How to Make Your Live Streams and Webinars More Engaging

Live streaming is becoming more and more popular for both creators and brands today. The ability to not only deploy video content to engage an audience, but do it live, in real-time, tears down almost all the barriers social networks present to get to and engage an audience. 

The social network sites prioritize live video content over anything else in their algorithms. They even force feed pop-up notifications on you to tell you when someone you’re following is live while you’re there, hoping you’ll come over and watch. It makes the social network experience stickier. You stay longer. You’re more engaged. Your more likely, then, to satisfy the site’s need to present better user statistics which means they can sell more ads. They can also present more ads to you the longer you’re on the site.  

According to Statista in 2020 consumers spent 482.5 billion hours on live streaming apps. Live streaming videos reach almost 30% of all consumers worldwide. Consumers are expressing interest in live shopping, too. As of 2021, 14 percent of U.S. consumers said they are interested in live shopping experiences on social networks. TikTok and youTube are already deep into live commerce features. Amazon Live is turning the register regularly for many creators. 

I even used it as a test to sell copies of my book. It worked to a degree. I didn’t have an established audience on Amazon to work with, but every time I went live, a few copies sold. That’s not bad in an uber-competitive and oversaturated publishing market.

But live streams aren’t really engaging for the viewer. It’s basically the home shopping network online. Until now. 

Lux Narayan is the founder and CEO of StreamAlive. It’s a platform that uses a combination of interactive questions and content devised by the live stream host and AI technology to ensure everyone in the audience is represented in the live engagement of a stream. For example, the hosts asks where everyone is watching from, people just drop a city name, state or country in the comments and a live map dynamically plots all the watchers for all to see. 

There are many more applications of it, of course. Since it’s something that can help both creators and brands improve their live stream content, thus commerce output on the other end, I thought it would be good to have Lux on to tell us all about it.

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

Scroll Down for a Show Transcript!

The Winfluence theme music is “One More Look” featuring Jacquire King and Stephan Sharp by The K Club found on Facebook Sound Collection.

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Lux Narayan Transcript

[00:00:00] Jason: Do you want Instagrammers or TikTokers to post about your brand? Or do you actually wanna engage creators who influence their audience to buy your product? If you’re in the ladder of those two, you’ve come to the right place. Welcome to Winfluence, The Influence Marketing Podcast.

Hello again friends. Thanks for tuning into Winfluence, The Influence Marketing Podcast. Live streaming is becoming more and more popular for both creators and brands today. The ability to not only deploy video content to engage in audience, but do it live in real time, tears down almost all the barriers social networks present to get to and engage an audience.

The social network sites prioritize live video content over anything else in their algorithms. They even force feed pop-up notifications on you to tell you when someone you’re following is live. While you’re there, they hope you’ll come over and watch.

It makes the social network experience stickier. You stay longer, you’re more engaged, you’re more likely then to satisfy the site’s need to present better user statistics, which means they can sell more ads. They can also present more ads to you the longer you’re on the site. 

According to Statista, in 2020, consumers spent 48 to 482.5 billion hours on live streaming apps. Live streaming videos reach almost 30% of all consumers worldwide. Consumers are expressing interest in live shopping too. As of 2021, 14% of US consumers said they’re interested in live shopping experiences on social networks. 

TikTok and YouTube are already deep into live commerce features. Amazon Live is already turning the register regularly for many creators and brands. I even used it to test sell copies of my book. It works to a degree. I didn’t have an established audience on Amazon to work with so every time I went live, not very many copies sold, but if you did, and that’s not bad for an uber competitive and oversaturated publishing market. But live streams aren’t really engaging for the viewer, it’s basically the home shopping network online, until now.

Lux Narayan is the founder and CEO of StreamAlive. It’s a platform that uses a combination of interactive questions and content devised by the livestream host, so you and AI technology from the software to ensure everyone in the audience is represented in the live engagement of a stream.

