By Bill Accola
I hear so many interesting use cases from our Broadcaster customers that I thought others might enjoy hearing about some of these customer conversations.
This week, Broadcaster’s audience Lobby page came up in two different client conversions. Fyi, for those less familiar with Broadcaster, the Lobby page is where viewers can wait and potentially be entertained or gain important information if they join a webcast before the event has started. Once the event begins, viewers are automatically transitioned into the event presentation pages (viewers joining after the presentation has started, for example, would bypass the Lobby page entirely).
In the first conversation, our client commented how “the Lobby page is the most underutilized and sold feature in Broadcaster.” This prompted me to ask for more details because I’d always thought of the Lobby page as just a transient destination on the way to the webcast. The client explained how they customize their Lobby pages for their webcasts well beyond just text and colors – and create an experience well beyond the typical event title, speaker bios and countdown clocks. Instead, they use the real estate to include custom buttons which hyperlink to other pages that have content related to the event speakers and presentation. These links can go to topic-specific web pages, iframes with embedded third-party websites, pre-recorded video links, social media and more. This client provides links to product pages and data sheets for products and services that will be talked about during the event.
The client’s goal is to get viewers engaged by immediately interacting with educational and entertaining media while they wait for the event to start. The client strongly felt that by keeping the viewer engaged with the Lobby page – vs. passing the time multitasking or scrolling on their mobile device – they would remain more focused, and better prepared, throughout the presentation. Using the Lobby page to initiate active engagement, they maintain, turns passive viewers into active participants who are more likely to interact with polls, surveys, sentiment icons and the question-and-answer options as they appear throughout the webcast.
The Broadcaster Lobby page can be designed with any number of buttons that hyperlink to pre-event information – from web pages to embedded media or third-party applications – that converts passive viewers into engaged and active webcast participants before the live event even begins.
The second conversation about the Lobby page was just as interesting. After seeing a MediaPlatform demonstration of how to embed YouTube and Vimeo videos, Spotify playlists and other content into the Lobby page, an enthusiastic team of users from another client said that one of their internal customers hand-selects music playlists and time stamps them across each event. This internal customer is looking at their webcasts as artwork for the audience and takes meticulous care to ensure that the presentations always come off great.
The production team’s excitement came from their newfound knowledge that they could embed curated Spotify playlists onto the Lobby page. The event producers knew that their internal client would love this ability because they always pick out specific music to go along with the content being presented and what was going on in the company and world when the event was being run. By being able to embed specific music for the people waiting in the Lobby page, the mood for the event itself could be set earlier for viewers and it help set them up in the right headspace and send them in the right direction at an even earlier stage of the event.
It was great to hear the excitement from both clients and I wanted to pass along how they’ve converted what could be pre-event dead space into an active, multimedia experience.