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Are they just adding more noise or do they benefit your business? Live streaming apps like Periscope and Meerkat are all the rage and we uncover some ideas of how you might want to uses these in your business.
TRANSCRIPTION
Andrew: For today’s podcast, we’re talking about live streaming video for business. For today’s episode, you’ll get a handful of live streaming tools that are hot right now. You are going to get ideas for how businesses can use them and why you should think about adding these to your marketing mix.
Hey everybody, this is Andrew McCauley, welcome to Podcast no. 104. Today we’re gonna dig in to some live streaming apps. It is crazy, to what’s going on to something new, cool features popping up, even news apps popping up for video live streaming. If you haven’t seen any of these stuffs, then fear not. We’re going to threw back the chords and show you exactly what’s going on and what you need to know about your business.
Of course, Heather Porter is on the call as well. Hello there.
Heather: Hello Andrew, hello everybody and unfortunately we’re now on the opposite sides of the world again.
Andrew: I know, I’m back in sunny, warm, warm California, and you are still in the cold heart of winter in Sydney.
Heather: Getting better, getting better. I think this is gonna be our warmest day of the year yet or of the season, I should say. I’m very excited.
Andrew: Well, yes. We had a good time in Australia. We did a couple of events together, we did a few other cool things, Periscopes and some other awesome things. That was good, good to catch up and lots done. But you know what, it’s good to be home, get back to routine of work a little bit. Because when you’re travelling, I was travelling on 7 lakes with my family with me. It was good..good to have your family but it’s always good to get back to you and just if you got a routine going , that sort of thing Although when I did get back on new task, I really didn’t have a house, a routine of this house but it’s been hectic for me getting home and then moving house but it’s good to sort to know that everything’s here, back on fast internet which seems to have a problem with everywhere I went in Australia, for some reason..
Heather: Yep, poor Australia..oh well..It is good you’re back on speed, on your own zone and yeah, we’re back on the podcast , I guess what, the little plan that we have coming up, we’re gonna keep on trackin’ it a little better for you guys that are our listeners. Thanks for gently partnering us along the way. We have a lot of cool topics to share with you, coming up.
Andrew: We do and it’s gonna be fun because you know, joining me in this podcast, I love it and we haven’t been as consistent as we like to, and that’s something that simply needs to rectify, we’d love your help if you think that we had another podcast in a little while, give us a kick, give us a boot. Let us know, but we’re gonna try to give it so you don’t have to do that for us as well.
Heather: Yes, perfect.
Andrew: I’m gonna check a little up for you. What did you learn from last, a little bit since we’ve spoken on podcast and if you need sometime to think than jump in right now cause I’m trying to be careful.
Heather: I have one, but I’m thinking if I actually have better than that so you go first.
Andrew: Okay, you know what? It did happen just recently was that, Twitter has finally said “we are happy to let you have more than 140 characters for your private messages. This just gonna mean a thing. I’d like to get your thoughts on this because if you do it at Twitter DM now you can have up to 10,000 characters which is pretty much more than normal. They try to champion on that whole messaging bandwagon you know, Facebook’s got Messenger, you’ve got what’s happening, you’ve got to list all that messenger’s app settings, Twitter sees that pretty a powerful thing and they try to jump in and let people use that as their messaging service. I really don’t know why too many people apart from regular spammers use the DM function on Twitter. I check on it everyday and i cleared it out pretty quickly. Yet to see many..I would be lucky to get one or two valuable messages that are actually meant for me a week, if I’m lucky.
Heather: Yeah you know I should have say, I think they’ve trained us to not look at those. Just because of the autoresponders, spammy stuff that you’re saying, I really never look at them to be honest.
Andrew: Oh I don’t know many people do that really so they don’t see, like everyone’s out there, so why are you sending me this for? You’ve got many numbers,you’ve got my phone number, you’ve got everything. I’ve seen stuff on Twitter like that, I’m not gonna read it. So I think they gonna have that a little bit of hot challenge on training us or re-training us to get back there and read those messages.
Heather: Yeah I agree. I don’t know if that’s gonna work. It’ll be interesting just because of how we’ve been trained. I think that’s a good point though in any business move. It’s like, if you trained your audience to do something opposite of what you want to bring in as the next phase of your business, I don’t know, will it work? Maybe not. Maybe.
