I am Sree Sreenivasan and I am the co-founder of Digimentor and New York
based Social Media and Digital Consulting Company. I was the Chief Digital Officer of the City
of New York, Columbia University, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and now I work for myself,
with my best friend. When I think about live video, I think about a great
opportunity for companies to cut through the clutter. There's so much noise, live
video helps you stand out. I coined the term thumb stopper and what that refers
to is that everyone's on their phones all day just scrolling, scrolling,
scrolling and now you can stop them with something that catches their attention.
It could be a photo, could be a gif, could be a map, but a video that's live is a
great way to get people's attention and so I believe that that's a reason for
companies to experiment with it. You can do it through professional services but
you can also do it on the big platforms. Things like Facebook Live, Twitter Live,
which is also Periscope and YouTube Live and Instagram Live and so all of these
tools are good ways for you to get your content seen by your existing audience
as well as new audiences. The reason I love live video is there's no homework.
You do your video and you're done. When you're shooting any kind of video
including this one, there is transcribing and logging and editing and
post-production and all this stuff and those videos are better in many ways but
the live video is easier and in a world where we're all so busy and so much to do,
that live video gives you that opportunity to kind of stand out and just get people's
attention and I love that. I think that there are multiple ways to think about
when a video should be live, when it shouldn't be live. Part of it is what are
people going to learn in this video live that they wouldn't learn from just going
out there and seeing the video. It is also, I think, when you have dynamic,
close-range interviews, I think they work really well. When you're doing kind of
podium Facebook or podium Twitter or Periscope, it's kind of dull. So I would
also look at do you have what I call a digital wingman or wing woman, someone
who is reading the comments, responding, because the number one reaction people
have when they join a Facebook or Twitter video is what the hell is this?
What is going on? Who are these people? So also making sure you're constantly
reintroducing yourself and making it clear what is this because it's kind of
confusing. Nobody reads the introduction, the description, all of that. So be so
constantly read, kind of reintroduce yourself and that'll make a difference. I
think that getting in front of a camera is not easy for people. I was a professor
for 21 years at Columbia so I could have lots of opportunity to kind of practice
being in front of people and some of those were recorded, etc. There are also
ways in which you can learn to be good at this. So I had an advantage. I was also
on television for many years doing live hits on the set of major American TV
shows and that builds kind of mistakes that you get kind of get out of the way
over time. But my tips to people who are going to do live video, I think about the
opportunity to tell a story and think that you're telling your friends. You're
not trying to tell a million people. The video may go to a million people, it may
not, but make sure you are looking at it as a chance for you to tell a story, make
a connection. Even if you're making a connection with one person, that's really
effective and not worry about everybody there. I think there's an opportunity for
you to use live video as part of your overall skill set and whether you're in
sales or anything else, you're used to doing this. You're used to making
connections. You're used to telling a story and this is where you have that
opportunity. I would say as somebody else very famously said, don't work with
children and animals when you're doing something live. I remember the first time
I went live with, we got a new puppy and we went live as we were on her first
walk as I took her out. Suddenly you have your live pooping on camera so I had to
turn it away. You have to be really aware that what you're doing is going to be seen,
could be seen by people and be very quick at responding to what you see in front of
you. You have to anticipate these scenario changes because it's going to happen
really fast in front of you. I think that analytics are critical to video that
you're doing. Anytime you can get metrics on what you've done, where it's working,
where it's not, where were the dips and falls and where you got more engagement,
what happened in those minutes? You can actually go back and correlate it and see
and so you have to be good at understanding analytics, looking at the
numbers. But the reason people aren't good at that is that the tools are not
always easy and some tools are easier than the others. There is a kind of
feeling like if I post a video it'll be seen by everybody is a kind of
comfortable situation. Once you start looking at numbers then you have the
most common reaction which is disappointment. If you don't know this stuff then you just
presume everybody looked at it when in fact very few people looked at it. Find
the right tool for you to measure and just start doing it even if it's
disappointing, even if the numbers aren't very large, the chances of you making an
impact and helping people and understanding your audience. That's worth
everything instead of just pretending that you're being successful. Know when
you're successful and know when you're not successful. Those things will make a
difference. I'm very bad at predictions but I can just say that the opportunity
to use social in kind of smarter ways, to use it to use the analytics portions of
these tools in better ways is going to be important. Also geolocation is going to
be important, social video is going to be important and stories now that stories
also come to Facebook is going to be even bigger and then people are going to
continue to use video on other platforms things like on GIFs or use them on
Instagram of course but also using video on LinkedIn is becoming
bigger and also you now have the opportunity to do live in different ways
and to understand where you're having a connection and where you're not having a connection.