For example, the host will ask where everyone is watching. So people drop a city name or a state or a country even in the comments and a live map dynamically plots the place where everybody’s dialing in from for all the watchers to see. There are many more applications of it, of course, since it’s something that can help both creators and brands improve their livestream content, thus commerce output on the other end. I thought it’d be good to have looks on to tell us about the product he’s coming up on Winfluence.

Speaking of AI, let me tell you about CIPIO.ai. You might know I recently joined the company as Executive Vice President for marketing. CIPIO.ai is now the presenting sponsor of Winfluence. CIPIO.ai is a community commerce marketing platform that has a family of applications that help you drive commerce through your own community. One of those taps into a big theme for 2023 for brands and creators, and that is efficiency. 

Whether you’re a brand or a creator, you probably spend a lot of time writing and rewriting captions for social media content. You also have to make sure that content will perform well by keeping up with the trends across social media, right?

Our gift to you during the holiday and New Year’s season is a solution called Vibe Check. It is our community generative AI application. Think of it as an AI content generator with an extra brain for optimizing social media posts and predicting success. 

Tell Vibe check the idea of your post or even campaign. Give it a call to action, the tone of voice you prefer, and the length of word count. With the push of a button, you have a library of smart content recommendations with predictive analysis of how the post will perform.

Vibe Check’s powerful AI engine digs into the big data of over 140 million social media users, posts, images and videos. It mines that data for deep learning insights to give you not just content, but content that will perform. That makes it very different from other AI content generators out there. 

Now, I’m not a fan of automating content creation, but that’s not the point. Vibe Check produces a ton of great content to save you writing. You still need to review and edit. Make sure it’s perfect, make sure it’s in your right, tone of voice and all that. But it gets you 90% of the way there, which saves you a ton of time. 

CIPIO.ai wants to give you that power as a New Year’s gift. Sign up for a two week free trial. No credit card is required. Go to jasonfalls.com/vibecheck and start creating all the captions and content you need with the click of a button. It’s free for two weeks. Just see if you like it. I’m betting you will. Jasonfalls.com/vibecheck Seriously, folks, this will change the game. If you write a lot or have a lot of clients you need to write for, if you’re at an agency, jasonfalls.com/vibecheck, I promise it will be worth the time to give it. 

Today we’re gonna tell you how to make your live streams more engaging for your audience and more effective at moving the needle for you and your clients. Lux Narayan from StreamAlive is next on Winfluence

 Lux, it’s great to have you here. I can’t wait to dive into, StreamAlive. I’m getting tongue-tied already. So excited talking about this stuff. I wanna get into that a little bit here, so the audience can know more about how they can make their live stream content come to life. But before we go there, I wanna ask you about some things not coming to life. You have a longtime obsession, I think with reading obituaries. I have to ask what’s up with that?

[00:06:11] Lux: First of all, thanks, Jason for having me. This is a pleasure. I followed your work even from our previous company on metric in the social media space so, it was good to reconnect with you a few months ago and it’s good to be here and in, today’s conversation. So thank you again.

Obituaries. Wow. Okay. You certainly did your homework on that one. You know, it’s one of those things that kind of sometimes sticks with you from when you were a kid. So I remember reading this, expression. I can’t recall exactly where it was, but it been something like this, if you wanna learn about man’s failures, read a newspaper from the first page on, because that’s where it typically talks about war and strife and all the things that are, you know screwed up and going wrong with the world things like that.

Unfortunately they take the position of prominence on the first page. And this was, bear in mind, a time when newspapers used to just be one or two sections. They wouldn’t be 20 sections, like they are right now. 

It went down to say that if you wanna learn about, you know mankind’s achievements, read the paper from the last page on, because that’s typically where they talk about the obituaries and lives well led and all of that.

So you know like some of those things that stick with you from childhood, struck a chord with me and I found myself reading the obituaries more and more across different countries that I traveled to.

So I’ve lived in the Middle East and Dubai. I’ve lived in India quite a bit, and now in the States for about a decade or so. And in each of those places I would subscribe to the newspaper. Very old , get the physical newspaper thrown into the driveway and read it from the back page on. It almost sounds morbid like who died today and what can you learn from that, more importantly, right? 