Andrew: I’m trying to talk my head in any other company that had done something similar, and I really can’t think of anything but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. I can’t think much of anything off my head. How about you? What have you discovered? What have you learned?
Heather: I remember the thing I wanted to talk about. And I haven’t heard to actually learn more about, maybe you’ll actually know more about it as well but I think it’s an incredibly big, powerful move, and that is that Instagram has opened up its advertising as an API which means the third party advertising can come in and place ads on it. So do you know much about actually how about that works? Is is available yet to all of us Andrew? I haven’t looked enough into it.
Andrew: I don’t know a lot about it. I know that, I think it was November last year though, they opened up their platform to advertisers but that was for very, very limited people. And now as you’ve said they’ve just opened up to third party which is gonna be interesting because at the end of the day, who owns Instagram and Facebook and Facebook Republic company. They wanna make money. They gonna do anything they can to get money coming in so I am not surprised one bit about what Facebook is doing with that. It’s a money machine that they are on and they’ve gonna milk it as long and as fast and as quick as they can.
Heather: They are speculating that they’re gonna reach 1 billion dollars in ad revenue by 2017. There you go.
Andrew: That’s crazy, isn’t it?
Heather: That’s big! Between Instagram and Facebook I mean. Because Facebook owns Instagram and Facebook really is like setting up for world domination and it’s one of the things we’re going to talk about in this episode is something else that Facebook recently launched as well.
Andrew: They sure did. Interesting to say how that’s gonna go to but we’ll be into that in just a moment.
Heather: Yeah.
Andrew: Well, what are we digging into now?
Heather: Okay, we’ll start there.
Andrew: So you know, today’s topic is all about live video streaming. It’s sort of first on the scene earlier this year 2015. Meerkat, I’m gonna give a quick history over just so people will understand what it is. Meerkat came on board. They are one of the very first apps that came out. Essentially, what it does is you could record yourself on video and broadcast it live to whoever wants to watch you do that. Now people probably have a sketch on the head of what’s going on if they were to do with that. Don’t worry probably some people have the same sketch on the head like, why would i write 140 characters on a tweet, that’s ridiculous. Well, Meerkat came on, there was another player in the market called Periscope which quickly got bored out by Twitter. And then we have a few new players in in the last month or so that also have come on board. But first, let me go back a step. So Meerkat and Periscope have been around for about 6 months now. You can broadcast yourself giving information. But the cool thing is people can interact with you by typing questions to you on the screen so if you’re filming yourself and you’re talking about a subject, then someboy can type a question. They can support you, they can tell you that, “I love you”, they can ask questions or share your feeds as well. This can actually let people know, their followers know that you’re live on Meerkat or Periscope and other people can come and find you. Now when you and I done a Periscope, we’ve done a couple of periscopes and it’s nothing for us to get 30, 40 or 50 watching us within minutes of us going live and not telling anybody. So it’s a pretty powerful platform. We did one the other day with a friend of ours, Keith Kelly, here had nearly a hundred people on in Periscope for the very first time. We did it in the middle of the day, he never even knew how to use it but it didn’t matter, he just turned the app on. Within three minutes of him turning the app, we went live and we had a hundred people, watching him which is phenomenal- how did he do that? You got a hundres people watching your Youtube video within minutes? It’s very, very hard to do. So this sort of stuff is amazing. I really heard a staggering stat the other day that people in Periscope and Periscope alone are watching something like 40 years of video, 40 years worth of video every hour.
Heather: See that’s unbelievable and between the two apps, what’s your favorite?
Andrew: Periscope.
Heather: Yeah, so here’s why. I turned on Meerkat, I tried both and I’ve done Meerkat a little bit and between the late night gangster in the back of a limo, riding down Hollywood or Boulevard or whatever. It was 4 AM and he had all these women scantily clad around him, two drunk girls coming home after a party with, like, doing shots, and jello shots. I kind of got right. This was clearly some weird foyer party app.I have never seen anything on earth of substance that could just be made. What about you?
