Periscope and Marketing: Big Opportunity, Big Danger

(Originally published on EpicPresence.com)

The new age of mobile streaming live video is only about two months old, but the potential this technology affords us is so apparent that I’m totally fine using the phrase “new age.”

Meerkat and Periscope have drawn a new line in the sand for social media.

The fact that anyone with a new-ish smartphone can stream live video from wherever they are gets our species one step closer. (No, really, that’s straight from Periscope’s About page: “It may sound crazy, but we wanted to build the closest thing to teleportation.”)

Radio came of age in the 1930s during the Hindenburg disaster (the famous line “Oh, the humanity!” was broadcast all across the country as reporter Herbert Morrison watched that airship go down in flames), and it’s fair to expect live mobile streaming will have its moment sometime very soon.

But can Meerkat or Periscope become a giant marketing channel, as radio did in the 20th Century? Or do the negatives of having a universe of smartphone users livestreaming their worlds ultimately outweigh its strengths as a marketing channel?

We looked to some of the world’s most cutting-edge marketers and tech journalists to get a feel for how this might play out.

The Huge Opportunities We’ve Already Seen

With Periscope especially, your livestreams already have a built-in audience: Your Twitter followers. Streaming video gives marketers and brands a chance to really engage some of their most interested followers.

“Have a celebrity ‘take over’ the company Periscope for a live broadcast,” Jonathan Long, founder and CEO at Market Domination Media, writes at Huffington Post. “Imagine if Diet Coke announced a Taylor Swift takeover. Millions would tune in, and Diet Coke sales would be imminent.”

Long’s piece brings up a great point: What if livestreaming engages the right audience as well as or more effectively than expensive commercials? How many celebrity takeovers could Diet Coke’s Super Bowl ad budget buy?

But celebrity takeovers are just the beginning here. Livestreaming facilitates some killer two-way conversations at a large scale.

“Interviews and Ask Me Anythings are a great way to really demonstrate brand transparency and industry expertise,” content marketer Anna Francis writes. “No one likes to think they are talking to a robot on Twitter and Facebook, and it can be really beneficial for brands to show their audience their human side.”

This could even potentially fold fans into the process of creating products, music or movies.

“Imagine an indie film director who say, while filming a difficult movie scene, decides to broadcast a take live to fans to get immediate feedback on how to make it better,” Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes writes.

“For artists and creators, mainstream live video streaming will inspire an entirely new way to engage with their fans and help them become more collaborative with their work.”

So far, that AMA model has worked wonders. In early April, young adult fiction author John Green (he’s the guy who wrote The Fault in Our Stars) took over MTV’s Periscope feed and tapped right into a super-engaged audience for a 20-minute conversation.

Even the summary that author and MTV reporter Kat Rosenfeld wrote up about the livestream got nearly 10,000 shares in a week.

Deeper Engagement on Existing Social Channels

If you have an engaged list of Twitter followers, Periscope or Meerkat are potentially excellent ways to move audience members down your content funnel.

This might be where the real genius lies in the early stages of the evolution of these media.

“In lieu of expanding to new platforms, mature social media teams are looking for ways to consolidate and improve efficiency of their existing networks,”Adobe’s Cory Edwards says.

“That’s the beauty of the Meerkat and Periscope phenomenon: It offers the ability to leverage existing investments in a way that brings greater transparency and efficiency and fresh new ways to engage versus creating and maintaining a new platform.”

Hubspot’s Jessica Webb has already put together a few best practices for anyone who is ready to try out livestreams. A couple of key things to remember at this stage are:

• Make it easy for people to find your livestream with good headlines, keywords and hashtags,
• And be sure to turn on location tagging, Webb says.

Some Problems That Have Already Emerged

Deeper global connectivity through communication technology is a double-edged sword. “Hell is other people,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1944, and that was well before Twitter trolling was a thing.

Trolls have already begun to find their voices on both Meerkat and Periscope because the stream allows for real-time commentary.

Periscope was quick to react to this problem, Engadget senior editor Nicole Lee reported.