Fascinating stories and then, kind of saw a parallel between that and what we did in my previous company on metric, where we’d look at history to get lessons for the future and I just found that’s exactly what we were doing with obituaries also, looking at history, lives well led to learn lessons about, living better lives in the future.

And so when I was approached for the possibility of a Ted Talk when I was around metric, after a lot of meandering through various options, this kind of made a lot of sense because it’s something I continue to read. I have a corner here with a huge pile of obituaries that I’ve collected over the last three months that I need to read in more detail. It’s a little morbid when I explain it to people when they come home, but yes been a fascination and I absolutely love it.

[00:08:30] Jason: I love that take on it because I think if you read the newspaper from front to back, you could consider that morbid too. Just the way that the media covers, the news items. There’s, war and famine and all the bad things that happen are up front as well. So I don’t know.

You get to the middle of the paper where the sports are and maybe there’s a little bit of positive in there, but other than depressing to read. That’s fantastic way to look at it. It’s a great place to go for life lessons. Certainly a good thought for those out there.

I have always enjoyed, the obituaries that kind of go viral because the person or the loved one writes them in a very humorous tone. Those stand out to me and are very memorable. I’m thinking I might write my own one day and make my kids read that out loud at my funeral. So, just to make sure everybody has a smile on their face remembers that.

Let’s steer things back to the living here. On the, actually the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I think, in a lot of ways for many is that you’ve also tried your hand at standup comedy too, right? Tell me more about that.

[00:09:29] Lux: I think, if you ask my wife, she’ll tell you that part of an extended midlife crisis. But yeah, I’ve been a fan of comedy as I think a lot of us are. And, I thought I’d leverage my proximity to New York City to explore what the city has to offer. 

So a few years ago I signed up for improv comedy. You’ve probably seen that. Sure. Whose line is it anyway? 

[00:09:51] Jason: Yup. 

[00:09:52] Lux: And all of those. So being a longtime fan of that. I saw some more Improv comedy shows over here and said, okay, that sounds fantastic. And I actually signed up for a six week class. Absolutely loved it. 

We had a show at the end of it. And the nice takeaway from that was a lot of lessons that actually went into the workplace in terms of that central philosophy of yes and things like that. At that point I just said, okay, there’s a lot to learn from comedy even if the original intent was not to seek lessons from it, the original intent was just to have fun, but there was a lot of other stuff.

And Improv I would argue it’s relatively a little easier because you’ve got a bunch of people you’re doing it with. It’s in the moment. It goes with the flow and you’re handing each other as long as you stick to some rules, you can create comedy collectively. It’s beautiful. 

Standup comedy was tougher scarier because it’s like rehearse, spontaneity how they describe it. You cannot rehearse it so well that you can, someone wakes you in the middle of their sleep. Tell you’re set, but you’re gonna say it with those pauses with everything. And it’s something that scared me still does because, standing in front of an audience with whom, often you don’t share a cultural background or you don’t have a whole bunch of shared premises, but at the same time, the ability to make them laugh, is I think a very powerful thing and it’s a very human thing. 

So, I’ve always been a student wanted to try my hand, signed up for a class here as well. End of it, collected the guts to perform at the Comedy Cellar and do a five minute set. It was the scariest thing I did, but probably the most fun thing I did.

My kids, they’re adults now. They still don’t disown me for having, pulled them into that set and making them sit in the audience and clap and under the threat of not getting food afterwards. But it worked out beautifully and again, there I got a whole bunch of benefits I never counted on. I just think I became a lot more observational after that.

I would go into airports after that and stop looking at my phone or my iPad. I would actually keep it down and look around for material. It just makes you a little more alert and alive to life around you. So I think there are a lot of ancillary benefits that come from that too. 

But yeah, longtime fan and 2023 resolution is to get back to it and write a couple of new sets.

