"Dumb? The dumbest."
I am not a good businessman (hello BeachGrit!) and am genuinely confused by the machinations of the corporate world. Like, I remember driving through downtown Los Angeles as a younger man, looking up at all the tall buildings and wondering what all those workers were doing. Thousands upon thousands of workers punching on their computers and reporting to various vice-presidents but what were the workers punching and why so many of them and how did anything get done?
My mind couldn’t, and still can’t, fathom organizational hierarchy charts etc. but over the years I’ve picked up some tenants that appear to make businesses hum and one of the most important seems to be obfuscation. Just blurring the heck out of basic truths. Spin etc.
Well, our World Surf League has done a wonderful job of a muddled messaging from its very inception (hello Herr Paul Speaker!) and continues to throw pointless smoke. The failed Facebook rollout is prime example and, again I’m not a businessman, but what if instead of stretching the truth (hello “concurrent viewing numbers!) the League just came clean and explained how/why it didn’t work in plain language to its most ardent fans?
Would a little straight talk not cheer you up?
Thankfully, there are wonderful people in similar fields and here we have the great friend to explain, in plain language, our future. And without further ado:
The team I work for were very early adopters of this technology and did a deal with Facebook and a streaming video company (Facebook does not have the capability to live stream multi cam broadcast) to deliver weekly content in early 2016.
What we have found from doing the stream for 3 years is that despite Facebook claiming they do not “quash” or “algo” live video content, they do exactly that by preventing the video from appearing in your news feed.
This means that your streams only go out to a fraction of your audience.
In our case, we might get 200 live views reaching a total of 8,000 viewers, similar ratios to what the WSL gets for events so tells me they are on the same set up. It is worth pointing out there is NO regional coding. This is great except that we have 200,000 likes, so the engagement is less than 10% of the customer base and the only way to increase this is to pay money to Facebook. When we remind them that we did a deal with them their claim is that the “natural” setting of live video cannot be altered without a specific boost campaign.
This means that any live stream, unless boosted after the fact, (which isn’t strictly live event anymore) only ever goes out to a fraction of your engaged audience. So what the WSL have done is sign up to a service which actively prevents its customers from viewing the product.
Dumb? The dumbest. And they are only finding this out now because the numbers are way lower than what they would have predicted.
Choo-choo! Make way for the straight talk express!