Andrew: I’ve seen some good things about Meerkat. It has some functionalities that are good and bad. So let me give you a quick overview. Meerkat lets you if you are the person filming yourself, you can go back and scroll through people’s messages, go back and see what’s going on. Once you finish a Meerkat, it generally disappears. So you can’t have it, you can’t watch a replay. Unless you have something on like Katch. K-A-T-C-H where you can collect those recordings. Periscope lets you record and for 24 hours later, people will come and watch your recording, so after the next 24 hours after you’ve finish recording, somebody comes and watch that replay. You can also download versions into your IOS device. If you got a phone, let’s say android phone, and you’ve just recorded your Meerkat or Periscope, you can download it to your own phone so it becomes part of your photo streaming, your photo roll sort of thing. With Periscope, you can’t go back and scroll for the messages, and people are sending you messages, you’ve got a lot of people watching and you’ve got a lot of messaging coming through real quick, that’s very hard to scope up on what’s going on or answer people’s question, which is apain on the backside. On Meerkat, you can actually share or put down, hmm that you like, that particular Periscope or Meerkat broadcast. But on Periscope you can actually tap the screen as many times as you want and give people hats. So the more hats you have, the more entertain people are, so to speak.
Heather: Look, I really like Periscope and the reason why, that just could be my future processes as well and people that are connected to on Twitter. But I’ve been watching business episodes on Periscope. So I’ve been watching everything from..there’s a guy down the bars on Queensland and he walks around the beach roaming and he shares his business tips. There are people that are podcasters and they basically do a free podcasting. Periscope for them is actually showing the other person if you do interviews on Skype or whatever, show the other person on their Skype camera and then go back and forth and have the answers before the podcast. There’s a guy named Dereck Hupburn, he does social triggers. I love what he did for one day, he actually sat down in a cafe in Manhattan and he basically well known group of people like Louise House, Rey Furlow…he basically catches those at a cafe, and he had one person after another and interview them on a quick scope and it’s amazing, like what a way to connect to those people, so genuine.
Andrew: Yeah, well the thing that Meerkat has introduced is that you can actually invite somebody to take over your scope, take over your Meerkat so if you and I, If I was doing a Meerkat and you’re watching it, I could invite you and and bring you on, so your face comes up in front of me and you can talk about whatever you want to talk about to the people that are following me. So it’s a great way to introduce other people to your list or your tribe, very cool way to do that and now I’m sure Periscope gonna allow that to come on board very very soon. But what I do is I wanna also make sure the other team’s new plays have just joined the market which is very interesting. I think Facebook’s gonna sit on their hands with this one, not a chance..So I did boarding and saw their mention apps on board and they’ve build a livestream app on Facebook.That’s pretty available totally for people that are verified on Facebook okay? So they can only watch people that actually have the green ticket next to their page name. I’m sure that they will bring in that to other people soon once the bugs are wind up so watch the space for those guys.
Heather: Here are a couple of events that I’ve been watching as well that have been doing a life, actually there’s three people that I’ve watch. There is Louise House, there’s Sandi Krakowski and there is Ricky Gervais. He’s and English comedian and to give you a quick idea of how people would actually be isn’t it? Ricky Gervais is a comedian obviously and he uses and he brings his cat only and he brushes his cat in front of the line for you and have a good laugh. It’s funny and his cat’s like got some pissed of and runaway. And Ricky, it’s just funny to hear him moan.. and look how quick life leave like that.. Sandi Krakowski surely have a moment she jumos in..I just got an idea, I have to share it with you guys, here’s like five copywriting tips, so she’s very business oriented and I think Louise is just really quick on checking and testing the platform.
Andrew: So tell me then, if somebody loves to go and watch these guys, they quickly gonna find out because the other two by the way, Periscope and Meerkat are IOS apps. You download them on your phone or actually google android, so download it in there. With Facebook, do you know the app to watch them or you can watch them on the desktop?
