Shoppertainment is saving China, so what can it do for your business? Here are 6 platforms you can

Welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James and I am your host, and today we're going to talk about live streaming once again. We're going to talk about how you can build a business without having a retail outlet, but it does rely on having online store and online publicity to get the customers to come to your store. Now, this podcast is all for business owners to help you get the business that you deserve by using publicity that is free to generate and help you to unlock the value in your business. Now, when we look at live streaming, which is topical because the China economy is surviving and some would say thriving in certain pockets down to the efforts of live streaming. Now, I was thinking about that because Today I was going to go shopping with my daughter, and she has pocket money, but she spent it all. And actually, before we can go to the shops downtown, she spent it all online. So we're now seeing the patterns of spend by young people changing fundamentally, and I don't think it's ever going to come back. Now, shoppertainment and livestream e-commerce is filling the store gap. In the UK and America and all over the world due to COVID, but it's perhaps in China that it has had the greatest impact. But the reason I want to talk about this on the podcast is because I don't think that it's going to be limited to China. I think China is going to show us the way, and having lived in China for 13 years myself, I watched the growth of mobile and the beginnings of live streaming. What's been happening in China though recently is that There are different people now becoming spokespeople for both companies, but also towns and provinces. In Hubei Province, for example, which has got some 60 million inhabitants, the local provincial government officers are live streaming, and they're doing that to endorse and to sell products being made by the companies within their province. They apparently sold some £2 million worth, $2.5 million worth of goods in one day of this campaign. So what we're seeing is actual spokespeople coming on the scene and becoming trade ambassadors for their town and their province. So we may well see chambers of commerce, for example, in other countries starting to ask their— maybe their mayors or their provincial or regional, uh, officials to start to go online and to promote their region or their town in a way that we haven't seen before, actually even at a product level. Now in China, it doesn't seem to know any bounds, and we're going to hear from Charles Yan, who is the East-West public relations consultant based in Beijing, and he's going to talk about really the rise of Taobao, for example, but which is really the Amazon of China, and it's been the platform with the largest number of live streaming sales. And during COVID during February, they saw a 719% increase in new sellers. Now, that doesn't mean that everybody's making that much more money, but it shows a migration from the bricks-and-mortar stores To online, so I want to invite Charles to speak to us because I think China gives us some clues and some lessons about what we can do here in the West to build our business and continue our business in the mobile and the digital era. Let's listen to Charles Yan.

Hi there, this is Charles from East West PR. It is great to have you here again on this channel. And today we're gonna talk about live streaming. Live streaming is very popular right now. Data from the Ministry of Commerce shows that in the first quarter of this year, there were more than 4 million live broadcasts on e-commerce in China. So let's see how crazy the number is. And in this year, under this special situation, live streaming not only becomes an important channel for sales but also drives new consumption patterns. And under this background, all kinds of governments, medias, institutes, and enterprises have been testing the way of live streaming. They use different ways of tactics on live streaming to sell products and help to promote the brand. So livestreaming has been a new way of sales and new way for marketing. And we have to say that livestreaming is opening a broader space for the development of the internet economy. Beauties, makeups, food, cars, books, home decorations, and digitals So when you click on the Taobao Live broadcast interface, a wide range of goods comes into view. At present, live streaming is not only a popular way, but also more diversified. In April, professional broadcaster Wei Ya sold rockets in a Taobao studio. Within just 5 minutes, After the link went on sale, more than 800 people bid for the deposit, and the first order was sold for 40 million yuan. So you might want to ask, why does live streaming sell well? Well, I have to say that the live streaming process forms a closed loop of information about the goods from knowing to buying, which reduces the transaction decision-making time. The presentation and explanation of anchors are lively, highly credible, and to a certain extent reduce information unbalance between buyers and sellers. Compared with traditional e-commerce, livestreaming is more Interactive and warm. Also, there are more and more technical ways added into livestreaming. For example, people could see and feel the color of the lipstick through VR technology. It's crazy, right? And your girlfriend or your wife doesn't need to go to the shopping mall Just click on the mouse, then finish the shopping. What's more, live streaming is becoming almost everywhere, not only on Taobao. We could find it on TikTok, WeChat, and the Redbook, and almost all the e-commerce platforms. Even the rocket could be sold through live streaming. So What's next? Maybe your new home.

