Don't hang yourself with a Google Hangout!

Google Hangouts – they are hot right now and every brand wants to do one but I’m afraid they can be disastrous and look awful.

If you don’t know anything about Google Hangouts, they are a way you can broadcast live from your Google+ account, which upon completion will then automatically upload to your YouTube Channel. You can link with up to 10 people on screen and invite people to come and watch the live broadcast.

Go and watch a few and you’ll soon appreciate why people like Graham Norton are paid huge amounts of money for doing wonderfully entertaining live television. Most are terminally boring, they are badly filmed with bad lighting and the people they link up to, who are usually at home on a webcam located in their bedroom, look and sound atrocious. No one has rehearsed, no one has prepared –it’s carnage.  And on top of this they don’t have enough bandwidth, so it’s jumping all the time

Here is a Hangout that House of Fraser did this week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoP_cX2f6WY

I wanted to stab myself in the head after two minutes but then it became so bad, it was funny.

If you have been involved with making TV commercials all your life, which I have, you know how tough it is to create something which looks good and is compelling viewing but here are my Hangout tips: 

1..  Just because you can invite people to a Hangout, doesn’t mean you have to, especially if you don’t know how they are going to sound, where they are going to be, and what their broadband is like.

2. Treat it like a piece of programming, think about the set, the branding and make sure you have adequate bandwidth.

3. Rehearse and prepare. It doesn’t have to be learnt like a script but you can be sure that Graham Norton has done his homework, knows what he wants to ask and what direction he wants to take the whole programme before he starts. Improvisation takes far more effort that reading lines.

4. Take a tip from television stations and make sure you are plugging the hell out your Hangout on every social channel before it happens. I think House of Fraser had 14 viewers.

I’m sure House of Fraser will get better and they have learnt some useful lessons but if you’re a brand and you want a successful Hangout, it needs as much thought as any other aspect of your marketing. Good luck!