Heather: I have only ever watched them on the desktop. I’m unsure if they actually have work on the app yeah but I couldn’t see why they wouldn’t though because on the Facebook app as it is right now, if you’re on your newsfeed you can watch videos, that’s have to be part of it on your phone. So I would imagine the same thing would apply for this. The way you got alerted and this and this is how so far I’ve worked to get alerted, is you go to your Facebook page that you follow, this is actually a good tip for you guys that have a business Facebook page, there’s a little app in your cover area that’s says like shop now, contact us, like share, there’s actually a number of buttons that’s just sitting on the top, just below your cover photo. There’s one that says like, that would give you likes for the page, there’s a dropdown arrow and you can actually click on the..i don’t know, pops-up on the area on the right and just get notifications. I f you really follow people, I mean you don’t wanna miss a bit then click on “get notifications” and you’ll actually get a little push notification or like a little ping whether you’re on a desktop or a phone that that person has just posted or something.
Andrew: Go on okay.
Heather: So another little tip and I’ve done this with some of the people I really want to stay, you know, stay on their tribe and understand what they’re doing, so I’ve actually click to that and so I actually get little notifications now.
Andrew: Awesome, good little tip! So then, the other one I want to bring up is the one that just came out from last week and that’s call BLAB, B-L-A-B, BLAB. Have you ever heard of it?
Heather: Only from you, so have you tried it out?
Andrew: Actually, I have not recorded myself yet but yeah. What is BLAB? BLAB is basically, it’s like Periscope for groups. Okay, so we can have four people on the group, let’s say, you and me, Johnny and Mary. We’re all on a video chat together. We would have four of us basically on the screen together like the old party bunch. Remember party bunch credits where kids are up there? That’s what it looks like, you got four people, two at the top, two at the bottom and we can have a conversation but the cool thing is you could have hundreds of people listening into that conversation of four people. As soon as thing it’s like, you know when you go, not to go to the UN building but you know to got all those speakers on the floor, and there’s a gallery of people that don’t partake, they just watch the people on the floor speak, so that’s what it’s like, you got the four key people in a BLAB speaking and then you got the outskirts of people watching. But the cool thing about BLAB is that when you say Mary wants to get out of this and left, we can put an ad and she can leave the spot and we can bring somebody else in. So you can bring people in and out as you see fit throughout your BLAB as well. So it’s a great way to have a sort of Periscope for some personal watch and the limelight and you got BLAB for four faces who wants to share and collaborate ideas, that’s the thing. So to explain this new app, it’s gonna be interesting to see where Periscope or Meerkat or even Facebook adapt to the usability of BLAB into devices as well. I hate to think about the download data on that, maybe it would be 4 times, enough for one video or not.
Heather: Yah, interesting point.
Andrew: It’s probably not because it’s just one app but it’s still any of these apps, here’s a warning for you by the way, if you’re travelling and you’ve got a limited data plan and you know you’re not on wifi, these stuff can suck up a plan like nothing. You can hit the limit pretty pretty quick and I know, you and I, you hit that load on Periscope a couple of weeks ago, I’m ready to do a couple of Periscopes in a three-day period so you’ve got to be careful about the data that you’re using and where you’re connected to. If you’ve got a really small data plan, you’ve got to be careful.
Heather: Yah, absolutely. You know, these are all apps basically and you’re using social media platforms and it’s all happening really really fast because it’s been for a long time we had Google hang-outs Which is the live streaming of Youtube, we also had a platform called Youstream which we actually have for a long time, and they’ve been there, but you know, people are not likely to grabbed the benefits of Youstream. And in the event of things like that, people can go to Google Hang-outs and what’s interesting about it is that everyone’s using them for void reasons like for having fun on business and there was like a very big business movement behind this happening. What are some great business ideas the people could do with use with this platform?
Andrew: Good question, good question. I would give you a couple of examples how I’ve seen people used it already. There’s a girl, a lady who’s a real estate agent, she runs..She takes people through their houses using Periscope. So she walks to the house and says, so here’s the kitchen, here’s the laundry area, here’s the garage and people say, hey can you open up and walk out the door or can you just go at the backdoor. What’s the distance between the front door and the backdoor? People are asking questions about walking through their house. And what she does is she records it. She saves it on her phone and on a website. They can see what other questions people are asking as she walks through the house. That’s a really cool way of doing it, the way of a real estate agent. So what else can people do?
