3. Getting Familiar with the Controls
Connecting in New Ways
Hangouts are all about connecting. Because they take the ability to connect with your target audience to a new level, they have a number of features that allow you to create “conversations” that will help you better promote your company or brand. There are two distinct sides to the connectivity equation. One side deals with the dynamics of the people connection. It allows you to understand what it is that actually drives this forward so that you can break it down and use it to benefit your business and provide a better experience for your target audience. We will see how this works in the next chapter.
The other side is purely technical. It is the “tools” with which a Hangout is composed. These we will look at here, in some detail, in order to understand how they differ, what is available, and how they can be best used.
Hangouts have proved to be very popular with the general public, and Google has launched a Hangouts app that specifically allows mobile users to take part in Hangouts without having to go through the Google+ app on their phones.
The Hangout app is not just about video. It allows chat messages to be exchanged and it also allows photographs and video to be shared. Because it can store a conversation, it can become a nonpublic record of chats, videos, and shared photographs that, from a business point of view, can have a significant impact on the way a company or a brand connects with its online audience.
As Figure 3.1 shows, the Hangouts app can now become a record of contacts, and shared experiences that are available to view again later.
Figure 3.1 The screen on the left shows that Hangouts now exists as a standalone app in the Android and iOS environments (green circle with quotation marks). This allows the end user to message, chat, share pictures, and use videoconferencing with not just their Google+ contacts but also anyone who is in the address book of their phone (screen in the middle). The killer feature of the Hangout, of course, is the capability to use video, any place, anywhere, to quickly communicate in an unambiguous manner.
The decoupling of Hangouts from the constraints of the Google+ environment opens up an entire world of fresh contacts and opportunities for you as a business or brand in need of communicating. In the past if you needed to use chat, you were constrained to using a preexisting paid version or an application that might not have been compatible with everyone’s device. In the past a conversation would take place using some kind of messenger; it might have gone on to text and then, for a face-to-face, you would have used Skype. But all of this was fragmented. Losing some of the meaning across communication verticals might be okay when friends talk to friends, but for a brand trying to market itself and create a continuity with its online audience, it was a less than ideal situation.
Now the Hangouts app provides one seamless, unified environment that also retains the communication history. It’s not unlike a chat room of old, which can either be one-on-one, or involve a larger number of people and with the capability to offer enhanced communications in shared media like photographs and the option to go to video (which is also recorded and stored).
From the end user’s point of view, the functionality could not be easier, as Figure 3.2 shows.
Figure 3.2 The Hangout application quickly allows end users to (1) type a name from their contacts, (2) use their Google+ list of friends, or (3) draw from frequent contacts.
This kind of robust communication platform is brand-new. The ability to go over past history so easily, and to see what was said, what was agreed on, and when, is new. The capability to integrate chat, text, photographs, and video is new. Relatively few businesses or brands have been prepared for it. It therefore represents the perfect opportunity to push the envelope, make an impact, and create the kind of brand-reach moment that marketing history is made of.
Google’s Director of Marketing North and South America, Lisa Gevelber, writing on Google’s online magazine Think Insights, quantified the moment with this: “Imagine being a marketer in the 1940s. It’s the advent of television advertising. Your entire model for connecting with consumers is evolving and you’re getting your head around the implications of having a captive audience tuned into screens in their living rooms. You’re likely enamored by the opportunity to deliver sight, sound and motion—with great reach. But you’d need new assets, and new ways to position your brand and spotlight its benefits. You’d need new thinking about how to structure your campaigns—and your teams. As you witnessed a massive change in the relationship between people and technology, you’d be called to embrace the accompanying implications for marketing. Perhaps without even realizing it, you’d be living a piece of marketing history.”
As consumer attention becomes fragmented, we truly get into the attention economy that Thomas H. Davenport, Director of Research at the International Institute for Analytics, defines as “focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act.” It is this awareness that leads to action that Hangouts are wonderfully geared to do for a business or a brand.
