Joy Mayer, associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and the director of community outreach at the Columbia Missourian, recently experimented with Meerkat (one of two new live-streaming apps) in her newsroom. Her observations and lessons learned could be helpful to any newsgatherer interested in live-streaming.  

Her main takeaway, Mayer blogged, "is that the simple Twitter integration makes me likely to use Meerkat (over Ustream, for example) for times when I prioritize interaction with followers.”

She began the Meerkat test with one of her classes.  Mayer signed in using her Twitter credentials and invited the students to click on her Twitter feed. While her class could watch from a browser or within their Twitter app, interaction was only one-way from Mayer to the students. 

After class, Mayer continued the Meerkat test with her colleagues in the Columbia Missourian newsroom where they quickly learned these lessons:

·      Browser is not the same as in-app. If you plan to interact with people, you must give them the time to download the Meerkat app before the stream begins. 

·      Comments auto-tweet. But those auto-tweets don’t include a link to the stream or a hashtag, so when seen on their own, they won’t make sense to followers.

·      Retweets and likes also auto-tweet. Those watching a stream have buttons that invite them to retweet the stream or like it.

·      Content ideas for Meerkat include streaming newsroom meetings, live events or taking viewers behind-the-scenes for a tour of a facility or other venues typically off-limits to the public.

Mayer’s 12-minute Columbia Missourian experiment can be viewed online. 

For step-by-step instructions, she suggested posts found at TechCrunch and Mashable. Mayer plans to take a look at Periscope, the other new live streaming app which is owned by Twitter.