“On the broadcasting end, it’s also far easier now to control the quality of the comments. For one thing, you can now set it so that only the folks you follow can chat, which is useful if you’d rather not have a flood of strangers saying all kinds of nasty things to you. But even if you do allow it, it’s also now easier to block annoying folks — a single tap on an offending comment will offer an option to add the person to your blocked list.”

A day later, Mashable’s Seth Fiegerman wrote that Meerkat was planning to roll out its own options for troll control, citing comments from Meerkat community manager Ryan Cooley on user attempts to report trolls via hashtags.

“[Cooley] admits it shouldn’t fall entirely on the community to ‘self-regulate,’” Fiegerman said. “For that reason, Meerkat is planning to introduce a feature with its next update that gives broadcasters control over who comments on their streams.”

These aren’t new problems. Trolls are almost as old as the internet itself, and marketers must rely on the skills they’ve (presumably) already honed in active social media management.

“As with any social campaign, you must not ‘set it and forget it,’ and you have to be prepared in advance for what could go wrong,” Benjamin Hordell, partner at DXagency, told AdWeek’s Christopher Heine.

Then, of course, there are all the standard worries about what a new technology could enable — loudest among those worries being lo-res streams of copyrighted works.

Users around the world got to see a small sample of how this might work when the fifth season of Game of Thrones, already the most pirated show on American television, premiered in mid-April.

Periscope “provided the ability for people around the world to watch the episode in real time albeit in low quality,” Jenni Ryall, an Australia-based writer for Mashable, reported. “This was particularly helpful for Australians who do not have a Foxtel subscription, the company who holds the rights locally, or do not have HBO access in the U.S.”

Coincidentally, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Josephine Tovey did an excellent writeup on Periscope and Meerkat for that paper’s readers, and her analysis captured the “Here we go again” feeling among copyright holders.

“Rights holders already have their work cut out playing whack-a-mole on YouTube and other existing platforms, forcing the removal of user-generated content featuring copyrighted material,” she wrote. “When the content is being broadcast live, it’s going to be that much harder to deal with.”

A Little Perspective May Be Necessary

Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, though. So far, Meerkat and Periscope have proved to be:

• A nice tool for engagement,
• Another headache for copyrighted content, and
• Something fun for tech journalists to write about.

And at this point, that’s enough.

“We’re still in the embryonic stage of mobile live streaming – think of it like Twitter back when most people just tweeted about what they had for breakfast,” English agency Something Big points out.

As such, the hype around these two apps — as well as any fears — needs time to die down a bit. If people are there, marketers will follow,” Advertising Age Managing Editor Ken Wheaton writes.

“But as I keep trying to point out, tech media aren’t ‘people.’ They’re super-obsessed savants with one of the biggest and baddest echo chambers going. And because their echo chamber can be heard by the regular media folks, it sometimes gets mistaken for reality. Granted, my middle name is ‘Get Off My Lawn,’ so of course I would say something like this.”

In the meantime, there is already an established model for how Periscope and Meerkat marketing might play out. Japan has had a similar livestreaming app, Twitcasting, that’s been building a solid base of users since it was unveiled in 2010, Tech In Asia reporter J.T. Quigley writes.

“When former AKB48 [a J-pop girl group] idol Tomomi Itano went solo, she streamed promotional videos for a new single on both YouTube and Twitcasting. According to [Twitcasting exec Yuki] Ishikawa, about 4,000 people watched her 37-minute YouTube stream. 22,000 tuned in for her six-minute Twitcasting broadcast.”

Quigley also highlights another singer whose album hit No. 1 on Japan’s iTunes charts after some heavy Twitcasting promo. And a Twitcast from a Tokyo mayoral candidate pulled a half million viewers.

So, there are ample opportunities for Meerkat and Periscope marketers, if five years of growth in the Japanese market are any indication.

And if you’re thinking of making a concerted push in this direction, maybe reach out to tech communities in Japan for marketers there who speak your language. They can probably show you how to deal with the trolls and the copyright violations.

images by:
Laura Lee Moreau / Unsplash
Kevin Schmitz / Unsplash
Tonglé Dakum / Unsplash
Jérémie Crémer / Unsplash