Meerkat v Periscope: Who will win the live-streaming video battle?

For the last couple of weeks the hot new thing in tech - or at least the most talked about at the SXSW music and tech festival in Texas - has been a live-streaming video service called Meerkat.

Now Twitter, which just days ago acted to prevent Meerkat tapping into its own users quite so easily, has launched a rival service called Periscope. Battle has been joined and there's unlikely to be more than one winner.

Both apps provide an extremely simple way of going live from your mobile phone with just a couple of taps - and letting the world see what you see. This is not particularly new - services like Qik, Bambuser and Livestream have allowed you to go live from your phone for some years. But Meerkat and Periscope have come along just as many mobile users have easier and cheaper access to the necessary data connection and they also make it far easier to connect with an audience. I've tried both, and here is what I've found.

To start a Meerkast (as they're known) you just fill in a subject box describing what you are about to show and press "stream". Then those who follow you on the app get an alert telling them that you are live, and they can choose to watch and send you messages which pop up at the bottom of the screen. I've used the app to stream a speaker at a conference, a Raspberry Pi contest at the Science Museum and even a tech event hosted by the Duke of York inside a royal palace.

You quickly see how many people are watching - I think my highest audience has been 47, and apparently a Meerkast with the White House press secretary attracted several hundred viewers. Not exactly the world coming together, but then this is a very new app. Once you stop streaming, anyone who arrives too late has no way of retrieving your Meerkast. As I've often found, it can be frustrating to get a message saying someone is streaming, only to find it's over by the time you tune in.

One really annoying aspect is that you can only film in portrait mode, so although you can save the video you shoot onto your phone, you wouldn't want to show it on a standard 16:9 screen.

Periscope works in a similar way, but I found it performed just slightly better - perhaps because until today it's only had a few test users. I did not get the connection issues that occasionally saw my Meerkasts switch to audio-only mode. But what really impressed here was some of the content. I downloaded the beta version of the app just as the astronaut Chris Hadfield was starting a broadcast on an apparently mundane subject - packing his suitcase.

Astronaut Chris Hadfield is an early adopter of live-streaming video

He'd propped his phone up while he packed, and riffed about the kind of clothing you take into space. Then questions started popping up at the bottom of the screen, and he answered each of them - including mine - with great wit and insight. We learned what kind of underwear you wear in space, that you never get any washing done up there and about the precise mechanics of, how shall I put this, visiting the bathroom.

Twitter cleverly gave Periscope to a number of tech-savvy celebrities to test and while their audiences were necessarily small during the pilot stage, I can see them rapidly learning how to engage directly with fans, just as they have with other social media platforms.

The key to success in this live-streaming battle will be compelling content from articulate people

The key technological trick in live streaming video is cutting latency - in other words, reducing the delay between the broadcaster and the audience. And Periscope appears to have cracked it. I did a test by counting to 10 and asking people to message me the moment I got there. They responded almost immediately.

Overall, Twitter's new baby does seem a more polished product overall than Meerkat. It also allows you to publish the videos for later viewing, which must mean that they will get bigger audiences. But it shares one annoying characteristic with its rival - it works only in portrait mode, giving you vertical video.

Periscope's co-founder and CEO Keyvon Beykpour - who only sold the business to Twitter in January after developing the app for a year - didn't seem to understand my irritation with this feature, when we spoke yesterday.

A screenshot from Periscope - no plans for horizontal video

"This isn't television," he says. "It's a different medium and people generally hold their phones with one hand." But he says they hope to introduce landscape mode quite soon, although he believes that most users will stick with vertical video.

So prepare to see your Twitter stream fill up with people showing off their new kitchen and their child's first steps, or giving you vertical views of a football match or a rock concert. Is this the future of social communication? Maybe, but I'm betting that the key to success in this live-streaming battle will be compelling content from articulate people. In other words, let's hear more details about Commander Hadfield's space underwear.

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Written by Rory Cellan-Jones 

How B2B CMOs Can Turn Social Media into Social Storytelling

For the CMOs of B2B companies, the to-do list is never-ending. Provide more original social content. Engage your target audience. Attract new followers. Create ambassadors. And these tasks can appear monumental given the lack of time and the fluctuating gap in social skills, which require an understanding and communicating on multiple social networks, each with unique style, form, and community.

To be successful requires more than a social presence. It requires continuous social storytelling. Original stories are now one of the most strategic marketing deliverables B2B companies can create for engaging social audiences and communicating a company’s core positioning and value proposition. If told in a meaningful and engaging way, this narrative can become more than just story – it can become the blueprint for a B2B company’s entire social communication strategy.

But how to deliver effective social stories and content every day? Recognize that social media has created a new marketing lifecycle, combining social awareness, education, and engagement. CMOs must execute this new lifecycle within a digitally driven ecosystem against unrelenting competition to win buyer influence. Storytelling is at the speed of social.

