NCET Biz Tips: Ask NCET: YouTube and Personality/Behavior Assessments in Your Business
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What’s the best way to use YouTube to promote my business?
Are you optimizing your YouTube Channel for your business? When I consult in the field, I often hear from prospective clients that they have claimed a YouTube channel, but they haven’t really put effort beyond that into this digital property. With 1.5 billion users per month, YouTube is a great place to post video content about your business that will help to educate your customers about how you help them best.
Let’s review the basics:
1) Make sure your YouTube Channel is linked to your website, and that your website links back to your YouTube channel. It’s important these two digital properties are connected so your prospective clients can easily move back and forth between your website and your YouTube Channel.
2) Use the description box. You can get a lot of SEO value by having a robust description of your video in the description box space. The text information you place here not only helps Google and YouTube understand how to serve your video to searchers and watchers, it helps humans who watch your content understand what next steps they can take to connect with your business. I challenge you to look at the description boxes from videos of YouTube channels you follow for inspiration.
3) Create content! You can get started with your smart phone making videos that help your customers connect to your business such as: How To’s, Unboxing (where you literally unbox your product), FAQ’s, Troubleshooting, New Product Launches! The only limit is your imagination.
Cinammon Davies is an account executive for LOCALiQ, part of the USA Today Network (www.localiq.com/markets/nevada/) and NCET’s VP of Social Media and Newsletters.
What’s the Value to Using Personality/Behavior Assessments in Business
All of us have tendencies to how we act within our business and personal environments. Over many years, evaluations have been developed to measure our tendencies. During my 30 years in the semiconductor industry and 15 years as a realtor, I have been evaluated many times and used the evaluation tools in management roles in business and in my real estate career. The advantages to using such tools are that we learn more about ourselves and our tendencies. We can recognize the tendencies of customers, fellow workers, and even bosses. Understanding the tendencies of a client is invaluable for a realtor. And, as managers, we can evaluate our staff’s tendencies and understand roles that our staff play, with an eye to optimizing the team’s make-up and performance.
These tools started by defining ourselves as right brain or left brain.
Right brain - artistic, free spirit, compassionate.
Left brain - logical, analytical, control.
Over the years, various tools were developed that evaluated 4 brain quadrants and their effect on our personalities and behaviors. There are some popular tools that look at a combination of 16 tendencies.
Myers-Briggs looks at 4 dimensions:
Where we focus our attention – introvert or extravert.
The way we take in information – sensing or intuition.
How we make decisions – thinking or feeling.
How we deal with the world – judging or perceiving.
As an example, if you are an ENTJ, your 4 dimensions are extravert, intuition, thinking, judging. An ENTJ is structured and challenging, strategic, questioning, not afraid of making tough decisions and solving system-level problems. An ENTJ can be domineering, inflexible, and insensitive.
The Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument defines the 4 dimensions as brain quadrants. The 4 dimensions are:
Basal/Left - logical, analytical.
Frontal/Left - organized, detailed.
Frontal/Right - interpersonal,feelings based.
Basal/Right - intuitive, synthesizing.
An engineer tends to be high Basal/Left. An HR person tends to be more Frontal/Right.
From my experience at managing a corporate staff, I was prepared to deal with the VP of Sales (Frontal/Right, Basal/Right) and the CFO (strong Frontal/Left) seemingly to be always at odds with one another. They basically have totally different personalities and behaviors.
In my real estate career, I have been trained on DISC profiles. DISC is a simple tool to apply, to understand, and to use almost instinctively.
D is a high driver – assertiveness & insistence, bottom line oriented.
I is an influencer – persuading, charm, optimism.
S is steadiness – loyalty, follow the rules, compromise
C is conscientious – analytical, quality, accuracy.
Once familiar with these characteristics, you can pretty much identify someone’s DISC profile by observing them and you can plan for interactions based on that person’s profile. For example, a high C manager or real estate agent will have a tendency to make very detailed presentations full of analysis and data to back up his or her position. A high C target of the presentation will totally support that presentation. A high D target will tire of the detail and want to know “what’s the bottom line?”
There are other instruments that you can track down and learn about. Just Google “personality assessments” and “behavior assessments”. There are also many consultants and executive coaches who have developed businesses to help management teams and individual performers learn how to use these tools. For example, part of Mastermind’s curriculum has another tool for looking at behavior and personality assessments. They call this “Personality Masteries”.
Yes, these tools can work if understood and applied properly.
Jock Ochiltree is a Realtor® at eXp Realty (www.jockochiltree.exprealty.com), a long term veteran of high tech engineering and management roles, and NCET’s VP of Tech Wednesday.
NCET is Northern Nevada’s largest member-supported non-profit that produces educational and networking events to help people explore businesses and technology. (www.NCET.org)