Now, it would have been more logical to have started this chapter with something that is a little more detail oriented from the marketer’s point of view. I didn’t because the change in marketing that the Hangouts present us with require an equally radical change in our way of thinking when it comes to marketing, promotion, brand building, and customer service. Many of the things you will end up doing by the time you have finished reading this book will, most probably, have never been done by a brand before. That requires time to wrap your head around and examine the possibilities. This is why this chapter started out the way it did.
With all that in the back of your mind, it’s time now to go and look at some of the nitty-gritty.
The Hangout Controls
Having seen the way Hangouts look from the mobile user’s point of view, it’s time to examine them from the point of view of you, the marketer, business owner, and brand promoter—the person who is now charged with the mission to make your brand widely known, to make your business the darling of the online world.
To start a Hangout from your Google+ profile, you need to log on to your account and on the right-hand side column click on Hangouts and then the New Hangout command at the upper right, as shown in Figure 3.3.
Figure 3.3 The right-hand side of your Google+ profile displays all your email, Google+, and Google Talk contacts. To start a Hangout, just click on New Hangout at the top, marked by a + sign.
When you start a Hangout, Google tries to make sure you make as few mistakes as possible. After you have clicked the New Hangout link on the upper-right side of your Google+ profile, you will see a change in the options of who you can add, as shown in Figure 3.4.
Figure 3.4 The moment you decide to host a Hangout, the right-hand column changes to allow you to pick your guests. Although only 10 people (including you) can hang out at any one time in a video chat, text chat and picture sharing can have up to 100 people taking part at one time.
Google+ Pages see a different view, as shown in Figure 3.5.
Figure 3.5 Pages can start a Hangout by using the left hand side menu to navigate to “Dashboard” and then clicking on the “Start a Hangout” option on the big green button.
When deciding who to invite for a Hangout, you could, for example, choose to check a circle (a number of people you have conveniently grouped together), a number of people from your contacts, or a combination of both. It is only after you have checked them (and made your choice) that you will see the Hangout “card” appear, as shown in Figure 3.6.
Figure 3.6 The Hangout “card” that appears is very similar to the one that most end users see on their phones. The idea behind it is to unify the look and create an ever-closer integrated environment so that the “conversation” rather than the device space becomes the focus.
After you have the card, there is still one more step before you get to a visual Hangout, though for all intents and purposes you are actually hanging out the moment the card comes up and you have invited people. As shown in Figure 3.7, that final step creates a video link connection.
Figure 3.7 The video Hangout does not start until the video icon is clicked and a video request is sent to the other party. Video Hangouts have a limit of 10 people including the person who hosts them, but they can be seen, in real time, by the other members of the Hangout. Obviously, when one member drops out another one can enter, if necessary. It is worth noting that the Hangout itself can be entered into, from the card, by clicking on either the Green video icon or the green bar.
So far the journey from deciding to host a Hangout to actually pressing the video icon button and starting a visual Hangout has been one marked by conscious choices all the way. This is no accident and more choices lie ahead. If you decide to make this a Hangout on Air, which means it is public and people outside the Hangout can see it, the person or persons you are inviting will have to go through a stage where they approve that it is public and then join you.
If you decide to not make the Hangout public, essentially the other people will simply accept or decline the invitation and join you for a face-to-face conversation.
Both of these events will be documented in the card as having had either a Hangout or a Hangout on Air and will be viewable as events in the history stream that the card contains.
Here are some things to remember that are of direct interest to your marketing efforts:
• The card is viewable on any device. So essentially it becomes a powerful marketing tool for capturing the attention of your audience wherever they are.
• The history of what was said, what was shared, and how everything was phrased is retained. So this now becomes an additional powerful tool of your branding and social media outreach effort.
Digital marketers have, for some time now, been complaining about the difficulty of capturing and keeping the attention of their target audience. As devices, popularly referred to as “screens,” have proliferated, marketers (and with them companies and brands) have found that keeping the attention of their target audience has become a difficult proposition.