In order to answer the challenge, you must have a team in place that shares your company’s vision and positioning. Form a story marketing team that is capable of telling original stories with clear roles, processes, and techniques. The goal for a story team is to make social storytelling part of the internal flow of conversation, to reach messaging alignment, and to deliver lifecycle organized social communications. Without clear storytelling management and workflow, your marketing team will be stuck in a world of one-off social media efforts. Here’s how to get started:

• The story team members: product experts, customer experts, digital media designers, and experienced social marketing communicators.Select individuals from product marketing, product management, marketing communications, customer experience, and social media management.
• The story team roles: story owner, collaborator, and viewer. Owners create and drive ideation and targeting. Collaborators add context and content. Viewers help share and communicate stories before, during, and after delivery. Consider a center of storytelling excellence to share roles across teams.
• The storytelling process: story planning, design, and production.Planning is simple and fast. Ideate and organize ideas everyday. Design includes social targeting, social contexting, and social message testing. Production takes feedback from tests and completely prepares the final digital versions, the sequence, and schedule. Make sure these three phases become a standard lifecycle. Story is a deliverable so it requires a lifecycle process.

Delivering these original social stories that drive awareness and increase engagement by your prospects must be designed with the following key strategies and techniques in mind:

1. Know your rainforest

Your social rainforest is your target ecosystems and social connections. Entering social networks is much like wandering into a rainforest where everything is fundamentally connected. If you enter this ecosystem without knowledge of the power of its connectivity, extinction is eminent. Stories provide the link between your positioning, digital media, and target customers. They are that crucial connecting thread between your marketing team, your desired image, and your target social communities. In other words, the marketing team needs to be one with their target community. Aligning your employees and your story is the first step to telling it to the world.

2. Be authentic and helpful

Stop the vendor speak. Making an emotional and real impact means telling your story in an authentic, honest, helpful manner that is accessible to all parties. Worry less about impressing your audience and more about engaging them.

3. Find the stories within the story

Your story is just the beginning. Within that story are additional narratives, flowing together to help express your core beliefs and ideas. Think about it – every blog post, webinar, e-book, and customer experience has many related needs, tragedies, successes, and conflicts that can be shared on social networks to increase awareness and positioning. Finding and telling those stories will only enhance your overall story.

4. Arm your team

Social storytelling marketing teams must compete like sports teams. They need the best equipment. They need to create the strategies and they need to craft brilliant play books. They need experts in the right positions and, above all, they need experience playing the game.

5. The right apps

Today, CMOs and their team improvise by patching together an ad hoc mix of marketing tools and unmanageable volumes of content without a blueprint for scaling people, technology, and processes for storytelling. Invest in integrated, social ware marketing applications that instantly guide users through creating the right story for the right ecosystem through the right content and network. Thus, the entire marketing team is able to focus on creativity rather than administrative tasks. Arming your team with collaborative, marketing intuitive apps for story planning, story component design, digital publishing, and story measurement allows your team to deliver empowering and compelling social stories every day.

Your story is your strategy. By creating a high performance storytelling marketing team for your B2B company with clear roles and processes you can begin to source and pipeline ideas and content from across your team, partners, and customers. Team consistency and alignment becomes the norm versus the project. Turning social media into social storytelling requires well-designed organization, digital content, and applications that truly orchestrate social story planning, design, and delivery seamlessly and successful from ideas to wins.

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Written by David P Butler

Google Panda is the April Fools' joke you wish was a real product

It's already April Fools' Day in Japan and Google isn't wasting any time.

In a video posted to Google Japan's YouTube page, the company introduced Google Panda, its new adorable take on voice-enabled search.

"Google Panda is engineered with state of the art emotional and conversational intelligence," promises vice president of engineering, Chris Yerga, in the video. "All you have to do is speak your mind."

Later, a Google engineer takes the stage to walk through the design inspiration (a real-life panda, of course) and the various features of Panda, which include its extra cute, mobile and shock-absorbing abilities. In keeping with Google's tendency to make devices in multiple sizes, Panda is available in the "compact" Google Panda 5 and Google Panda 6.

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Written by: Karissa Bell

5 GREAT ALTERNATIVES TO 24/7 SOCIAL CUSTOMER SERVICE

Customers are making key buying decisions based on the interactions they have with brands on social media. Twitter and Facebook are always on putting customers just one click away from being able to reach out with complaints, questions, etc. However, for quite a number of brands, it’s not possible to ‘always be on’ with 24/7 customer support. The lack of resources often prevents them from hiring extra people to take care of the night and weekend shifts.

How can you manage conversations with your customers if 24/7, round-the-clock support isn't feasible? How can you still manage to exceed the expectations of your customers?

