6. Hangout Insights and the Pull of the Visual Narrative

TV is a high-entry-level medium. Whether you are advertising or broadcasting, the cost of the technology involved is so prohibitive that even at the basic entry level you need to have deep pockets. As a result, anything that “happens” on TV comes with an instant credibility factor attached. Almost no one spends money lightly, so in order to spend it, whether you are a news network delivering information to the world or a company using TV to advertise, the implicit message that comes with the subtext is a simple but powerful one: permanence, long-term planning, professionalism, investment in the relationship with the largely passive viewer/consumer.

For anyone alive in the last 20–60 years, TV was how anything visual became instant and global. Yet when Felix Baumgartner prepared to make his historic jump from space, eight million of us from across the globe watched it live on YouTube. Even more amazing, as Figure 6.1 shows, NASA was holding a Hangout on Air from space, connecting the orbiting space station with tens of thousands who could watch the HOA live. (And you should circle the NASA page on Google+ because it’s just awesome: http://goo.gl/eZaAo.)

Figure 6.1 The possibilities being opened by the Hangout on Air became evident when NASA used the technology to create a “window” into the orbiting space station that the public could access.

These two events showcased what a direct live feed can do, and they proved beyond any doubt that TV’s grip on the popular mind as the primary delivery channel for live and recorded video images was broken, forever.

Video, then, has emerged not just as the primary means of visual communication in the twenty-first century but also as the new voice of social media. This is a critical distinction. We do not easily associate video with social media and this is a mistake. Social media is characterized by this triptych:

• Transparency (often at a deep, radical level)

• Accountability (it puts a very human face in front of every possible situation)

• Authenticity (you can no longer fake anything long enough to make inroads in marketing)

YouTube and Hangouts are the primary drivers of this and Google controls them both. This means that it is illogical to think of Hangouts as being divorced from search (YouTube is the second-largest search engine on the planet), which then makes them part and parcel of search marketing. This is something no television executive would have ever thought possible.

Those who have taken to video marketing more often than not labor under the impression that the medium is not much different from television. Its form is largely the same: moving pictures projected from one point and received at another. That description tends to obscure what’s radically different about the medium. Unlike television, video on the Web can be repurposed, shared, reshared, discussed, commented on, and interacted with in a way that adds fresh layers of meaning to its original intent.

This is a classic case of form and functionality creating a new medium of communication that goes deeper than the original. The functionality of video is a lot more malleable and a lot more responsive than the monolithic vertical of TV programming. As a result, its use is quite transformative and probably disproportionate in the impact it has on a brand. Video becomes key to the forming of a brand’s identity, the perceived connection it forms with its intended audience, and the way that audience sees the brand values and principles that resonate with it.

Content, of course, has always mattered; in the medium of television content worked hard to identify with its audience through a reflection of their lives and values and aspirations. Content was the primary way it made that all-important “connection,” which would then allow the audience to become part of the programming, claim ownership of the material, and emerge as loyal or brand advocates, or both.

You’re wondering here how this is any different. Obviously, content is still important. But the emphasis on the video culture that’s arisen is not so much in reflecting at the audience a picture they can be comfortable with, as in offering the audience something of real value to themselves. Just as in search on the Web, this then means that video (and Hangouts on Air are very much included in this) offers content that is informational (it teaches us something new), entertaining, or transactional (it leads us to a purchasing decision).

Video and Hangouts (on Air or otherwise) are a semantically dense medium of communication. They allow the synthesis of a lot more information than one could put in, let’s say, a blog post or a tweet with its 140-character limit. As a result, they are great at synthesizing content so that it does more things at once (that is, entertaining content can be transactional in value as well as informational in tone).

This is a unique situation that supersedes anything TV has been able to do to date in terms of cost, value, and reach. This doesn’t mean that the television industry did not try. In the 1980s and 1990s there was a decade when television experimented with ways to democratize its means of content production. Public Access Television was a trend that promised to do just that and launch a new age of user content that would increase social cohesion, drive brand values and social identity, and create greater connectivity and transparency. All the things, in short, that Hangouts on Air and YouTube video are doing.