[00:11:53] Jason: That’s great. Let me know, cause I’m a huge standup comedy fan, have been for years. I do some public speaking, so I try to work humor into what I do. I don’t consider myself a comedian, but I try to be funny and make people laugh, when I’m on stage.

And so I’ve always wanted to try and open mic night. One of these days I probably will, throw up my hands and do it. But I’ve just never really had the time or the confidence, quite frankly. But, one of these days I will, but I’d love to come see you. That’d be fantastic.

I actually had a experience recently where there’s a touring comedian, right now named Colin Chamberlain his dad, John, is one of the podcasters on the marketing podcast network and a friend of mine for several years.

And I just happened to be in New York when Colin was doing Carolines on broadway. And I just bought a ticket. It happened to be that John drove in from Pittsburgh to see Colin play Carolines. So we got to sit in the front row and see Colin, play. So that was a fun evening. Got to meet all the comedians afterwards and all that kind of stuff.

So I, huge standup comedy fan. So would love, come to come see and support you and I would definitely clap even if you don’t feed me afterwards. 

[00:12:54] Lux: Thank you. And we should catch a show together next time you’re here in New York. I’d love to go for a one together as well. 

[00:12:58] Jason: Yeah, that’d be great. Every comedian that ever talked to after I’ve been in the audience is can you tour with me? Because I just belly laugh and just participate. I get into the moment, I really enjoy it and support the performers on stage, cause I know it’s scary and intimidating and having a bad crowd is awful. So I try to make it lively. So it’s fun, but.

[00:13:19] Lux: Just a side note on that. I’m sure I wouldn’t be the only person who’s surprised on hearing that you’re scared of doing standup comedy, because I’ve seen you on stage in some of the social things in my previous life and, you used to speak on some of the events and stuff. I’ve seen you weave in humor and I think your personality naturally lends itself to it.

So very shocked and surprised, but look forward to seeing you do comedy as well.

[00:13:38] Jason: Well I appreciate you saying that. I think when I’m on stage talking about marketing, I’m confident in what I have to say. And when I’m on stage doing comedy, the fear that I have is that, I don’t necessarily have anything to say that anyone’s gonna care about, right? So they’re not there to hear me share my business wisdom, if you will, or my experience.

They’re there for me to make them laugh and I don’t make them laugh. That fear of failure is just like a big shadow over me, but one of these days I’ll get through it and get around it. I’m certainly comfortable in front of an audience. I’ve probably got about 80% of the battle won because I know how to get up in front of people and talk, and I’m perfectly comfortable doing that.

Do that here, all the time but it’s just the expectation of make me laugh, funny boy, right? That bothers me for some reason. But anyway, I gotta get to the real reason why I wanted to have you on the show or we could go down this rabbit hole for hours and then the audience didn’t come here for that. So let’s turn it back to why you’re here. 

You are the CEO and co-founder of StreamAlive, which is an aptly named startup software tool that enables live streamers to bring their whole audience kind of into the experience of live streaming. Give us the quick overview on what StreamAlive is.

[00:14:45] Lux: So StreamAlive is an audience engagement platform, and it’s exactly what you described. The idea is, you have an audience in a live session, which could be on Zoom, on Microsoft teams, on YouTube live, it could be in-person.

We are all getting back to in-person with a vengeance almost, it feels like nowadays it could be in-person. Too many of these one to many conversations are monologues. We are trying to make them dialogues, right? And the underlying thought was, it was about, 38 years ago, there are gentleman called Robert Gaskins invented something called PowerPoint.

And ever since then, for the last 38 years, we are still having one way conversations with an audience. We are like I’m gonna talk, I’m gonna talk, I’m gonna talk. We just wanna change that to talk, listen, talk, listen, talk, talk, listen. So how can we make it a two-way thing between a presenter and an audience and use technology to literally give the audience a collective voice, so it is a conversation.

[00:15:41] Jason: Awesome. I’ve done a fair amount of live streams in my time and it’s difficult to make sure everyone watching feels engaged because again, as you said, we’re in that one way, communications mode when we’re presenting. It’s hard as the host to call out everyone who comments. 

