Categories: Articles

Your Live Brand Is Alive

How live is your brand?

About one year, I published an article titled, Your Streaming Live Brand. As smartphones got smarter and mobile data speeds made streaming as seamless as texting, it became apparent that brands are going to quickly need to have a “live brand strategy.” Last year, everyone was excited about Meerkat and Periscope (some still are). Regardless of how those platforms are performing, there is no doubt that Snapchat is growing by leaps and bounds. With that, Facebook is making big, brash and important bets in the live video space.

This is going to be a huge challenge for brands.

Here’s what we know: Facebook is amping up many live video features. Instagram (which Facebook owns) now offers sixty second video clips. Both Facebook and Instagram are controlled by their proprietary algorithms. Because Facebook wants live video to happen (in a big way), they have already tweaked the news feed to deliver videos (and, more importantly, live ones) at the top of their user’s news feeds. So, in the old days, as brands would use popular keywords to game the search engines, now brands must use live video if they want some kind of organic placement at the top of the news feed (without paying for it).

Facebook is getting even more serious about live video.

Many more features and functionality are coming to Facebook’s video service. Almost all of them are related to live video. Facebook is sending us (all) a very serious message about where they are putting their energy, and how our traditional typed status updates are much more likely to become live video messages. Yesterday, Buzzfeed published a very in-depth article titled, Why Facebook And Mark Zuckerberg Went All In On Live Video. It’s a must-read. With that, here’s the question: how ready is your brand for live?

A more elegant question about Facebook and live video: does your brand have what it takes to be relevant in a world of live videos on Facebook?

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.