In the third part of my social media tutorial, viral spreading of video is the name of the game. We’ll start by looking at how live mobile streaming from Qik can spread like a viral infection all through the net.

qik-stream

 

Qik is simply my favorite mobile streaming app because of all of its viral possibilities. Besides the live streaming at your Qik page, you can push your content to nine more channels. And it is increasing. Today Qik offer viral spreading to:

So with a touch of a button, you can spread your content to large networks. In each network you can set up further viral spreading to other sites and services, making your possibilities almost endless. I guess your imagitation sets the limits.To make it happen, sign in to your Qik account, hit “Edit profile” in the top right menu, go to “Networks” and enter your account details for the services you want to add your live streaming to.

Just remember one thing. If you for example set up viral spreading to YouTube, you have to manually turn the spreading off when you don’t want to publish something automatically. Or else, your stream will be transported to YouTube as a file as soon as you are done streaming. In my opinion, a brilliant evolution for Qik would be to offer their customers to turn viral spreading on and off in the mobile client.

I especially like the possibilities for streaming through your own channel at Mogulus. The most brilliant part is that you can set up several mobile phones to stream in the same channel. With minimal knowledge of TV or streaming, you can produce a multi camera event. The participants don’t even have to be in the same country. It’s simply amazing. I hope to be able to try a Live World Cast one of these days. So far I’ve got reporters in:

  • Norway
  • Denmark
  • Holland
  • Australia

I would still like someone from Asia and America.

To configure your Qik account for Mogulus streaming, simply enter your credentials and the name of the Mogulus channel. The owner of the channel simply has to add you as a production member.

As you may have seen, in Mogulus you can make an embeddable player. I you wish to add this to your blog, you can then stream your live streams, no matter what sort of content management system (CMS) you use. On my own Mogulus channel I’ve got a loop of clips from YouTube running in the live channel. But the minute I start to stream from Qik, the live mobile stream automatically takes over my Mogulus channel. When I turn off the streaming from the phone, my loop of clips is back on again.

If you don’t want to use Mogulus or any of the other services, you can also embed your last clip or live feed on your own page. This is also possible on Bambuser and Flixwagon.

For my part I’ve set up Qik to send a message to Twitter each time I start a live mobile streaming. If you have a large crowd following you on Twitter, this is a great way to let them know you are producing. If you follow my tweets, you will see that most of the time I’m livecasting, it’s when I hold a demonstration for journalist or their bosses. It’s in Norwegian and usually pretty boring to watch on screen. It is a you-got-to-be-in-the-room-to-enjoy-it sort of presentation. But if you work actively as a journalist, I believe these combinations of possibilities are golden. You can target your crown in many ways. For my own part I can see that every time I publish a new post on this blog, I get around 40 visitors the next five minutes. My blog has a small niche with pretty nerdy stuff. I guess if you report from more mainstream subjects you could have great impact from connecting your production to Twitter. It’s all about recruiting people to follow your tweets. I’ll write more about Twitter and tweeting in my next tutorial.

The next thing you can do is to let your mobile stream go from Qik to YouTube and then to your blog. In your account setting on YouTube, you can set up pushing from YouTube to your blog. You can also let YouTube announce your new video to a mailing list.

I’m pretty amazed that we don’t see more mainstream newsrooms using these possibilities to report breaking news. When I puzzled with these issues last year, I thought that newsrooms worldwide would embrace and be the foremost advocate for this type of live coverage. My thought was obviously wrong. I just think it’s stupid that larger news organizations use a vast amount of their resources covering a lot of silly breaking news. Instead they should focus on freeing up resources for digging out important and exclusive coverage of issues their competitors doesn’t know about. Either I was way too early in my predictions or major news organizations are on their way to burn all they’re money on petty news, letting citizen journalist dominate these platforms.

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