Plus, when you’re calling out everybody who comments, it makes the flow of the program slow. It slows everything down. It’s boring cause I don’t care about all the 10 other people you’re calling out. I care about me. So kudos for finding a way to engage the audience more. Give us a couple of examples of how the live streamers say you or I are doing a live stream right now. How could we use the platform to draw engagement out of that audience? What are some examples for us?

[00:16:23] Lux: Sure. You hit the nail on its head when you said you can’t call out each person individually because imagine a hundred people in an audience and let’s say you asked this classic icebreaker question that I’ve heard on literally every single Zoom webinar that I’ve been to, hey, where’s everyone joining us from? 

And then there’s a beautiful pattern that emerges, okay, let’s pretend you have a hundred people in the room. 50 people are skeptical saying, who cares where I’m joining from? You’re not gonna acknowledge it anyway. I’m not gonna type my answer.

And And there are 50 people who are actually enthusiastic and say, hi from New York and hi from Tennessee and hi from here, and I’m in Cairo, and so on and so forth. Right? And among those 50 people, after that, the presenter then eyeballs, the answers, calls out three or four people and says, hey, we’ve got, X, Y, Z from London. We’ve got someone joining us all the way from Sydney, Australia as the middle of the night for you, and then ignores the remaining 48 people who so painstaking the answer that question.

That is not normal in human conversation, right? You would not ask a person a question and ignore them, and then that became the genesis for what we do. So in this instance, you still cannot expect the presenter to call out 47 other cities because then the presenter would sound like a geography teacher.

So, that’s a classic example of where we use StreamAlive. Where StreamAlive is listening to the chat. In the Zoom case, it’s literally like a bot that’s reading the chat along with any, every other participant.

Reading it in real time and within less than a hundred milliseconds, plotting those locations because there’s always context to people’s answers. When you ask people really joining from, they’re not gonna say pizza or a bagel or something like that. They’re gonna talk about a city, right? 

So at that point, StreamAlive was listening for a location. It’s filtering out all the noise and saying, okay, is this a location? Is this part of the stream of location? Taking all those locations, mapping them on a web application at the presenter side. So the presenter might have Google Slides happening on one tab. On the next tab, they have StreamAlive, or they’ve even better still imported their entire presentation into StreamAlive and presenting it, one after the other. Done two slides, and now they’ve asked people this question.

And StreamAlive is plotting all those locations. It’s plotting London and Cairo and Tennessee and New York and everything in real time. World map is popping like a Christmas tree and it’s lit up in all its splendor and colors, and the person is, literally looking at it, giving an overlay in terms of a commentary.

And something powerful happens at that point, the 50 people who otherwise would not have answered a question, suddenly that person sitting in California almost feels obligated because California is looking very naked with zero pins. He almost feels it’s this karmic duty to say that he’s joining from Los Angeles and does.

so So people participate when they know they’re gonna be acknowledged, it’s very simple. If you’re not gonna be acknowledged, I’m not gonna be participate. So you also see that the participation and engagement rates drive of simply by visually acknowledging the audience. So that’s one example where we take real time inputs to plot out a map as a classic icebreaker question.

Some of the other ones are open-ended questions like Word Clouds. Where you’d ask people like, in one or two words, what do you hope to accomplish at the end of today’s session on public speaking? And they say, confidence and, projection and things like that, body language and things.

And just imagine 50 people typing those answers and one or two answers becoming big in real time through a word cloud. Or a poll, too many pools are boring. Imagine you had four options that asked existential question. Pizza or sandwiches or bagels or whatever.

And then you type 1, 2, 3, 4, and the poles literally dance against each other. So, we are emphasizing a whole library of visual interactions, so to speak. That are the equivalent of what we’ve always done since time in Memorial where you say, raise your hands if you agree with me, and you get to eyeball the audience and say, 75%, raise your hands.

What can you translate that, raise your hands into now that you’ve got chat and you can visualize it and give the audience a collective kind of a voice.

