How Viya in China generated US$49m in sales in one day using live streaming, and how you can do the same

Today, I'm going to share a little bit about live streaming. On our weekly EastWest PR huddle that we had today, my team member in China talked about the growth of live streaming for all manner of activities. It seems to be that live streaming has really come into its own due to COVID. The comment of Charles Young in Beijing resonated with me, because earlier in the week, I was speaking to the proxy agent in London for my apartment. He said that he had built a full 360-degree online tour of the apartment that he's renting out on our behalf, but the prospective tenants still wanted to come and see the apartment. Not only did the person come to see the apartment, but they actually then walked around the apartment and live streamed to the other person who was going to be renting the apartment with them. So, live streaming now seems to be certainly within the grasp of all of us that have got a smartphone. It's becoming more and more accessible. The question is, how can it play a role in our public relations activities and in our sales? 

Charles was sharing how, in China, they are already ahead of the game, because what's happening now is that live streaming has been integrated into commerce. Platforms like Alibaba with their Taobao shopping and WeChat with their online app stores are now enabling people to find, to view, and to purchase products and services of all manner and all sizes in real time and online. And because the payment gateways are also incorporated into their mobile phones, for many people now, mobile shopping at the point of purchase is becoming like the old home shopping channels that were put on years ago by the QVC network. Barry Diller, if I remember rightly, had seen the need and the desire for people to be at home and to view it and to buy it from the comfort of their couch. So live streaming maybe is going back to where cable TV was 30-odd years ago, but what should we do with our own businesses, big and small, when it comes to live streaming?

Instagram and Facebook are, of course, two very popular social media apps, and that can make them the perfect place to livestream. There is also the concept of multicasting, that rather than just streaming your content just to one channel, with certain technologies now, you can actually stream across multiple platforms. But beware, there are some challenges to that. 

If we, first of all, look at Instagram, which has got a demographic in the early 20s to maybe mid-20s, you can only go live using the mobile app on Instagram. You can't go to Instagram on the desktop or on the browser and stream, so it's very much an Android/iOS native streaming app. For many of us that use Instagram, one of the things I personally find is the lack of content around the images. The benefit of Twitter and Periscope as the platform for sharing your video online through Twitter is that you've already got your followers. You've already got a narrative that is talking to those people, whether it's your own tweets or tweets that you've taken and reposted, so Twitter already has our audience waiting for what we'd like to share. Periscope has a number of extra features as well. It has the ability to basically replay the videos at any time. In other words, it's not just a stream. It's actually recording and taking that as a video.

There are other integrated social features with Periscope. You can have people join or leave. People can leave emoticons and they can leave comments, so that's great. You can also set privacy, so you can stop people coming in or out. You can also see who you're broadcasting to, so that's a nice way of live streaming to a dedicated group where you can actually have people commenting and make them feel part of a community. There are some comments though, if you look on the iOS store. The comments are leading around two areas. One is that genuine accounts are being blocked for no particular reason, and people then are finding that the followers that they've got are no longer able to watch their content. The other is that it's being hijacked by the underworld. Basically, it's being used for pornography. Now, that doesn't have to affect your own use of Periscope, but it may mean that, as a corporate platform, it may or may not be what you want to use.

There is another app called Livestream which is also dedicated to mobile, and it's only available in Android and iOS. You can create films, and they can be broadcast in HD as well, which is pretty amazing, especially with the new iPhones and Huawei making 4k films. Of course, you need the bandwidth to be able to upload those. With Livestream, you can also then send your video by connection through to Facebook or Twitter using your website. Again, looking at the reviews, Livestream seems to have a couple of comments. One is, again, it's being used by the underground for streaming indecent images. And also, whilst it says it's free, actually, quite quickly, one needs to pay some ￡70 a month in order to use it, so there may or may not be some truth to that but the comments in the sections on the app stores are saying that it's not quite what it should be.

In China, the big growth story has been ByteDance's TikTok, and that is certainly something that is now creating a bit of a storm with these 15-second videos set to music. There's not much that one can say in 15 seconds, but from a branding point of view, it's good. In China, the big one that's being used is Taobao for live streaming sales promotions. People there are buying and watching and following it There was a story recently that came out about a female streamer who is the top e-commerce live streamer. Her name is Viya, and on the 10th of October in 2019, she sold 353 million RMB. In one day, she sold nearly $50 million worth of merchandise. She has 200 staff apparently, and she has become, if you like, the ultimate in sales demonstrators online. China has already moved well beyond what we've been doing, I think, in the UK in the US. There are other channels like Vigo, and there are a whole host of the on the App Store and the Android Play Store where you can start to stream content. The problem seems to be a couple of things. One is the company that you keep may not be so good. The second is the quality of the video.

There are some platforms that are professional and are doing proprietary video. Video consumption online has jumped over 65% since 2018 with Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, Snapchat, all these big companies creating both their own technologies and owning the consumers. There are companies like Vimeo who have video platforms. Vimeo has created a Vimeo Enterprise premium package, which enables you to stream your video across five multiple platforms. Users can stream through the Vimeo platform to five other dedicated platforms. I thought this is quite interesting, and I'll share with you why more is not necessarily better when it comes to video streaming.

