November 27, 2012 
There’s energy in going “live.” Fierce energy.
Ask anyone who has been to a live sporting event or a concert. There’s an electricity that comes from knowing you’re watching events unfold in real-time. This works not only for attending live events, but also watching them. The live energy can be felt while watching the Oscars or the Super Bowl. Live programming translates well on the screen.
It also translates well into news – and newspapers.
The City University London’s Journalism School recently conducted a study of live blogging on news sites. They focused the research on The Guardian, one of the most respected dailies in the United Kingdom. They found that live blogging at The Guardian received 233 percent more visitors than regular news postings and generated 300 percent more views than other content.
Those are HUGE increases.
Why? The study had this to say:
“We believe that it is because liveblogs [sic] are extremely effective at engaging audiences, because they are well adapted to meet changing consumer preferences for news delivery and formatting, changes that have resulted — in part — from the displacement of news consumption from print to online.”
They added, almost as an aside:
“It may be then that the form of liveblogging [sic] itself, rather than the content it carries, is the attraction. An example, perhaps, of Marshall McLuhan’s old adage that ‘the medium is the message.’”
Bingo.
The attraction. The energy. Live connects people to content in ways that other types of content can’t match. The Internet – and particularly social platforms – thrive on real-time communications. It’s what platforms like Twitter were designed for in the first place.
When you go live you bring on the excitement. You attract larger audiences and you engage with those audiences more. If you’re using social channels to market and communicate with your audiences you should be thinking about creative ways to bring it live.
Links:
City University London’s Journalism School study on live blogging
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