AWS Enterprise Support needed to increase brand awareness and raise the profile of Technical Account Managers as professional technologists and thought leaders. The challenge was creating a sustainable livestreaming program that would generate a pipeline of senior speakers capable of presenting at premier public events like AWS Summit and re:Invent, while meeting stringent benchmarks: 160 unique viewers, 25 concurrent viewers, and 17% engagement ratio per stream.

As monthly host from Q4 2021 through 2023, I developed and led the “What’s New in AWS with Enterprise Support” Twitch livestream, delivering live technical commentary and demonstrations on new AWS releases across Storage, Compute, AI/ML, Database, Analytics, and Developer Tools. In 2023, the stream delivered 565 minutes of content averaging 160 unique viewers per episode with a 14.6% engagement ratio—maintaining viewership targets despite AWS Twitch paid media dropping from $575K (2022) to $95K (2023), which reduced overall AWS Twitch viewership from 4.2M to 1.3M unique viewers. Monthly TAM time investment was approximately 15 hours, with all content archived on a dedicated Enterprise Support YouTube channel.

The program expanded from its original intent of simply commenting on “What’s New in AWS” email content to include live coding demonstrations, best practices deep-dives, and guest speakers from across ANZ Enterprise Support teams. Livestreaming became an approved public speaking activity contributing toward senior speaker certification, establishing a sustainable pipeline for developing technical thought leaders. Throughout 2023, the show maintained consistent engagement despite reduced marketing support, with regular LinkedIn promotion averaging one post every two months.

For 2024, I authored a comprehensive strategy redesign to increase streaming cadence to fortnightly while improving engagement metrics. The new approach required 10 dedicated team members (2 show owners, 4 hosts, 4 producers) with 2.5 hours per stream commitment (30min pre-show sync, 1 hour prep, 45min showtime, 1 hour post-processing), totaling 20 TAM hours per month. The strategy introduced four new content segments: Partner Corner (featuring Partner-Led Support organizations), Community Corner (leveraging AWS community members), Voice of the Customer (customer presentations), and PSE Burndown (upcoming Public Security Events). Post-stream, we extracted multiple short videos (<2 minutes) suitable for social media sharing and direct customer engagement on trending topics like service deprecations or forced upgrades.

The livestream series successfully raised the profile of TAMs as professional technologists and thought leaders, contributing to ANZ Enterprise Support’s certified speaker population of 14 senior speakers (~10%) and 60 associate speakers (~40%) in 2023. The program generated regular participation at Sydney Summit, Canberra Symposium, re:Invent, AWS meetups, and the Twitch livestream itself. The 2024 strategy produced 10 new senior speakers (100% YoY growth) while establishing Twitch as an effective vehicle for generating a pipeline of senior speakers capable of presenting at premier public events, with full streams published to YouTube and speaking engagement credit awarded to participants.

Watch the streams on YouTube.