This has made the attention economy, which we started this chapter with, one of the hottest areas to work in and one of the hardest in which to come up with any kind of lasting solution. The interaction between a marketer and his potential audience is always fluid. As new marketing techniques come along and their innovative nature is enough to capture the attention of the audience, they are widely adopted and their proliferation creates the same issue all over again.
Now, of course, Hangouts become the ultimate attention economy tool. In one place you can aggregate text, photographs, and links, and launch video conferences. And do it for a group, or an individual. And continue it asynchronously. And it remains on record. And it can even be accessed through Gmail, separately (like on the go and away from a major web connection, later).
This latter point is actually one of the most significant when it comes to marketing. It may be easy to forget how to access a Hangout card or difficult to find it over time, particularly as individuals tend to participate in many Hangouts. Gmail provides an email notification of the Hangout chats, complete with text. Anyone who has used the chat client to ask a question and has then been asked whether they would like the chat history emailed to them will understand the power of this functionality.
First, conversations cannot be lost. A quick search in Gmail using the search query “Chat with XXXX,” where XXXX is the name of the person you had the Hangout chat with, will bring up the entire text. Gmail is seamlessly integrated with Google+. It will notify you of updates, mentions, posts where you have been specifically tagged, Hangout on Air invitations, and, of course, keep a record of your chat history. All in one place, easy to find, accessible via a powerful search engine.
There is one more important component to this that has little to do with Hangouts and their capabilities and a lot to do with search marketing. We are fully into a web where Google’s semantic search is taking hold. Our engagement with others, interactions, and frequency of contact all play an important role. Just as in our real-life interactions with others, the engagement we have with them and the depth and detail of that engagement and interaction mean something. Collectively, they contribute to our professional identity and authority.
Gmail scans these interactions and indexes them. They become part of your personal profile connections (and you of theirs). This also means that your content sharing activity across Google+ has greater chance to surface on personalized search results, even if the interaction and engagement within the Google+ environment is not quite so strong in terms of sharing posts and engaging on conversation threads.
Even Santa Claus, had all marketers written to him and been good all year, could not have delivered anything as good as that. So, now that we have all this, what is the best way to use it?
Obviously, you need to have some basics in place, like defining a unified message to project. Remember, we will be looking at the psychological factors driving Hangout uptake in the next chapter, and we will discuss how you can best handle your audience, target more audience, and deal with “difficult” people in what is essentially a live show.
Much of what we call marketing today focuses around the ability to convincingly tell a narrative in a fragmented way. The Google+ Hangouts allow this to happen in a way that is easier to implement and easier to monitor afterward, which means that the pressure to come up with the kind of narrative in your marketing that does get you eyeballs and does win you “hearts and minds” is now squarely on you.
With that said, let’s go and see what else you need to know after starting a Hangout. As Figure 3.8 shows, your options on the type of Hangout you want to host are quite wide.
Figure 3.8 You can choose whether to have a group chat (called a Hangout Party) or a one-on-one. Clicking on the cog wheel at the top right of the Hangout card brings up the Hangout settings, which give you control over the ability to archive the Hangout history and control the people who take part in it.
You can choose to use the Hangout chat option with a group, for instance. This would allow you to broadcast a specific message to a group of people as large as 100. In a marketing environment, you can segregate your customers into groups that have specific interests or requirements and market directly to them at a much more targeted level.
Depending on what you want to achieve, you can also go on a one-on-one or a very tightly controlled group chat with just a few select people.
There are two things you need to remember about Hangouts on Air and the Hangout chat facility. First, they’re public. Hangout chats do take place in a closed environment where you may not necessarily want the outside world to enter. You do need to remember that there is not a lot of control you can exercise over them. Screengrabs can be taken and even the Gmail text notification (and transcript of a conversation) can be made public if someone decides to share them.
Second, they’re social. Whether you’re interacting with a group or only one other person, there is no denying the fact that this is not a channel where you can sell anything in the traditional sense of word. Hangout interaction is a critical part of branding, establishing your credentials, and helping others have confidence in yourself and what you do. All this is done in a largely social context.