I’ve seen speakers; a bit of us will do Periscope just before we go on stage. He’s backstage. He’s about to teach. It gonna run for a weeks weeks or gonna run tomorrow. There’s lot of ways to do that. There are also a lot of clever markets using it to give great advice and great information about the content. And at the end is a small call to action like here’s my website, join me on this website and you’ll get notifications form or other stuff. So that’s a couple ways to do it. What other ways have you seen so far?
Heather: I just think it’s a way to humanize your brand because if you think about live streaming, it is live. You got bull points but you can’t really put it in your phone and it’s very very real if you messed up, you messed up so it’s a really strict way to do that. I call the stocks photos and videos perfect to lighting, you know, works perfect as everything is. It’s allowing people to actually really connect with their users, so anything from customer service, to live Q and A to like what you said. So here are 5 tips that I came up to reach out people very real with your following. Up to now, I’ve never seen it done because every online tv show that I see people put out their videos has been editing that goes on.
Andrew: There’s a guy on Meerkat that’s very very active and I think he’s on Periscope as well now. From what I could tell, he’s got a gift shop. He does a lot of gifts and stuffs. And they feel themselves for making the gifts, like they’re just different, we’re making this bag or making this box or we’re making this. The people just watch how they mixed up and ask questions. But they’re only working. The gals are just working. Chances are they would put us on stand and they walk away, crazy. You know, if you’re asking about the news, like what’s the big story today? Or we’re leading the story about..da..da..da..So they did have a chat before they go and walk away. That doesn’t seem real. To answer my question, I’ll just ask question. This is the news presenter. These are the people that are pretty untouchable and now are becoming touchable without that creepy factor.
Heather: Do you know, when I was living in San Diego, I just opt what you’re saying. Maybe think of a house that was in San Diego. And God, this would have been probably 15 years ago or around there, 12, 15? There’s a house they’ve wired with webcams, every single room including the shower. Do you remember that movement way back where the internet was coming up and there’s sort of somebody’s house with a webcam. They do like the voice command and all that. I remember back then and yet talking to the guy, they made me sign a waver before coming into their house because you will be on film. And they actually play it on the door and there are a couple of guys. We did our show with artists and as we walked in and I’m saying to them, oh do you know how many people are watching you live. And they’re like, yah, sometimes we get 40 people. How times have changed. It’s amazing. I mean, it has always been around. It’s just its rich to be in point right now.
Andrew: I’ve got a couple of ideas about that people think around so good that doesn’t feel good to me. About product demos, you know, there’s a great way to go and do some product demos. What service you can offer that you can do a demo of, some product demos that you can use. Tutorials are great way. Decent tutorials about the products and services you’ve sell people, a way of thinking people buying it. A particular product, do a tutorial. Let’s say you gonna buy dishwasher. We do it on Periscope on how to use dishwasher like here’s the thing you need to know about installing a dishwasher, sort of thing. So, in an industry, come up with a tutorial pretty much. Things about live events have always been popular here in the US. The hockey league over here was a bit worried about Periscope because people were taking their phones in and filming hockey live and broadcasting to everybody. Like hey we got our phone in and here it is.That’s not gonna work. So now think about live events, your own live events. You can do live events so I think I’ll set up for weeks. I’ve always, you know I’ve done that too. I’ve done live events that we filmed on Periscope. We try to do it on Periscope before I do a live event every time, just to let people know what we’re doing. So there’s a way to do that. Ahm live Q and A’s. It was like, Hey I’ve got a few questions about your products or services and I’ll just jump on it and answers questions about it, making a specific topic at a time so..there are sorts of cool things like major announcements for your business or maybe you’ve got a new employee or maybe you got a new customer service or maybe you’ve got somebody that’s new to your tribe and you want to introduce to everybody. Bring them on, bring them on. Have them stand next to you and have a chat. We’ve done that a bunch of times. You and I did interviews. Three of us, we met in an info in papers and we attended an event of 700 people there. And we spoke. We went to every speaker and did a little interview on Periscope for 3 minutes. And every one of them said “yes”. People love it. So get known by doing some of those stuffs.
Heather: So I’ve got a question. Because I don’t think we’d address yet those who are new to using these apps. How do you actually get people to tune in? How do you get them to watch you?