There are a few reasons why Public Access Television did not take off as expected. In a study titled “A Failed Success: A Community Television Case Study of the Contradictory Nature of Participation and Deliberation,” published in the International Journal of Communication, researcher Amir Har-Gil looked at the microcosm of an Israeli kibbutz, with its theoretically easier alignment between means of production and shared, community values, to determine why Public Access Television did not work.

“Broad direct political participation and effective political deliberation are two central dimensions to the exercise of democracy,” stated Har-Gil in an opening paragraph titled “The Tension Between Participation and Deliberation.” In the microcosm of the kibbutz, television, a means of mass communication, was examined primarily in its value as a political communication tool. Though restrictive for our purposes, this is also important. Just as in the broader macrocosm of the Web, video is driven by the tension of deliberation (the exercise of informed thinking through the consumption of information-rich video content) and participation (the need to do something, transforming the initial connection into a transactional exercise).

“A growing body of empirical evidence—both historical and contemporary—maintains that there is an inherent tension between achieving effective deliberation and ensuring broad direct participation because, while participation is often the result of like-minded individuals acting in unison, deliberation is by definition the product of individuals interacting across lines of difference,” wrote Har-Gil. He went on to note that historically, when one increases the other declines.

The ability to use television this way was examined as an informative tool and subsequently as a communal tool because these were identified by the participants of the study as central characteristics of the project. At a time when we speak of “the world getting smaller” and the G+ community and the community feeling of social networks, the ability of broadcasting to help form a backdrop of community values—even if these are loosely held ones that revolve around the right to broadcast, direct access to information, and the ability to view or share user-generated video content—should not be underestimated.

As the title of the study suggests, the experiment with public access TV failed. One telling remark from a kibbutz member interviewed strongly suggests why: “Everything is just information, but there is no criticism, no issues are discussed and that’s missing. If something ‘hot’ was happening in the kibbutz, they won’t bring it. They’ll prefer to bring some holiday [celebration] or hold some quiz instead, and that’s a shame.”

In a public discussion I had on G+ on the subject, Scott Scowcroft, former Executive Director of the Northwest Access and Production Center in Seattle, Washington, associated with Public Access Television in the 1980s and 1990s, made a similar statement with a very modern twist at the end:

“Despite being well financed with free production facilities and a cable playback channel, public access never gained traction, at least not here in Seattle, Washington.

“The primary reason for this in my opinion was the dominance of poor content and predominance of low production values from these citizen produced videos.

“One difference is that ‘TV’ is linear and sequential, kind of like real life. The Internet is asynchronous, and with social media, one can make bad content irrelevant simply by ignoring it.”

The contention that a democratization of production values does not necessarily make for compelling viewing is a valid one. Despite the attempt to divorce the means of production from the content and allow casual users access to a high-end production that was essentially a soapbox that could be used to churn out user-generated content, the experiment failed. Environments as diverse as communities across America and kibbutzim in Israel could not make Public Access Television work because something was missing.

The missing ingredient was the same every time: a means through which those who created content could connect more directly with those who consumed it. It sounds like such a minor thing and yet the ramifications are massive. Without the direct bridging connection that provides a measure of immediate feedback between content creator and content consumer, we slip back to top-down, television-era ways of operating. Public Access Television may have decoupled the means of production from the content, for example, but it did nothing to bridge the gap. Those who used it were still governed by the conventions of television that produced a mono-directional channel of communication, regardless. Even more telling, there was no real way to repurpose the content of each broadcast. It was unwieldy, locked into the moment and contextually, perhaps, a hit-and-miss affair that harked back to the mass media model it was emulating. As Har-Gil wrote in conclusion to his study, when it came to Public Access TV, it was a case of “mass media in communal clothing.”