For business to business, that's very interesting, because LinkedIn is really the only game in town if you're marketing yourself, and video in LinkedIn has really been growing in terms of traction. I checked it out to see how I could post my own videos on LinkedIn. It's not that everybody can do that. What one has to do is to go to the LinkedIn site, and the link is also on the Vimeo Enterprise pages. LinkedIn says that live video broadcasting is available for a limited number of members and LinkedIn pages. What they've asked me to do is to fill out the form about how often I'm going to be live casting, what I'd be live casting about, and the history of my company, so obviously some human beings will be going through some fact-checking to make sure that that platform is not hijacked. I personally like the credibility that that creates for my content. With the simulcasting on Vimeo, we can also connect our YouTube accounts, for example, and also, we can integrate some custom syndication of content to Twitch and Periscope, Twitch being the more consumer level playing field for video.

With Vimeo, you could also embed the Vimeo player into your own websites. Personally, I like that because it means that if I've got people coming to my website, then I can be streaming to those people. But if I've got product to be selling merchandise on the page, for example, I could actually be showing people merchandise, taking them through, for example, the walkthrough of an apartment or showing them some bathroom fittings and furniture, and show that on my website and actually lead them through to the shopping cart.

Another alternative is a website called Restream, which is allows us to broadcast live video to over 30 social networks. I have to say, I'm not a member of 30 social networks, but if I was, then I think I'd find this useful. Actually, I have a Restream account, and we're looking at how we can use that. This was founded by a couple of young men in 2015. It has an office in Ukraine and also in the US. I think the founders were originally Ukrainian. They now say that they have some 200 million users worldwide. So within five years, it's become a phenomenal success story, one that frankly, none of us have maybe even heard of, because it's not the end channel, but it's the carrier.

There are some other softwares like ManyCam, which enable us to stream to multiple platforms at the same time. It's an encoding software that enables us to take the content from our phone or our cameras in our studio, and pass them out to these other platforms. The thing to remember is that the more streams that we have, the more bandwidth we need from our production equipment. We're going to need a computer or a Mac with greater RAM for managing the different streams of video, and we're also going to need greater bandwidth for our internet connection. It's not that we upload it once and all of the heavy lifting goes on to Restream or ManyCam. Our own infrastructure has to have that kind of capacity and bandwidth built-in, or all of those streams that go out will become choppy.

The other thing to remember is that when we're casting out to all of these platforms, actually, products like Vimeo and another one called OBS, which is Open Broadcaster Software, enable the chat to be in real time as well. What that means is the chat is integrated from all of these different platforms. And if we have all of these different platforms answering maybe 200, 300, or 400 people sending in messages, we need to be set up for answering all of those questions, or else we're going to create a bad user experience.

If we want to look at the two big games in town, which are really Facebook and YouTube, Facebook is a great place to share live video, either directly through their own live stream or through someone like Restream. But remember that the people there aren't going there just to watch video, they're going there to do messaging, to post pictures, and so on. So whilst we may have a community there, and they're discussing things, and they're sharing, they're not necessarily going there to watch the video. It's a bit like they're in the front room of the house, the living room, the lounge, and the television's on, but they're also distracted by the newspaper, the book, the dog, the family, the friends.

YouTube is more like going to the cinema, because people actually go to YouTube to watch video. YouTube is also owned by Google, so the content on YouTube is catalogued and becomes search engine-friendly which, of course, is also very good for our SEO or search engine optimization. But on YouTube, we don't necessarily have fans or a community or a page, because it is, to some degree, a one-trick pony. Youtube is where people go to watch video and then come off, so they spend less time there. If we're going to be on Youtube, we have to think about how we're going to get the traffic, how we're going to get the people to come and watch what you're sharing if you're live streaming. 

This is where both platforms, all platforms, have their own inherent advantages, because they're all slightly different. Facebook is still the most popular social media platform in the world, but what I personally like is this idea with LinkedIn that, for business to business, I might be able to stream using Restream to my YouTube, to my Facebook, and also to my LinkedIn, assuming, of course, that the content is applicable across all platforms, which it may not be, because, obviously, one is a B2B community, one is a consumer community, and one may be for a different age group. As we keep talking about our different audience groups from the SPEAK|pr module under Personalization, we talk about the three groups: our internal audience, our partners, and our external audience. It's quite possible then to think about streaming content on your own website or to your own community of followers, and that'd be one video channel, and then to have an external one, too, for example, your Facebook community.

Channelization, according to the different audience streams, can then be played out in terms of the amplification strategy. Which platforms do you send it to? Some announcements may be generic enough to go across all platforms to all people in a live manner, and some may be live for some people. Maybe team meetings could be live, but in a closed chatroom. It's important to look at streaming because video now is a main platform and a main medium for everybody. There are many options. Choose one platform at a time. Choose to multicast. The main thing is to make sure that your content is compelling, it's relevant, and that you can follow up. As Viya has shown by selling nearly $50 million worth of products in one day using one platform, mobile commerce and live streaming is definitely with us. In COVID times, it's even more with us, and it's possibly a great way to build and drive sales. 

This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

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