Periscope and the rise of live streaming

Live streaming isn’t new, but since the launch of Meerkat and then Periscope it has suddenly become the big talking point in social media.

I’ve had the Periscope app for about a week. It is far from perfect, and I’m sure there will be several iterations over the coming months.

Think twice before live streaming

Periscope’s simple point-and-stream interface partly explains why live streaming has suddenly taken off.  However, if we are going to live stream more, we need to be a little more circumspect about when we do so. Particularly as Periscope sends an alert any time someone you follow starts a new live stream.

I was never that bothered about seeing a photo of your meal. I certainly don’t want to watch you eating it.

I haven’t broadcast anything on Periscope yet. Being able to do a thing doesn’t automatically make that thing interesting.

Then there are the ethics of when to live stream, and whether we should be watching. There are times when logic and compassion should override the individual’s desire for a dopamine rush.

The vertical vice

Periscope currently only works in portrait mode. Until recently I felt strongly that shooting vertical video was a heinous act. Our eyes are side by side and we see the world in landscape. TV and film is always widescreen, so our own videos should be too. However, I am softening my stance on this.

Google is our homepage

70% of recent visits to the Bradford Council website started at a search engine, and most of those started at Google.  I wanted to help our web authors think of the user journey starting not on our homepage, but on Google.

To help illustrate how so many user journeys start at Google, I mocked up a quick image for our web authors, imagining that Google actually is our homepage.

Think of the user journey starting at a search engine

For most users, a link on our homepage is not the deciding factor in getting where they want to be. Far more important is well written content that meets our web standards, and preferably on a webpage rather than in a PDF. Such content is likely to be easy to find on a search engine.

Make your own

I made my homepage mock up using Canva. A few people at other councils have asked me if they can adapt my image for their own use. I’m certainly happy to share it, but the only problem is that Canva doesn’t have a ‘share as template’ option. A shared Canva design is a ‘collaborative’ design. So, if you use this shared version of my Canva design, you need to remember that this is a shared file.  Once you have changed it to say what you want, make sure you download it straight away. You might find that if you go back to it the next day, someone else has changed the lettering.

Facebook video – enjoy it while you can

We have all seen organic reach falling on Facebook, but I’ve had remarkable success with Facebook videos recently.

This video of Victorian tunnels in Bradford reached over 50,000 people, being shared 300+ times, within its first five days:

That video didn’t take long to put together. I filmed it on an iPhone and edited it on an iPad. It was online within a couple of hours of me donning a hard hat to enter the tunnels.

To put the 50,000+ reach of that video into some sort of context, Bradford Council’s Facebook page has fewer than 2,000 likes, and other recent posts have an average reach of just a few hundred people. The tunnels video has been by far the most successful Facebook post Bradford Council has ever published.

But even before that freakish success, I had observed a trend, with videos on our Facebook page outperforming other post types:

Recent videos on the @bradfordmdc Facebook page have done far better than other post types. #localgovdigital pic.twitter.com/6P0wxCg56E

— Albert Freeman (@AlbFreeman) January 12, 2015

Another recent video that did well was one announcing the sudden closure of one of our customer service centres due to wind damage. It was a far from brilliant video, but that didn’t matter. It seems that using Facebook video for news items is working well.

Yorkshire LocalGov Camp

I recently went to my first LocalGov Camp, and came away enthused. I had arrived enthused as well to be fair, but that’s not the point.  The point is that my enthusiasm has meant I have somehow talked myself into taking the lead on organising a regional event in Yorkshire – a local LocalGov Camp for local people.

The idea began during a Twitter conversation with Phil Rumens about how LocalGov Digital can reach out to councils who are working with beta websites.  One of Phil’s suggestions was to have a regional LocalGov Digital meet-up, something he is already planning in his own neck of the woods.  I particularly like this thought from Phil about the reasons for holding a localised event:

@AlbFreeman It's about creating formal collaborative partnerships between #localgov where political priorities and local user needs align.

— Phil Rumens (@PhilRumens) July 4, 2014

Are you local?

I already have enough people interested (after the above Twitter conversation) to feel sure that a Yorkshire LocalGov Camp is good idea, and we are probably looking at late autumn.   Because of the timing, one thing we might choose to discuss is winter weather.  Maybe we might want to work towards coordinated gritting communications, like they do with #wmgrit in the West Midlands.

I don’t want to plant too many ideas in your mind, as if you are interested in attending, I want your thoughts to be unhindered by my own suggestions – start with a blank canvas, and think about what you think we could achieve.

Vine and Instagram videos in local government

I had wanted to experiment with Vine and Instagram videos for a while. I wanted to see if they could be an effective way of engaging people with local government and promoting council services. The need to promote the Bradford Council app was an ideal time to try.

I chose to highlight just one feature of the app – the alert which reminds people of their bin collections. It only takes a few seconds to say how the app can help people remember their bin day, so short form videos seemed a good option. Here are our two creations, first on Instagram and then on Vine:

http://instagram.com/p/on-QAtBKix/

Although Bradford Council doesn’t currently have many followers on Vine or Instagram, my hope is that people will appreciate these videos and will share them via Twitter and Facebook respectively, where we have a greater chance of reaching our customers.

Videos to help with Council benefits

Customers who receive Bradford Council benefits often contact us with questions about notification letters. As well as FAQs (which included both text and images), this year we have also made two videos.

These videos replicate, as far as possible, the experience of a customer service advisor talking through a benefit notification.

I wrote the scripts together with face-to-face staff, who knew the types of queries they got and how best to answer them. While writing the scripts, a colleague showed me an online video bill for her digital TV subscription. This both confirmed that we were onto a good idea, and also amazed me.