[00:20:06] Jason: Yeah. And I think the important part for the end user to understand here, or the, creator who’s trying to, build something for viewer of the livestream, is that you’re taking a step out of what people have done in the past, to create that engagement because that user experience is frictionless. In that all they do is chat. 

They come, they jump in the chat of whatever the tool is and say the city they’re from or answer the poll question. They don’t have to go to a QR code to another website to input something somewhere else that brings the technology in. 

I want to dig a bit more into both the live streaming and the technology behind what powers what you’re doing. But I wanna do that after a quick break. We’re talking to Lux Narayan from StreamAlive. If you’re a live streamer or want to be, stick around after the break and we’ll break down how this all works. Don’t go away.

 Welcome back to Winfluence. We’re talking to Lux Narayan from StreamAlive. His platform helps livestream creators, brands, anyone who is live streaming, draw engagement out of the viewers by having them comment to answer questions, then turns those comments into dynamic on screen experiences like a map that plots where everyone is watching from word clouds of answers. Lux was telling us about those examples before the break.

Now Lux the user experience for the viewer is the critical friction point you’ve solved, here. People are just answering questions in the comments of whatever, live streaming application or, Zoom or whatever they’re in StreamAlive is using the comments to fuel the data for these visualizations. I suspect there’s a fair amount of artificial intelligence involved here, am right?

[00:21:48] Lux: There is. There is. What you just said in terms of making it easy for the users. We like to call it frictionless inclusivity. So our objective to move audiences from 95% ignored to 95% engaged. You can never get a hundred percent, but if you get a 95%, that’s good enough.

And you want inclusivity and you wanna make it frictionless because you could ask a person to participate by saying, go to this website, go here, do all of these things, do this whole bunch of somersault and browser gymnastics just to tell me what you have for breakfast. And most people don’t respond, not unsurprisingly, because it’s so complicated.

So the big thing we’ve done here is there is a technical challenge in terms of integrating the product with each and every one of the platforms. Our philosophy is very simple. We will not ask people to go to a product. We will bring the product to the people.

So if you’re in a Zoom room and someone presenting a Zoom webinar is a live streamer in, our book. For that person, we will integrate StreamAlive with Zoom itself, someone doing an all hands or a town hall with 3000 employees using Microsoft teams is a live streaming CEO who’s streaming to his or her employees, and we will bring StreamAlive into Microsoft Teams.

Someone running a game on YouTube or teaching you how to speak better English through the YouTube channel and 2 million subscribers, is a live streamer in the most classic sense of the word. And over there will allow the audience to participate through the YouTube live chat itself. 

So, the first part is a technical part in terms of integrating it and making it frictionless for the audience. They just continue to behave as they always have type in the chat. They don’t know how to go anywhere else. 

The second part is where intelligence comes in, where at a basic level, for example, when you’re running a map, interaction, the application is intelligent enough to know that when you say hi from NYC, it ignores the hi and the from and takes the NYC and plots New York City over there.

So there is a interaction aware context to what is reading from the chat when it’s looking at the polls and you’ve given four options, is looking out for those four words and 1, 2, 3, 4, as the only options that it. 

It has a profanity filter that is automatically filtering out, usual curse words in English, Spanish, and a couple of Indian languages as well. And you’re constantly expanding that. Probably the most challenging part of the platform because you can get very creative with curse words, but that aside right? Or you’d be surprised. You have people saying, what if I tried this variant? And guess what? Yes, it breaks. You can…

[00:24:10] Jason: There’s a 13 year old in all of us out there. I think probably trying that. 

[00:24:16] Lux: You know, we see the platform as having four parts to it, right? It helps you plan engagement, which is really creating a runoff show saying, I’m gonna present these slides and ask these interactions and sandwich them in this form and fashion. There is something called, Track Engagement, which is where a lot of intelligence comes in as well.

 StreamAlive is almost like your proverbial fly on the wall. And is there only a meeting from beginning to end if you choose to allow it and that allows us to do some amazing things. So for example, there’s a layer of intelligence that’s reading the chat and looking through it and with about 90% accuracy saying, oh, that thing that Jason just asked sounds like a question because Jason said, is this session being recorded?