This becomes even more important to keep in mind when you are working with a group. The Hangout chat allows the members of the group to interact with each other in a very social manner. If all this sounds like a loss of the rigid control associated with traditional marketing, it’s because it is. The social element of a Hangout (whether it is a Hangout chat or a Hangout on Air) changes everything. It requires a very human touch and the establishment of trust not only for a brand or a marketer but from a brand or a marketer to their audience.
You realize here, I hope, that with all this functionality at your fingertips, stable platform, and next to zero cost to set up and execute, the real brand building and marketing work happens behind your eyes, inside the space of your mind. You should be thinking about the following:
• The structure of the narrative you are telling your target audience
• The impact that your narrative is having and the way it might get spread
• How this narrative contributes to your brand and how you hope it will affect your sales
Hangouts, for all their functionality and the groundbreaking connectivity they permit, are just another communication tool. Communication without a specific focus is just noise. It achieves little beyond taking time and energy. So before you even begin to think about clicking on a Hangout icon and “getting out there,” you’d better start considering what it is you want to gain from the investment of your time.
There are a couple more things to keep in mind. First, if you have started the Hangout, you will need to have a “beginning, middle, and end.” Do not let it go on for too long because people have busy lives, lose interest quickly, or are drawn away and your entire marketing impact is then lost. Have the right tone and mix of “play” and marketing in mind, and make sure you have ample material to sustain you. I have seen a couple of marketing Hangouts that were poorly planned. They started out really strong, caught my attention, got everyone involved fired up, and then, as the material dried up, people began to drift away and sort of petered out. This kind of thing does little to help your brand awareness, reinforce the positive perception of your image, or help your marketing win you sales.
Depending on whether you are carrying out a Hangout using videoconferencing or will simply use Hangout as a combination of chat, text, pictures, and links, or even a combination of everything, in order to work best for you, you will need to have in place an additional plan of interactivity. This is necessary to help you amplify your marketing signal and better spread the word of what you are doing.
Hangout Choices
You will have by now, I hope, understood just what a powerful marketing tool a Hangout can be. How it can be a crucial part of real-time marketing and how it can be creatively used to boost a brand’s image, generate an online buzz, and create the kind of impetus in your marketing that will help your company reach new customers, foster a closer relationship with existing ones, and create brand evangelists who will amplify your marketing signal for you.
The reason you need to start with your marketing message and end goals lies in the limitations of Hangouts. Although they are unquestionably a powerful marketing tool that, as marketers, we have not seen to date, they also pose some restrictions. If, for instance, you choose to hold a Hangout on Air, it can be attended only if the target audience has a Google+ account. While this is not an insurmountable obstacle it has to be stressed and, in your marketing, you will need to make sure your audience is aware of this otherwise they will feel left out.
This is the classic case of the marketer’s dilemma. Having succeeded in capturing your audience’s attention, you need to now be able to channel it in a manner that respects the audience and still makes your investment of time and effort pay off for you. Failure to adequately explain to your audience what it is they need to do in order to participate only risks alienation.
Although Hangouts on Air require your audience members have a Google+ account in order to participate on the Hangout Event Page, they can be viewed without a Google+ account if they are viewed live on YouTube or viewed live on your website.
The latter is a bit of a big deal. When you set up a Hangout on Air to take part in the future, you essentially set up a Google+ Event Page for it. On that Event Page, on the right hand side there are three specific links provided: the link to the Event Page, so you can advertise it within Google+; the Link to the YouTube Page, where the video will appear live and which can be used in any marketing you put in place towards a non-Google+ audience; and finally, an embed code that can be used on your website to show the video live when the Hangout on Air is on.
Figure 3.9 shows the links.
Figure 3.9 On the Hangout on Air Event Page, click on “Links” and a dialogue box opens up with the three links you need in order to publicize it.