Take a look at these 5 great alternatives to make sure you can still deliver smooth customer interactions over the weekend, during and outside peak hours, and those make or break crisis moments.

1. BEING ACTIVE WHEN YOUR AUDIENCE IS

It's as simple as that: just be active when your audience is.

The hours your audience is talking to your brand greatly determines when you yourself need to be actively replying to your customers' questions. Those hours, when you need to be available, typically depend on the industry you're in. To get to the bottom of this, you need to monitor when your community is active. Are they usually talking to you during the morning/evening/at night? If this is still a mystery to you, you will quickly understand when you need to provide customer service.

Important Tip: If your brand operates internationally and works with multiple social media teams across the globe, go beyond simply monitoring. Filter on country or language to be able to sift through the data so that each social media team only sees what's relevant to them.

Still not sure whether you need to provide customer support during the weekend? If that's when your community is most active, then the answer is, "Yes of course!" If you notice inflow is rather low on Saturday, and especially on Sunday, you can put someone on standby or exclude the weekend from your business hours.

2. PROVIDING BACK-UP DURING PEAKS & CRISIS SITUATIONS

At some points throughout the day, and even throughout the year, there are more conversations than usual. In those cases, outsourcing a part of the work to lighten the load is the perfect alternative to cover periods of time when there's a significantly higher volume of messages. In the case of telecom companies, for example, they often call upon extra pairs of hands in sudden crisis situations (e.g. failing network connections, total outages, and so forth).

Important Tip: Create special, dynamic forums where you can post regular status updates in times of crisis. As a type of self-service customer care, direct your community to it with helpful links.

3. BEING FLEXIBLE IN TIME & SPACE

In any customer service environment, flexibility is key. It's a crucial characteristic for employers and employees alike. It really works both ways: the more flexibility you grant employees, the more they will be motivated to do a great job and be flexible in return. That's why you need to be flexible both in time and space.

Develop trust and reliability with your social media team. If small changes need to be made in people's schedules, employees need to be flexible enough to step in and switch shifts from time to time. Working with shifts is a great way to provide regular breaks so people have enough time to decompress.

In a lot of cases, the option to work from home is a great alternative to make sure shifts are easily covered. Introducing a BYOD policy (i.e. employees have their own laptop at their disposal) allows employees to work remotely. This is very useful if you want people to work standby during the weekend. Introduce mobile devices and mobile apps, to work on/with either at home or at the office, to provide customer care on the go.

4. BUSINESS HOURS DON'T EQUAL WORKING HOURS

Stress is commonplace in a social customer service environment. High volumes of messages need to be dealt with in a timely manner if brands want to meet their targets. When starting a new day, messages have piled up during the night, and there’s usually a higher workload. Brands should create work schemes in terms of workload and not in terms of business hours.

Start half an hour earlier than usual to easily catch up on the messages that filtered into the social inbox during the previous night. After this change, you will easily notice an immediate, positive impact on stress level and response times.

5. CLEARLY COMMUNICATE THE SERVICE YOU OFFER

Customers should know what to expect from the service you deliver. What better way to do this than to give your Twitter bio a crucial makeover? The way you describe yourself online says a lot about how you provide customer service, and ultimately, how you do business.

Here are 5 essential elements to include in your Twitter bio to make sure customers know what to expect:

• include customer care, customer support, or comparable term in your Twitter name
• state that you deliver customer service in your Twitter bio (e.g. “Customer care team, at your service!”)
• include business hours: customers need to know when they can access you through social media (e.g. 8am - 8pm, Monday through Friday)
• communicate about other support channels, and have an alternative available (e.g. website, chat, phone, email, etc.)
• give your company a human face, and let people know who is part of your social customer care team

Want to learn more about these alternatives in-depth? Don't hesitate to check out our dedicated eBook to make sure you're maximizing your social customer service efforts.

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Written by: Sofie de Beule

B2B CONTENT: 5 TIPS FOR ARTICLES THAT AREN’T "BLAND 2 BORING"

March 29, 2015: Let’s face it: a lot of content out there on the web is dull, boring and humdrum. Such content will never motivate anyone to advance along a conversion funnel or be passed along on social media.

“Boring” is a subjective judgment, of course. I happen to be personally bored by the upholstery industry, but I’m also aware that there are hundreds — perhaps even thousands of human beings out there who are passionate about springs, padding, webbing and slip covers. (Hey, it takes all kinds to make an interesting world).

If your job happens to be creating interesting content for such people, you must somehow manage to connect with this passion. The question, of course, is “how?” Here are some tips for making sure that your BtoB content isn’t “Bland to Boring.”