Video on the Web, on YouTube, in HOAs works differently. The flow of information is in an entirely bidirectional affair. It allows the “broadcaster” to do his trick and market to the masses, but the ability to engage, share, reshare, and comment on the content produced asynchronously as well as in real time also provides a much-needed symmetry in the relationship. This changes the entire proposition and highlights the disruptive nature of video on the Web: Suddenly not only is the “broadcaster” thrown that much closer to his audience, but the monologue of broadcasting is turned into a conversation.

Although those who come from a mass media background and are used to the one-way street, top-down approach of getting their message across will find this hard to deal with, for the rest of us this has been just the sea change we have been waiting for.

Here’s what Hangouts on Air can help achieve quickly:

• Generate trust

• Personalize contact

• Create a strong brand identity

• Humanize business

• Amplify brand equity

• Create a viral trend in marketing

To illustrate some of this, let’s look at the Real Estate Industry. Arguably, this is one of the most difficult industries to be active in. Realtors are subjected to a complex shift of factors that range from volatility in economic conditions to the quality of homes, the desirability of areas, and the perception of how trustworthy the realtors are by those who come to buy their dream home from them.

It is no accident that the picture of a realtor, head-and-shoulders shot, looking at the camera, has become the only way to get anywhere in this business. In most Western countries (Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Portugal, and the U.S., to name just a few) the realtor is as key an ingredient in selling homes as the homes themselves. That’s because the human factor is a strong motivator. The realtor’s invariably smiling picture is a densely semantic piece of code that is decoded by the prospective buyers who decide whether to trust that realtor.

When the recession struck in the U.S., Marianne Howell Wright, a North Carolina realtor, was faced with a stark choice: Risk going out of business or find a way to give her business a real boost that would carry it through the tough economic climate.

As she told me during an online interview: “Business was dead; I was thinking about what would work now for my business similar to what my website did in early 2000s. I needed to reinvent myself as a buyer’s agent as listings weren’t selling. Thought about videos, got out my digital camera, and just started. I just added up houses sold from video leads...$330,000 in commissions in the past 2.5 years. I don’t think it would have worked if I didn’t love my business so much.”

She makes it sound easy. A look at her YouTube channel, a low-key, straightforward affair where Marianne talks mostly to the camera while she shows properties, shows that what comes across is a genuine love for what she does, a real person whose personality is projected through video in listing after listing.

Figure 6.2 shows that the setup is not exceptional, but the immediacy of the connection allows the exceptional value of the message to come through.

Figure 6.2 Marianne Howell Wright managed to thrive as a realtor during one of the toughest recessions in recent U.S. history thanks to the power of web video to establish that personal, immediate connection.

The ability of video to establish one’s “credentials” with ease is evident. The question then becomes, can this be made to work for a company, or a brand? Can Hangouts on Air be made to fit the needs of a more corporate world where marketing is more formalized? This is exactly what we look at in the next section.

Topshop, for instance, one of Britain’s High Street clothes outlets, used the opportunity afforded by the London Fashion Week to draw attention to its brand, create a buzz around the company, draw eyeballs to its online real estate, and drive foot traffic to its shops. What is interesting is how it was done. (See Figure 6.3.)

Figure 6.3 British clothes outlet Topshop used the opportunity of the London Fashion Week to use Hangouts on Air to cleverly increase brand impact and reach and drive customers to its doors.

Topshop used a high-profile event with a lot of glamour mystique. The London Fashion Week is usually reported quite extensively in the press and in mass media, but few can afford to actually attend. Highlights and snippets of the event appear, for weeks afterward, everywhere, but not the whole show.

Topshop chose an interesting strategy based on a simple fact: Fashion plays on our voyeur instinct. There is a real fascination with how shows are put up, the models who showcase the clothes, the designers who create them, and the people involved in the industry. Hitherto a fairly closed-door affair with access controlled by the press, it was ripe for disruption.

This is what Topshop did:

• It used Google+ to create content around the making of the event itself that was streamed live. It therefore took the online participants behind the scenes, giving them access that even those who attended the show did not have.

• It used YouTube to create model diaries in which the models themselves became part of the story.