Andrew: Well, that’s a really good question. The cool thing is that Periscope and Meerkat, because they are apps on a device, most people who by default will have automatic push notification so when you go live, Periscope will tell to all the people who follow you or connected to you in some way like, “Heather Porter is now live for the first time. Check this out or check her out on Periscope.” When start following people, or the peopleought to follow you, then they gonna get notifications that you will go live. My phone goes off the hook, the notifications on my ipad, i get probably 10-15 notifications every minute, every two minutes about the people going live on Periscope. I’ve got to follow a lot of people. I don’t read them all but when I see somebody that I follow, I’m gonna jump in quickly on my iphone and watch him on Periscope in seconds. So this is why this it’s so powerful. People getting notified all the time about when you go live and it’s so awesome. Just search and hit the record button, that’s a little number sticking over and wow, there’s people here already, it’s crazy..yeah..
Heather: Yeah, since it’s much easier said than done, and right now it’s very hot so that people are very much entailed about it. So once you ignored email marketing, you might ignore your facebook app notification, we get these more clients to say, “oh, who’s on Periscope or who’s you know, we kinda still use that space of checking it out or thinking a little bit about it differently.
Andrew: Exactly exactly.
Heather: So you know, there is a company here in Australia who has taken that live streaming concept to a whole other level. That’s to share. Today there’s a guy named Dale Belmont and his company is called Business Blueprint and years and years, he’s been running live events, you know, where he’d go and show up on business owners. And he had this sort of workshop mastermind sessions from there. He signs up to join his mentoring package. He kept on thinking, “How do I reach out the side of Australia without doing the licensing model or without taking on added headaches for that global growth?” And he was noticed in the trend of live streaming so he’s actually, it’s launching and I’m looking at the website which by the way guys is businessblueprint.com. It’s launching in 10 days. It’s gonna be the first world’s 24 hour business channel, streaming live on every device. He has basically followed the trend now, what’s happening with this sort of live streaming uhm, I guess moments and to do it professionally, basically, set up a studio and so he’s done that. He set up a studio with best gear, good lighting, and even studio audience can share. So you can bring like 20 people as studio audience if you feel better as a presenter to be in front of them. And basically, he’s just gonna have people. Right now, he’s recording enough. He’s gonna have live streaming business topics 24/7. Pretty cool.
Andrew: Very cool. That’s gonna be really interesting to see how that goes and watch that space. And maybe you’ll be part of it too one day, hey, maybe!
Heather: Who knows, who knows? Definitely, I’d be keen. I’ve met up with Dale and saw their studio and it’s like “wow!” Definitely on the trend so we shall see? So Andrew, do you have any last comments, any last tools that you’ve come up since we we’ve had this conversation?
Andrew: No, you know, I’m gonna say to people “Get on, go and download the apps, they’re all free, Periscope, Meerkat, BLAB, any of those three. Take them out. Have a look at them. Andymax71 is me, so follow me on any of those.” What’s your handle on there?
Heather: On Periscope, I luckily grabbed my name, Heather Porter. It’s the first.
Andrew: It’s the first, Heather Porter. First movies..
Heather: I’m an early adapter.
Andrew: Check it yeah. Go and check them out, have a look at them and look at what the people are doing. Don’t judge on the very first one. The very first one you say can probably be rubbish but go and find some people who’s doing a good job and you’ll get lots of valuable, great information from them for sure.
Heather: So guys, let’s summarize… We’ve had today on this episode, we’ve talked about Periscope, Meerkat and BLAB as apps that you can get on your phone where you can enjoy some live streaming. We’ve talked about Facebook live, we did even revisit some of the old school streaming, Google Hangouts and platforms that are available to you as well. So with these apps and things that are coming out, it’s a huge moment, there a huge tipping point, and I strongly recommend that you go and grab one or two or even three on your phone and decide what’s great for you and why would you use them. Because you can reach out to your fans, your followers and your clients, and leads and prospects in a way you’ve never been able to before. It humanizes your brand, they’re able to do demos, tutorials, live events, live Q and A, and guys it definitely is hot right now, so it’s something you’ll be wanting to check out for your business.
Andrew: Yes, definitely. Alright, Google session I enjoy the net, I love doing this apps, they’re pretty awesome so come and check these out.
Heather: Thank you guys for tuning in and we’ll be beyond with you soon!
Andrew: See you later.