And even though Jason didn’t put a question mark at the end of it, like his grammar teacher taught him too, it does sound like a question and I’m gonna park that in my questions box, something we call quick questions.

So let’s assume you had a very active thing with a hundred participants and 500 comments, and 30 of those things were actually legit questions.

StreamAlive will probably pick out about 27 of those accurately put them in a different silo. So at any point you could click on the quick questions, box, and it will show you all the questions that you had till that point in time. 

Now this is the first cut of tracking and giving inferences. There are a lot of other things you can do with that. Imagine, a session where you tell people, hey, we’d love to know more about you. Put your personal website or your Twitter handle, and then creating a gallery after that.

Or saying, tell us your favorite podcasts and which ones you like and then creating a library that can be a Spotify link or something of all of it, or a playlist of songs that, the cohort of classes likes to listen. 

There’s so much you can do collectively as a group when you give context saying, I’m expecting a podcast link, I’m expecting an Amazon book reference, I’m expecting a website. So there’s a lot of other intelligence that you’re gonna layer onto over here just to derive collective meaning and context from conversation.

So that’s really the track engagement part of it, increases what we talked about in terms of, map and the polls and all of those where there’s a layer of intelligence that’s expecting a certain kind of response and looking out for that. 

And finally there’s a whole analytics layer that post facto tells you, here’s how awesome your last live stream was and what worked and what didn’t, so you can do more of what worked and less of what didn’t.

[00:26:28] Jason: That’s fantastic. I’m glad you pointed out very specific examples because the reason I asked the question about AI is I still get a lot of questions around artificial intelligence and what it really means for brands, creators, for influence. 

And when you throw the word artificial in there, I think it rubs some social media people and more importantly, some consumers the wrong way. They suddenly think they’re being used or manipulated, they’re talking to a computer.

Really, it’s just advanced technology that makes the experience better in this case. And so I love the way you’re using it. So, you’re making the live stream experience better for the user, certainly better outcomes for the live streamer too, that makes for a better stream.

What are the reasons, what are the indicators that told you that this was necessary? I see a lot more people doing live streams, but you know what’s the growth projection or the upside for live streaming here? Is this really something that’s gonna continue to grow.

[00:27:20] Lux: I think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg as far as things are concerned. It’s not a pandemic phenomenon either because the kind of distribution and reach you get, with just putting yourself virtually out there.

And take this podcast for example, right? I’ve listened to you on stage, like I said before but there’s a limit to how many people can listen to you on stage, but there’s no limit to how many people listen to this podcast, right?

It’s exactly the same logic. When David Pell runs a writer passage cohort based class with 300 students, those students are across 12 different time zones. Which can never happen in the physical world. 

Reminding back to the impetus for this, it’s a couple of things. We all talk about this founder market fit and I think personally I found the founder market fit with StreamAlive in a very interesting way.

I’ve been a startup founder for many years now. This is my third startup, and prior to that I had a career in advertising, media and entertainment. But the common thread across all of these different hats I’ve personally worn is that all through my life, I’ve been presenting for a living, I’ve been presenting to clients to buy our advertising services. I’ve been presenting to investors to invest in us. I’ve been presenting to prospective employees to join us. I’ve been presenting to clients to sign up with us. I’ve been presenting for a living all my life. So I think point of all those presentations being one way, more often than not is very personally resonant. It echoed from that perspective. 

Secondly after the previous company that I was running a company called Unmetric got acquired in the end of 2019. I took a break in 2020. Used that time to indulge in another personal passion, which was this book, which had been in my head for a very long time and it’s called Name Place Animal Thing.

And the reason I shamelessly plug in the book in this conversation is because I binged on a bunch of classes on how to write a book, edit a book, market a book, and get Amazon to bless your book. And these were half a dozen different courses, delivered over 56 live streams on Facebook Live, YouTube, live Zoom meetings, Zoom webinars, and Google Meet.

