Editor’s note: Content Marketing World 2015, one of the premier events in content marketing, will take place Sept. 8-11 at the Cleveland Convention Center. Smart Business will profile three of the event’s leading speakers. This is part two.
Mitch Joel, president of digital marketing agency Twist Image, noticed an emerging social media trend coming out of the recent Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao WBO welterweight match.
Forget that there were questions about copyright infringement when audience members live streamed the match by using smartphone apps.
“The other story that was happening was that there were boxing enthusiasts who were not only broadcasting it, but were adding their own commentary,” he says. “A lot of the feedback was, ‘Wow! These guys are better than the authorized commentators.’ So suddenly we have this rise of the new media star who is looking at this world in a very different perspective.
“I believe there will be celebrities in this live streaming world who do just that. You’re watching them for not just the content, but to watch them tell their story. That trend is going to be super interesting.”
The last mile
The live streaming video trend is in a sense that last mile of the evolution of social media, Joel says. First were text-only blogs, then images could be added and finally video and live streaming.
“The jury is out on whether or not we have this mass adoption of people wanting to live stream content from their smartphones through Twitter or another platform,” Joel says. “The ability to simply live stream at a level of quality and engage in the social component of liking it, hearting it or commenting on it is readily available. But in the sense of user adoption, we’re not quite there yet. You actually have to have that app on your phone to see the broadcast, and you have to have the desire to do so.”
But it could happen. Twitter and YouTube are examples of platforms that first drew a lot of naysayers about sharing tweets and videos, Joel says.
With time, however, that negativity dissolved. Today, people not only share material, they want to share it.
Is there a secret sauce?
What is so often seen with successes, however, is that there is no single secret to the positive outcome.
“The truth is there is a lot of timing, luck and just general adoption by the open masses,” Joel says. “We can’t sort of just say, ‘This is the reason why.’ ‘Why a Meerkat over a Periscope?’ ‘Why did Twitter go the way it went while Foursquare, still relevant, just did not have the same zealous passion that others had?’ We can all look smart and try to say things that are really, really genius but we simply don’t know.”
What may be touted as a robust program that does everything you want may not get the traction it hoped for. Take the example of Facebook outdistancing MySpace.
“Really, why Facebook?” Joel says. “You could look at it pragmatically and go, ‘Well, MySpace was a place where anybody could change the page and do whatever they want, and, while it was seen as a negative that Facebook was so limiting in terms of what you could do to create and design a page, that might have been the reason why more people were attracted to it because it was simple.’
“You look at Facebook and they were very smart in terms of pivoting the company to be mobile first in a short period of time so users adopted it faster.”
Click here for Content Marketing World Registration and more information.