It is worth pointing out that not everyone in your target audience is going to be familiar with the technology and its capabilities. It is important to communicate the fact that they have quite a lot of flexibility:
• They can participate in the Hangout on Air through comments made on the Event page during the Hangout on Air itself. (Participation in real time)
• They can participate in the Hangout on Air through comments made on the Event page after the Hangout on Air has finished. (Asynchronous participation)
• They can participate in the Hangout through comments made on the YouTube page when the Hangout on Air is live. (Participation in real time)
• They can participate in the Hangout through comments made on the YouTube page when the Hangout on Air is over. (Asynchronous participation)
• They can participate in the Hangout on Air on your website when the Hangout is Live through a commenting system, if you have one implemented. (Participation in real time)
• They can participate in the Hangout on Air on your website after the Hangout on Air is over if you have a commenting system implemented. (Asynchronous participation)
Any of these can also be further amplified through social sharing to social networks both in real time and after the Hangout on Air is over.
Rarely has a single event, a Hangout on Air, provided a brand with so many opportunities to market itself. To fully take advantage of the opportunities presented by such a powerful means of marketing you need to do the following:
• Have a clear plan in mind of how you will leverage the Google+ audience and what you expect them to do.
• Clearly understand how you will drive viewing figures to your own website and what you expect or want viewers to do after they get there.
• Work out how you will use the video on YouTube afterward, how you can leverage the traffic YouTube gets to help your brand gain extra exposure, and how you will then capitalize on that.
• Make sure that each video works for you on a cumulative basis. The very last thing you want (or need) is for a prospect to find you through YouTube but then, after viewing the video, decide that your message is out of date and does not apply to them and never again look to find your brand or company.
Again, these considerations show just how important it is to start with the marketing plan first, and to work out all the scenarios and the details before hitting that Hangout button and getting on air to broadcast to the world.
A company or brand that goes through this process of carefully thinking out the contingencies of its message and interaction with its public and the way it interacts also begins to form a better picture of who it interacts with and develop a better “voice” and “character” in its interaction. Both of these go a long way toward capturing audience attention, helping foster customer loyalty, and beginning the journey that will take your potential audience, transform them into loyal customers, and turn them into brand evangelists.
Hangouts, of course, are not only used for brand awareness, real-time marketing, and business promotion. They can also be used for these purposes:
• Education: They can remotely connect students and teachers and asynchronously create a stream that becomes a powerful education tool.
• Teaching: They are a visually rich and resource-rich tool for creating direct teaching tools.
• Customer service initiatives: Just as Dell used them, they can now become a lasting means of helping answer customer queries.
• Product launches: Rarely has there been a better platform for launching products and creating a buzz.
• Demonstrations: They are a perfect tool for showcasing demonstrations of either services or products.
As a matter of fact, the rich-media environment of a Hangout provides opportunities that are limited only by the limits of your imagination as a marketer.
What You Learned in This Chapter
Hangouts are an incredibly powerful tool that, I hope, will start to feature more prominently in your marketing and overall branding efforts. The functionality of the device-unified environment and the ability to integrate photographs, text, and video, and also start video conferencing, provide an incredible opportunity to gain in the digital marketing front. It is the one tool that now appears to be capable of capturing your target audience as they flit across their screens and are lost to marketers using traditional, standalone tools.
Here’s what I hope you learned in this chapter:
• Success in Hangouts starts with real planning in your marketing.
• Hangouts are ideally suited to telling a narrative. The fact that every Hangout on Air can be stored on YouTube and accessed later has to figure prominently in the choices you make regarding content, tone, style, and presentation of what you do. Remember that Hangout Chat also allows your audience to store and retrieve the chat history and any picture sharing both through the Hangout Message Box and Gmail.
• The Hangout experience has to be fully integrated into your digital marketing stream.
• Hangouts and Hangouts on Air are an excellent means of capturing audience attention as they move across screens. As a matter of fact, Hangouts are uniquely suited to doing so. As such, they need to feature centrally in any digital marketing plans.
• Hangouts can be used for a number of purposes, from simply communicative to entertaining, branding, educational, and so on. Do not be limited by what you think they are, but instead experiment on the synthesis of them that can push the envelope of what you do. Allow the content and the activity to evolve and dictate the format.