So over a compressed period of three months, I got to see a lot of interesting patterns in live streams where we had the Amazon marketing class with 1,100 students and the chat would fly by faster than the…

[00:29:30] Jason: Oh yeah.

[00:29:30] Lux: Eye can see. You have no clue what is happening. The presenter has absolutely no clue what’s happening. It’s mayhem in a good way. And then you have the 10 person audience in this very boutique class, on B2B podcasting or something. 

And, which I think should have had a lot more people actually attending it as a fantastic class, but they had 10 people in the presenter wishes that the chat would fly by faster than the, eye can see because ,he or she would ask a question and people wouldn’t answer because either they’re too shy or too cool for answering there right, to be put on the spotlight. 

And then you have a healthy middle of maybe a hundred people or something like that, or 50 people attending a class and, the situation we talked about earlier where they would say where are you joining us from? And then proceed to ignore 98% of the respondents. 

So those pain points where, it was consistently one way or it was very complicated for the audience to participate, or more often than not, it was a one hour monologue and people were tuning out within about 10 minutes because those old rules of public speaking still apply, right?

Ask your audience a question every five minutes. Interact with them every 10 minutes or so. The use case for StreamAlive literally presented itself over those 56 different live streams. And then, got our old team together from, the founding team around Unmetric. 

We riffed around a few things solved us technically feasible. There were a few technical challenges to be started and once we had our first proof of concept on YouTube live, we said, okay, let’s figure out how to build this for other platforms. And we are sure it can be built and we are just expanding the platform, this after.

[00:30:59] Jason: That’s great. For the content creators out there, especially those of you who are expanding into and experimenting with Amazon Live or other mechanisms where you’re trying to sell products and drive return for the brands you work with, StreamAlive is certainly a method to fuel better results for you and certainly for you brands out there moving into this space, it just makes the experience better. So Lux, where can people see the product learn more and maybe.

[00:31:23] Lux: Streamalive.com has everything you need, including a free signup. So we have, and we’ll continue to always have a free plan. We want everyone to change the way we communicate as a species. And we think important to have a free plan out there so people can experience it, try it out.

In fact, the free plan all the features that all the plans have. It’s just if you have larger audiences, you move to higher ones. But the StreamAlive website also has a bunch of use cases. So we talk about how. Teachers, trainers, sellers, entertainers, town halls, all hands. All of them are different and how they use StreamAlive, all of those are brought to life on the website as well with examples.

But yeah, streamalive.com is probably the best place to see examples, sign up for a trial stay in touch with what we do.

[00:32:08] Jason: Awesome. We’ll have links to the site and where you can find Lux on the interwebs and the show notes at jasonfalls.com. Lux, thank you so much for making our content experiences better, my friend. I’m excited to use the platform soon over. We’re at CIPIO or even if I wind up doing some, live episodes of Winfluence, it’ll be fun to see it in action.

I really appreciate the work and appreciate you spending some time with us today, man. Thanks for being here.

[00:32:30] Lux: This was a lot of fun. Thank you, Jason, for having me.

[00:32:32] Jason: How about that? Awesome new tech for you to go check out. Go to streamalive.com, to do and I am gonna be using the technology over at CIPIO.ai in the coming weeks too. Can’t wait to test it out and make sure our live streams are more interactive for everyone. Make sure you follow us on LinkedIn or YouTube to follow along, just go to each network, search for CIPIO.ai or CIPIOai and you’ll find us. 

Also, don’t forget to completely change the way you produce social media content for the better. Get vibe check from CIPIO.ai, a two week free trial. No credit card required. It awaits you at jasonfalls.co/vibecheck.

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The show is also now on video as well. Just look for Jason Falls Winfluence on YouTube and see the show as well as hear it. Winfluence is a production of Falls and Partners and presented by CIPIO.ai the technical production is by MPN Studios. Winfluence airs along MPN, the Marketing Podcast Network. Thanks for watching and listening folks. Let’s talk again soon on Winfluence.