• It used a mixture of Hangouts on Air and YouTube video to tell the story from a designer’s point of view.

• It also used HD micro-cameras worn by the models themselves (future events will probably feature Google Glass) to record footage that appeared online, providing the viewer with the point of view of the model on the catwalk. In an ingenious move it also livestreamed the micro-camera feed to screens positioned around the catwalk so that those who were there on that day could see it.

• The models taking part in the show also recorded narratives that became part of a “Road to Runway” thread that showed those watching the preparation and activities necessary to make a show like this happen from the models’ point of view. This included interviews, fittings, and the day itself.

• Topshop was clever enough to use Hangouts on Air to show sneak peeks of meetings at its headquarters with the design teams, further fleshing out the narrative.

• Finally, closing the loop, a Google+ photo booth was installed at Topshop’s flagship store on London’s Oxford Street where users could try on outfits and create a moving image on a catwalk, which was then uploaded in an interactive digital shop window and appeared on the company’s Google+ page. They also used the Events page to allow some participants to win a ticket to attend the Fashion Show itself—creating a very elegant bidirectional flow that took some participants from offline to online and vice versa.

Seven distinct steps were taken by Topshop, on this particular occasion, to highlight a very specific event, increase reach, amplify media buzz, and drive sales, all in one package, using the power of Hangouts and leveraging the presence of YouTube. Above all, Topshop thought carefully about how it would increase engagement in its activity so that it could drive the necessary social media buzz.

Doing a forensic analysis on its very successful setup, the key takeaways become a blueprint for the successful setup of any event:

• Identify a central starting point. For Topshop the moment was provided with London Fashion Week. It can really be anything. A Hangout on Air that just is becomes difficult to promote so a hook is always necessary.

• Tell a story. Topshop could very easily have set HD micro-cameras everywhere during the London Fashion Week and simply broadcast that. It would have had quite some value and probably would have been pretty well attended, but it would not have been as successful as the narrative that captured everyone’s imagination. That’s because a visual narrative like that has inherent heroes, dramatic moments, and a progression that is much more captivating than simply watching the fashion show itself. Topshop executives understood this, and they set out from the start to create the kind of visual story that would grip the popular imagination and amplify their message rather than simply checking the “video marketing” box.

• Uncover a “secret.” Telling a story is not enough if there is no real value in it for the viewer. To create that value, you need to identify, in the story you’re going to tell, a “secret” that viewing now will make the viewers privy to. In this case it was all the behind-the-scenes stuff and the direct access to the models through the model diaries.

• Include everybody. This has to be deftly handled. An online video event that does not somehow feel exclusive drops in value. Topshop addressed this issue by creating the opportunity for engagement and interaction at every point, giving everyone access that complemented rather than competed with their experience. This helped magnify engagement and buzz.

These are four handy points that form the backbone of any successful Hangout on Air that is planned as a real Event, designed to have real impact on branding and marketing. These Events take planning and very careful thinking, but the execution is low-cost and easy to implement, driven by the power of Google+ and its crowd, in the Hangout on Air and supported by the YouTube traffic and accessibility.

Such is the positive effect this kind of event can have on the perception of a brand that the question is, how quickly can you plan one?

In this chapter we explored many of these, so here’s what I hope you learned:

• Hangouts on Air are the basis of a real conversation. Although they appear to be broadcasting, they are nothing like it. They provide the perfect opportunity to get the social media conversation going.

• A Hangout on Air is not a TV show, nor is it a show in the traditional sense of the word. It is social media in video format. As such, it follows the social media tropes.

• A sense of narrative is essential if your Hangout on Air is to pick up steam. Make sure you identify what your narrative is going to be and the best way to tell it.

• Add value by helping shed light on a “secret.” This can be anything from access to a specific event to demystifying a particular topic.

• Include everyone in a way that makes everyone feel special. Notice how Topshop created an exclusive feeling about its Event. Those watching it online felt privileged, and those taking part online felt they were participating in something new and clever. Everyone was happy and willing to engage in generating the social media buzz.