Member Article

The Periscope Pool

First off a big pat on the back for Drummond Central, the Jesmond-based Marketing Agency who showed the world that the North East is alive and kicking in the world of marketing.

Their Periscope of the Drummond Pool really showed the power of Social Media and the exploitation of the mundane if done well. We have been banging on to clients about the power of Periscope for several months now, (see our September 2015 blog post) but it does take a catalystic moment like the Pool to bring the message home to the masses.

There will be the inevitable scramble to get on board now with a whole host of weird and quirky ideas being floated (and broadcast), but much of the ongoing success of campaigns will be determined by a strategic deployment of the supporting assets available to make the message stick and hopefully viralise.

Cutting edge ideas are great and once in a while - like the ‘Drummond Pool’ and ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ - they become internet hits. Sadly these are few and far between and require elements of luck combined with inspiration and most importantly ACTION.

If the guys at Drummond had been content to amuse themselves by watching the struggles of the public negotiating the waters of Newcastle it would just have been another moment in time noticed by a few but acted on by none.

The beauty of Periscope that it costs nothing to broadcast to the world and opens up a whole new ball game for marketers to exploit. But it has to be done well so that it adds value to the viewer; finding and creating genuinely valuable content is not an easy task. And of course you have to promote it - the likelihood of stumbling across a viral ‘Pool’ is very limited and so you must deploy specific ways to get traction for your content.

Then you have to present it.

Presenting a video is hard enough for most folks, but when you don’t have the benefit of the safety net of post-recording edits as you do with video, a live broadcast is daunting. There is a derivation of the ‘What happens in Vegas’ saying that applies to the internet that can come back to haunt individuals for a long time - ‘What happens on the internet, stays on the internet.’ Anything you say on a live broadcast can and will come back to haunt you if your views are seen as any way contra popular view.

A Periscope lasts for 24 hours, BUT it can be recorded and used in perpetua. Content can be removed from the Web but it is an awfully convoluted process that may not be successful. So what you say and do in your broadcasts must be as squeakily sanitised as possible and reflect your views clearly, so a random broadcast can be fraught with danger. Filming the general public can also be viewed as an invasion of privacy but the ‘Pool’ showed folks not easily identifiable and probably escaped any comeback. (plus the folks up here are usually game for a laugh anyway!).

So before you all start rushing out with your smartphones and broadcasting, take a moment to define your objectives and then plan before you execute your masterpiece.

And take advice from those immersed in the industry, it will save you time, money and probably a lot of embarrassment.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Glass Frog .