View transcript
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.
