[Interview] A candid chat with Rahul Bhattacharya, Quick Reaction Team

In a hearty tête-à-tête, Rahul Bhattacharya from Quick Reaction Team, one of India’s most popular YouTube channels discloses the details behind the success and tips for fellow upcoming content creators.

Quick Reaction Team, a vox pop channel, decided to ask every question that you think of, but tick it off as embarrassing, complicated, weird, or downright ridiculous. With a dash of humour, they bring you reality in all its glory.

Social Samosa uncovers the process and the people who run Quick Reaction Team, churning out humorous street interviews and social experimentation videos that delight thousands on their official YouTube channel.

What inspired you to establish the Quick Reaction Team?

Being an ex-media person, it was there in mind to start something of my own, which no mainstream-media highlights/shows (in terms of the Subject). So that’s how we strike off.

What’s in the name?

As the name suggests, Quick Reaction Team is all about “Extempore”, where we qualitatively collect ‘in the moment’ opinions on various topics in the streets.

YouTube channels for Voxpop is a rather competitive space. What is it that gives you an edge over your competitors?

Voxpop is surprisingly versatile, it lends itself well to most topics where it is important to explore public opinion, and is great for capturing the subject's’ immediate reactions. Over the time, we’ve tested a number of different techniques, and have come up with certain guidelines for the entire process that will help us maximize the “entertainment factor”, ensuring impactful, actionable results. It requires a clear set of objectives, a pre-defined target audience, and a well thought out set of questions to rule the Voxpop industry.

We’ve been working hard for the past one year to develop and introduce a clean format which is 100% Entertaining yet Shareable, and that makes us top the list, we believe.

What kind of logistics are involved in running a YouTube blog?

A successful YouTube channel is one who have world class crew and uses the world class system and equipment. Other than this, it takes hard-work, determination and of course patience to run a YouTube channel.

Is Quick Reaction Team your soul profession or you have multiple jobs?

We have our own online radio-station named “The Movement” and we also run a successful e-commerce site called as “Wear To Festival” except for “Quick Reaction Team”.

From ideation to execution – please take us through your content creation process.

After a good brainstorm session, we choose our location, hammered out our questions, and schedule a day and time for the interview.

Everything seems to be running smoothly. However, there are a number of factors that can come into play that could swiftly derail the whole process - unless, of course, you have backup plans.

It is important to plan the post-production phase (in advance) before you hit the road, it helps to create impactful videos.

How often do you work with brands and agencies? How open do you think is the Indian industry to work with new age content creators such as you?

We often work with budding brands and well known agencies. The world has gone digital, so is India. So, it’s high time that Indian industry should navigate from traditional methods to something fresh and impactful like YouTube.

How do you monetize your YouTube channel?

We monetize our videos through Google ad sense, in other words the basic monetization program which is available for every content creator on YouTube.

What are your plans for 2017? What can your fans expect from you?

We’re planning to expand our crew so that we could create more videos for our viewers and make them happy and content-ful. We have set a target of making “Quick Reaction Team” a multi-lingual channel this year.

What is the most colossal mistake that upcoming vloggers tend to make?

Setting up the benchmark and violating the YouTube policies, are the two most-overlooked mistakes, which most of the budding YouTubers commit.

What would be your one advice to vloggers who want to make blogging their profession?

With a bit of patience and a lot of experimentation you can also produce videos in no time. Give yourself some time to let it all sink in and there’s no reason you can’t start out with a simple video. So, just jump into it!