So as we hear from Charles, there's even the 33-year-old Weiya who sold a $6 million rocket on Taobao, which led apparently Taobao to even publicly state that it was not an April Fool's joke. So it's amazing what can be sold online when the platform is correct. And I think that's something now that we can look at here for our businesses, because bricks and mortar may not come back again because people like my daughter don't believe they have to go to town to go shopping. They shop with their mobile phones on Apple Pay and have things delivered by a van. So I just thought I would look at some of the solutions that we can use for online, not just the broadcasting but also the integrated commerce. Now for broadcasting, there are a number. One of the leading ones is called daycast.com, and they are really aiming themselves at the sort of small to medium-sized video platform. They've got streaming solutions which start at a quite reasonable $19 per month. The benefit of using these instead of, for example, the Facebook or the YouTube Live is is that you get control. You get control, and also in some cases you get the ability to monetize, either to have a payment gateway, for example, or to embed APIs for e-commerce. So Daycast is one. What you also get from them is, by and large, sort of better video quality. When I tried today streaming a Zoom call through to Facebook Live, there was a lag in the video, but also there was really a loss of quality. But on these paid-for platforms, we're getting a much higher quality, much less latency. There's a company called Brightcove based out of Boston, which is one of the older online video platforms, although it's only 16 years old. Doesn't, doesn't sound young. By this industry's terms. So in 2019, they bought Ooyala, which was a name familiar to me because we actually pitched for Ooyala when I was based in Beijing some 10 years ago. Anyway, so Brightcove has taken Ooyala out of the market, and they are also offering sort of an enterprise-grade video broadcasting platform, but this is at $4.99 a month, so really is a, a large enterprise-grade video hosting and video on demand platform. IBM Cloud Video has a basic streaming for free service which is supported by IBM advertising, which you may or may not want, but for $4.99 a month you can remove the advertising And you can get some custom branding then, and you can have analytics, you can have content syndication. So this is also another way, another solution. And the other one that I'm using myself is Vimeo, which has the Livestream platform, which it acquired in 2017. And this can offer pay-per-view, which of course now with Zoom you can also integrate PayPal. And you can have pay-per-view that way too. So Vimeo is $7 a month, but it's blocked in China. And the other issue with Vimeo is that there isn't really any traffic to their site. So the issue with Vimeo, IBM, or Daycast, or Brightcove is that you have the stream, but you don't have the audience. So this is what takes us back to public relations. You're streaming high-quality video, maybe with a paywall. So it's great if you've got subscribers already, but if you haven't got subscribers, then you've got video and not necessarily a viewer, which is of course why we all go to YouTube or to Facebook for that. Now obviously these are all more of the content and pay for content, but what about if we've got things to sell? Well, Amazon has obviously the biggest online store in the world, some $780 billion of market cap. It's nearly 50% of all e-commerce in America, and in the UK, of course, it's, you know, still probably the biggest game in town, according at least to the deliveries we get at my house. Now, if you're a registered Amazon seller, you can download the Amazon Live Creator app Now you do need to then have what they call an OBS, which is an onboard streaming app for helping to encode the video, but it's very easy to do if you want to use your own camera. So you basically download the app, you download this OBS software, and if you're a registered Amazon seller, you've already got your product already online, and then what you can do is you live stream directly from your Amazon store using the mobile apps. In other words, use your mobile phone or a camera to a desktop to film. So much really like the Taobao product. So that's, that's probably the simplest and the most easy because of course then what what we've got is we've got anybody that's in our store, the— we have the ability to provide them with a live stream and of course a checkout, um, and a checkout cart and all of course the logistics that go with that. Of course what we want to make sure of from a PR point of view is that we've got all the sort of ratings that we might need for our Amazon sort of seller products. So ratings are really, really important, as we've discussed on earlier podcasts, and part of the public relations. Now, the Amazon Live Creator app currently apparently only runs on your iOS, not on your Android, which would seem to be a bit of a problem if you're an Android user. When I had a quick look on the the Apple Store at the Amazon app because I personally don't have an Amazon store. But if you look at the app, has a 3.6 out of 5 ratings. Now one person said it was a fantastic app and that their sales have increased fivefold since they started streaming on Amazon Live. You can also start your own ad campaigns, which is super useful, and you can apparently set them up very easily. So that seems to be another really good option for anybody that is selling products, to get registered with Amazon and to have basically the store already set up using Amazon and the consumers already within the Amazon marketplace. Now I did find as well an alternative, which is a company founded in 2016 in Quebec in Canada by Virgile Olivier and Laurent Boutet, and they are partners in a company called LiveScale. And what they are doing is working on the Shopify platform and transforming the content and e-commerce into a live shopping experience, they claim. So this is an opportunity then to be away from Amazon maybe use the Shopify platform and to have live shopping, because the product details are imported directly from your Shopify platform and they're displayed alongside your live streaming video. And they've built in a payment system and a shopping cart which goes straight to your e-commerce. So they're saying you can also allow live shopping On video purchase, which means that if you've got someone hesitating at the at the checkout, you can actually talk to them. You can actually negotiate with them. Which brings us all the way back to Taobao, which is what of course is happening in China. It's the complete it's the complete shopping experience that the Chinese are having online at the moment. Amazon Live sounds as though it's. The closest to Taobao, but someone like Livescale.tv seems to be offering an alternative platform. Now I'm interested in this because my wife, who is a Shanghainese, has just ordered a a load of Chinese teapots and Chinese pottery because she wants to be active now that she's in the UK and her residence fees has been sorted out. But we, we don't want to rent space anymore, and because that doesn't seem like a particularly bright move in this day and age. Having a website with a shopping cart is okay, but of course it's not really dynamic. Now obviously teapots are not particularly dynamic in themselves, but we could— we want to rotate them, want to display them, we want to be able to have people talking about them, product experts talking about them, and we want to be able to, you engage with people that are coming and looking at buying one of these teapots, for example, but don't know yet what to look for. We should be able to engage with them online and help them to make a decision. Public relations, of course, will have helped to get the people to come and find the store through our media relations, through our social media. But public relations now is part of the entire purchase chain. And because we have public relations bleeds into reviews and user-generated content, and as we've seen, ratings, live shopping and live streaming has to be part of what companies are thinking about as part of their integrated sales and customer service strategy. And because the customer experience is part of the public relations I wanted to share these tools and these platforms that I've been looking into for my wife's business, prompted by my own daughter's predilection for online shopping. So I hope this has been useful for you with a, you know, a little bit of a snippet from our correspondence, Charles, to give you an insight, a first, a first-person review of what's happening in one of the world's, if not the world's largest consumer market, and certainly the world's largest mobile consumer market. So with that, I'd like to thank you very much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. If you've enjoyed this, please rate us and subscribe or share it with somebody you think would enjoy it. If you'd like to get more information about East West PR, please visit our website at eastwestpr.com. In the meantime, I wish you a profitable business, great health, and that you keep on shopping, quite probably Live and online.