes to this stuff. This is just so much you can talk about.

Sean C Davis 35:46 Yeah, that makes sense. And speaking of that, we’ve got a question from Raymond Camden in the audience. And he says, Is there a good tutorial for making Tiktok videos specifically targeted for tech stuff, things like, oh man. Resolution this tool to highlight, etc, that kind of

Burke Holland 36:03 stuff. Yeah, actually, we have, like, an internal presentation that we could probably, I could probably, make public and give tea all to circulate, but we have that stuff documented. Yeah, it’s a good question. A lot of times you just film your computer screen. One of the crazy things about short form video is that it’s fine for it to just be crude. No one cares about production quality at all. Yeah,

Sean C Davis 36:24 that was one of the questions I had in there. Have you you see no correlation between the amount of polish on a video and the views or or is it actually inversely proportional zero?

Burke Holland 36:37 Yeah, it’s inversely right. The more you’re right, the more authentic it is, right? Then the more engagement that you’re going to have. And you’ll even notice this if you watch tiktoks, you don’t really want to watch something that’s like feel staged or something. What you want to watch is some authentic interaction with a person. Human beings are attracted to other human beings rough edges, and that’s what you’re being attracted to when you’re watching these shorts, that’s how you connect with people through a screen.

Sean C Davis 37:07 And so something you mentioned early was that there are different Yeah, there are different limits that, yeah, I know YouTube shorts are capped at 60 seconds. You said Tiktok was three minutes. I don’t know if that’s changed, but does do you then? Are you? Are you? Like, okay, well, then we go, we have to go to the the minimum, which means we’re always making videos that are less than 60 seconds. Or do you take the same idea sometimes and add more context when you have more space to share on Tiktok,

Burke Holland 37:46 we make longer videos too, right? The short form video isn’t the only thing we do. We make a lot of longer videos that are like 20 minutes, 25 minutes, 30 minutes, even sometimes even hour plus videos. I think short form video is its own animal. We have tried to go the other direction, where we have a video that’s like, long and like, let’s clip 60 seconds or less out of this video and make a short and right, because then you’re just repurposing content, which is what you want to do. And this seems to work well for other people, like, you’ll see clips of like Family Guy or comedians and podcasts and stuff. They’re just clipping their YouTube for us, this does not work. I don’t know why that is. We’ve tried it in multiple different ways, but it’s always just when you sit down and film very intentionally for the format that you get rewarded.

Sean C Davis 38:31 Interesting. Excuse me, I’ve, I’ve tried to do the same sort of thing, and Brian mentioned it in the chats where it’s like, oh yeah, I’ve had this show that’s a little bit longer. I’m just gonna use and maybe I’ll even use AI to help pinpoint, like, what are a few spots that I can pull out of the transcript, and then I can cut the video from there, and yeah, and it’s, it’s hit or miss for me, but definitely not as much as Yeah, just pick something and be focused and record for a minute and then put it out

Burke Holland 38:58 there. Yeah. Yeah.

Sean C Davis 39:02 One last question for you is on the frequency? So the you said that you’re you’re doing three short videos a week, is that something that you just happened to try and it works? I think that the mantra that we’ve heard is, you have to constantly be posting so that you’re staying in front of the users. But how did you come across that or land on the three per week?

Burke Holland 39:31 How do we land on three per week? It was kind of arbitrary. We just sort of pulled it out of thin air. Consistency is really key. The other thing is, is that you know, for every video you put out that has a million views, you’ll put out however many that have not nearly that many. And so you’re trying different things all the time, and because these content formats are pretty ephemeral in the sense that people. SPECT that you’ll post often. It’s just a numbers game, right? Like, the more you try, the more success you’re going to have. But consistency is key. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from people who are really consistent or really successful in this field, is that they’re very consistent. Like, if you look at people like Scott Hanselman, who I who works at Microsoft’s as well, is probably one of the best to ever do evangelism or advocacy. And he’s, he writes, I think he’s written a blog post every week for like, 50 years, or however long he’s been doing this. And he does a podcast, podcast, I think every week, right? These, like these people, don’t do this overnight. It’s consistency, and they’re on a grind, straight up, just like our friend that was playing Overwatch, right? He’s on a grind six to eight hours a day, every day.

Sean C Davis 40:47 Yeah, yeah, exactly, thank you.