Twitter Gets (More) Live Google+ isn’t the only social-media outlet

Air platform in stages, first offering it to select accounts, including celebrities and artists. (The Dalai Lama, President Obama, and the Muppets were early adopters.) Since Google rolled out the platform to the public in May, it has been met with enthusiasm, if not fer- vent praise, for its potential to foster connections and interactivity, includ- ing in the meetings industry. “Google Just Disrupted the Conference Busi- ness With Hangouts on Air,” read the headline of one widely shared blog post (convn.org/hoa-blog). “I think it’s a big deal,” said Brandt

Krueger, corporate technology director at metroConnections, a Minneapolis- based conference and event planning and production company. “There are alternatives that may or may not per- form better, but Google Hangouts on Air has one big thing going for it. It brings the cost of entry way down — to free.” Low risk is one of the factors that

led consultant Adrian Segar, author of Conferences That Work, to use HOA to live-stream a keynote speaker from EdAccess 2012, a small, 70-participant information technology conference held June 18–21 in Hightstown, N.J. Segar had done some advance prepa-

ration, including creating a test Google+ Hangout on Air, but it was limited — using the platform to live-stream from the conference didn’t occur to him until the night before the event started. “It was pretty much spur of the

moment,” he said. Some regular attend- ees who couldn’t make EdAccess had asked Segar if there was a way he could broadcast conference content, Segar wrote in a blog post about the event: “I had nothing to lose by trying out this

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new technology.” Segar modified his technique during

the broadcast, adding a second com- puter that displayed the speaker’s slides as he talked. There is no reason, Segar said in an interview with Convene, that he couldn’t have added a third com- puter to be used to rove the room and broadcast attendees’ questions, along with the speaker’s answers. Although the broadcast lacked the

polish that he would have gotten had he used a production company, for the price — $0 — and the amount of time spent, Segar was happy with the results.

“Google has done a fantastic job with the technology,” he said. And by using

“nice-quality web cameras and decent mikes,” users will get closer to profes- sional results. That goes for adequate bandwidth as

well. In Minneapolis, the Sustainability in Theater Conference was held in a venue with an extremely fast Internet connection. “I think that is critical,” Cooper said. Using Google+ Hangouts on Air “was just a fantastic experience,” she said. “To our great surprise.”

. Barbara Palmer is senior editor of Convene.

ON THE WEB Read about Adrian Segar’s experiment with Google+ Hangouts on Air at convn.org/segar-hoa.

with livestreaming options for events. In addition to YouTube’s livestreaming capabilities, Twitter rolled out its own livestreaming option for brand pages late last year — and it’s something meeting planners may want to keep an eye on.

Pepsi’s “Live For Now” campaign used real-time data about who’s “trending” on Twitter to create original programming drawn from a summer concert series featuring popular artists like Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry, and made it available on both pepsi.com (now branded as Pepsi Pulse) and twitter.com/pepsi. The “Live For Now” campaign was brought about in part by Mass Relevance, a platform that helps companies integrate real-time social content into online brand experiences. Mass Relevance Chief Marketing Oficer Matt Corey, who made Pepsi’s campaign part of his case-study presentation during WebMediaBrands’ Social Curation Summit, held July 31 at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, said that it’s vital for companies to build a complete online experience around an event. Moreover, he said, the content must be curated, especially when there’s a good deal at stake. Having a filter that takes user-generated content and presents it back to the larger audience is working for Pepsi, which, at the time of the summit, was averaging 38,000 new Twitter followers per day.

What does this mean for meeting professionals? Julian Solaris, editor of Event Manager Blog, pointed out that Twitter has always been a go-to site for events (as opposed to Google+, which is not as widely used) and is perfect for fostering attendee engagement and conversation. That there is now a livestreaming option just ups its value — for big-budget companies only, unfortunately. Right now, Twitter’s livestreaming capabilities are limited to large-brand campaigns (read: big bucks), not one-time events. Which makes Google+ Hangouts on Air all the more appealing for meetings — for the time being. — Katie Kervin, Convene assistant editor

Read Julian Solaris’ entire post about Twitter livestreaming at convn.org/ twitter-livestream.

OCTOBER 2012 PCMA CONVENE 53

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF MINNESOTA THEATER ALLIANCE