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I recently attended the London Social Video Meetup networking event – which landed conveniently after the Social Media World Forum – where I watched a live demo by Sarah Kornfeld at Vpype – a live stream application specifically for Facebook users.

I was at the Social Media World Forum and noticed that Vpype was one of the only companies to create a lot of buzz around their stand and that their demos continued to draw in little pockets of attendees and delegates. They were also live streaming during the event.

Live streaming isn’t a new concept with sites like Ustream and Justin.tv but Vpype (pronounced Vee-pipe not like Viiipe i.e. like Qype) has a couple of unique features that stands out from its competition. Firstly,  you could be live broadcasting from your lounge room to an audience of more than 400 million active users!! Well you probably won’t draw in millions but having a live broadcasting application within your Fan page means you can potentially engage with thousands of people at any one time.

You can also all decide who you want to invite to the broadcast – so everyone or specific Facebook members. Interestingly, you can also block people from the back channel too. So if someone starts making some ‘noise’, you as the broadcaster, can silence them…

The application is also uniquely integrated into Facebook Events, so you can make an Events Page for your broadcast – thus you are committed to your show every week, and can build up your audience – Plus it acts like a great reminder!

We also heard from Austin Vernon from Bright Giant about how brands can use this application to engage with their customers. For example, a company could set up a fortnightly customer service call with various members of the public and chat live  – much like when companies use Twitter as a source of two-way communication. He also makes the point that brands need to think how they are going to engage with their customers because there is nothing that makes people runaway quicker online is if you are having advertising forced upon you.

Vpype – and similar applications to come – is a simple three-step process. It’s in its early stages and I think there are some key features still missing such as the ability to add pre-recorded video, slides, pictures, voting buttons and polls etc, to make the live broadcast more dynamic for the audience. But with the popularity of sites like Youtube and Chatroulette, I think the combination of the accessibility of this tool (i.e it’s free to download via Facebook) and our inherent need to interact in a social and meaningful way, we’ll see more and more people willing to use live streaming platforms to broadcast their lives – maybe in a fun and irreverent way (i.e PianoChatImprov guy) or fans can chat to their favourite band on MTV Live within Facebook.

Applications like Vpype shows me that video is going social and it’s here to stay on the net. Ten years ago if your company did not have a website, you virtually didn’t exist. These days, if you don’t use video to interact and engage with your consumers then you are just a one-dimensional brand – without any personality!

You can watch the demo below (which was recorded live during the meeting):

After watching this, how do you think you would use an application like Vpype?

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