By Rakesh Kumar, Special to Gulf News
From news to sport events to award ceremonies to election results, we are tuned to experiencing it all in the moment. The emotion of being “present” and to be a part of the sequence of events is a powerful phenomenon implying active involvement.
Welcome to the world of being Live!
In the social media world, going live isn’t new though publishers and brands are catching up to this new format. Four years back, when Red Bull livestreamed Felix Baumgartner’s jump out of a balloon from space, to break a 50-year old record for the highest jump from a platform, it created an instant eight million people watching the event live. In comparison, only half a million viewers watched the summer Olympics around the same time.
So clearly, a revolutionary event generated the much expected attention and drama. Facebook recently revolutionised the concept of being ‘live’ with the streaming of people, events, and brands — an industry estimated to be $70 billion (Dh257 billion) plus by 2021.
Post the age-old evolution of news channels relaying events and news live, content on YouTube, Periscope and Facebook is being seen live.
Users have started feeling involved in moments wherethey usually wouldn’t have been involved or to which they wouldn’t have had easy access.
The content industry has seen huge growh of live content wit users commenting approimately 10 times more versus usual content.
Why should we go live?
A form of experiential marketing: In the era of experiences, brands have the opportunity of showcasing and involving their consumers. Whether it is an event or a product demo, consumers can experience the moment live.
Stand out factor: Since the concept is new, brands have the opportunity to stand out vs. mainstream content. Active alerts and video content are all assuring active engagement and early attention parameters.
New revenue formats: Live content can certainly create new business opportunities. There could be ways for brands to identify new revenue streams or to charge for attendees for live events. While this fee could be lower compared with a physical attendance, it does guarantee involvement, attention and newer opportunities.
Create conversation: Live events and feeds create instant conversation. Consumers have the chance to engage actively in real-time and get involved in brand-led conversations. There isn’t a time lag.
Live monitoring: In addition, brand marketers have the ability to monitor conversation and engagement real-time. There is agility in reaction and modification of content to ensure no time loss and that the brand message is delivered to the real consumers.
A bigger scale: Events, on demand content and brand feeds can sometimes have geographical and physical restrictions. Live formats enable a wider reach, a greater instant involvement and no geographical restrictions. To power up a global reach, the key is to go live … While the benefits are huge, the challenges are many. With only one take, events don’t have a second chance to engage viewers. From a content perspective, mainstream content still rules the game and the area of live content is still picking up.
It appears to be a lucrative space. However, much work still needs to be done to generate more eyeballs and the right attention hooks. While publishers are working on creating the power of being live, brands need to explore how to generate more relevant and human content, which can potentially go live.
Like mainstream content, if you lose attention early on, you won’t have them back. Hence, the traditional rules of content marketing still hold relevance.
To share some great examples of brands going live:
* Benefit Cosmetics launched a weekly live programme called ‘Tipsy tricks’. The programme is aimed to give live advice on beauty and make-up tips. On May 27, they asked users to send snaps on what they wanted to see and the chosen show was based on summer beauty, highlighting and contouring.
This was a classic example of relevant user content and active brand engagement with users.
* Chevrolet released a teaser of its new electric car in January 2016. The company successfully showcased the production version of the 2017 Bolt EV at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The telecast was shown via multiple channels and the customers got a glimpse of some key car features with live Twitter conversations.
In the UAE, one could witness the New Year’s Eve show live from the comfort of a couch. In addition, fashion events have been recently relayed live on social media.
While we get constant alerts of our friends going live, these are videos, which we want or don’t want to see. It is an opportunity for marketers to engage their customers in the moment and create the much-required social movement. Let’s go live!
The writer is the CEO of marketing services firm Human.