1. Brevity is the soul of wit. There’s no doubt in my mind that the influence of the SEO industry has made B2B content more boring. Because longer, keyword-laden articles are considered “better for SEO,” content producers are discouraged from creating punchy, pithy short articles in favor of long mechanically-worded tracts that tend to ramble and sputter to a halt at the 500th word. Isla McKetta’s recent article for Moz.com, “The Art of Concision” contains excellent advice on focusing your thoughts using fewer words.

2. Consider ditching the term “White Paper.” When Winston Churchillinvented the modern White Paper in 1922, the concept of publishing an authoritative, in-depth guide to a given issue was still a novelty. Today, however, the term “white paper” is both musty and somewhat condescending. There’s nothing wrong with providing long-form, authoritative content in the form of e-books or SlideShare presentations, in fact you should be doing this if you’re practicing the inbound marketing model. But please don’t call it a white paper. Just hearing this term is enough to put many people to sleep. “White paper” is a bigger turn-off than even the pretentious tem “manifesto” (although I’d be interested in reading any “manifesto” generated by the upholstery industry — just because it would be so weird).

3. Know who you’re writing for. The best way to get away from stuffy, stilted prose is to have a very clear idea of who exactly your reader is. “Personas” is a $20 word but all it means is that you’ve mapped all of the important likes, dislikes, goals, challenges, and other motivating factors. Personas put “a human face” on your audience that can help you actually start relating to these people. Always write for one and only one person — not a faceless group.

4. Be visual. Social media rewards visual content. Facebook would be nothing without photos. While people still read online, reading behavior is often a state arrived at only after extended scanning and searching sessions. If you must create long interrupted strings of text, at least break them up with images. If you don’t have the budget to shoot original photography, find images on the Web and obtain reproduction rights (which are often very affordable). With images, don’t make the mistake of “showing what you’re already telling.” Use images to strengthen and add new dimensions to your textual points, not simply repeat them.

5. Make it modular. Consider chopping a long document up into multiple parts and reformatting the document into multiple pieces that can be easily shared on web pages, in small e-books, and on social media. Excerpt essential facts, quotes, and other takeaways. Share these with the audience segments most likely to respond to them on social media platforms. The idea is to create bite-sized modules of content that deliver a complete idea shorn of any editorial “fluff.”

Before you start experimenting with non-boring content, make sure you’ve got analytics installed on your content pages. If you’re running WordPress, the quickest way to get this done is with Yoast’s Google Analytics plug in, although it’s easy to do this manually as well.

Try different content forms, editorial voices, and visual presentation styles. You’ll know in a short time whether your content is actually connecting with your audience or not.

The post B2B content: five tips for creating articles that aren’t “bland 2 boring” appeared first on Didit.

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written by: Chris Bell

DEMAND FOR BIG DATA APPS IN FITNESS AND HEALTHCARE

The introduction of open-source cloud computing services has helped to drive the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), enabling new forms of wireless digital devices that are able to both send and receive data that's stored online.

Moreover, since the introduction of low-energy mobile communications began in the mid 2000s, we're moving beyond the early definition of IoT to now include consumer electronics (CE) devices which become part of the user's personal space.

Case in point: research from Juniper Research has found that annual revenues from connected healthcare and fitness online services will approach $2 billion by 2019 --that's nearly six times the $320 million value estimated for this year.

The findings from Juniper's latest market study also reveal that connected healthcare devices -- and the data they generate -- will offer substantial benefits to the consumers of these new products.

However, cloud service deployments will initially be constrained by inconsistent government regulation, alongside continued privacy concerns surrounding the sharing and security of personal data.

Personal Data Privacy Standards Development

The research highlights the evolving 'quantified others' trend -- that being the use of someone’s data by a healthcare professional or concerned party (such as a parent) to provide meaning and/or advice.

Companies like GOQii and Filip Technologies are using this technology to provide services beyond mere data provision. However, this has the potential to be undermined by unreliable data.

While medical devices have validation standards, fitness devices typically have no such benchmark. The development of standards would alleviate both consumer and medical professional concerns, potentially driving up user adoption.

"Connected fitness and health devices provide a way to collect biometric data, not interaction platforms," said James Moar, research analyst at Juniper Research.

Juniper believes that people want to interact with these smart devices at the app level – the attraction is the captured user information contained within these Big Data applications.

Because of this, and the omnipresence of sensors, the importance of the hardware will diminish at a much faster rate than other IoT market segments. Meanwhile, demand for analytics software, that can extract meaning from the data, will increase.

Other findings from the market study include:

• Smart Wireless Devices will permeate the enterprise, with smart glasses in particular having a large impact.
• Mobile point-of-sale devices are poised to take off in developing markets, with several key players looking to move into Latin America and the Asia Pacific regions in the coming years.
• Smart watches will be the most popular consumer electronics connected devices, overtaking more established wearable cameras.

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Written by David H. Deans