How to successfully measure engagement before, during and after a live video streamed event

Your CEO has just finished a live streamed Town Hall to your global company, launching a new organisational strategy. The live stream went well, 75% of employees tuned in from around the world, lots of questions were asked and answered. The Town Hall was a success, a key part of the overall campaign, right?

How can you know if it was successful? Are people across the organisation talking about the campaign following the Town Hall live stream? What was the attendance across various company locations? How many employees stayed on until the very end of the broadcast, and how man dropped off mid-way? What’s the sentiment amongst employees? Six months down the track, is anyone still talking about the strategy?

For an empowered organisation, the live streamed Town Hall is just a piece of the employee engagement puzzle. What’s just as important is what happened before, during and after this Town Hall.

Before

Were people engaging with any internal communications about the campaign before the Town Hall? Were time zone differences accounted for when scheduling, so all employees could join the event live? Was the network stress-tested to guarantee no interruptions to the live stream and high video quality for all viewers? Were employees asking questions about the Town Hall? Who was leading the conversation and influencing people?

During

During the Town Hall, were people engaged with the content? Were they watching on a full screen or were they multitasking on another screen? Did people tune in for the whole Town Hall or leave after the first 15 minutes? Were they actually listening, or did they have their speakers on silent? And what was the quality of the live stream video ? Who was influencing the conversation during the Town Hall?

After

Did the conversation continue after the Town Hall, or did it just stop? Was the conversation ongoing three, six or nine months later? If so, what was the sentiment of the conversation? People need time to absorb the content from the Town Hall, and a forum to ask their questions once they’ve had the chance to think about their questions. Was this provided and did people participate? Who was influencing the conversation after the Town Hall?

Data will tell the story

You could ask these before, during and after questions in employee surveys but surveys don’t reflect what is really happening in the workplace, only what people think is happening. Also, take into consideration the time it would take each employee to answer these questions. Tapping into data will tell you exactly what is happening across the entire organisation, in real-time, without imposing on employees’ time.

Combining data from SWOOP Analytics and Hive Streaming will show exactly what is happening before, during and after your live video stream.

Cai Kjaer, CEO, SWOOP Analytics.

“Once the Town Hall is done, it’s important to measure that ongoing conversation,” said SWOOP Analytics CEO Cai Kjaer.

“We can measure the sentiment of the conversation before and after. We can see whether those conversations are lasting more than that peak.

“Did it just start and stop? Or did that conversation continue in the organisation for months after?”

Hive Streaming co-CEO Niklas Hagen says organisations are in a state of disruption which requires them to be incredibly nimble and agile. This means moving away from classic hierarchical organisational structures based on command, control and micro-management towards self-driven, autonomous, critically thinking, problem-solving employees who are invested in the journey of the company.

Niklas Hagen, co-CEO, Hive Streaming.

It’s the job of leaders to take their employees on this journey, Niklas says, and to do so they need to communicate with their people. The best way to do so at scale is via live streaming.

“The world is more uncertain than ever, we need to reinvent ourselves, and the CEO sparks the change,” Niklas said.

“Other leaders must further explain it so it’s not totally confusing for everyone else.

“Then what really matters is the buzz of the employees and if you can measure that, then you can understand the most important thing happening for any big organisation in the whole world, which is; ‘Will we be able to transform ourselves in time?’”

Hive Streaming has created the world’s only platform that can ensure the best possible video experience for all viewers, powered by its patented video optimisation algorithms. The platform also provides granular analytics to help monitor and manage stream performance in real time, track long-term KPIs, understand trends in audience engagement, compare different events and test the network prior to each event to troubleshoot potential issues before they affect viewers.

So where do the before and after conversations occur? For most organisations it happens on their enterprise social network (ESN) like Viva Engage or Workplace from Meta, or even within teams on Microsoft Teams, supported by content on the intranet. This is where SWOOP Analytics comes in, measuring every conversation related to the topic across ESNs with SWOOP Analytics for Viva Engage or SWOOP Analytics for Workplace and on Microsoft Teams with SWOOP Analytics for Microsoft Teams, then showing how the content is performing on your intranet with SWOOP Analytics for SharePoint intranet.

SWOOP Analytics combined with Hive Streaming, and Hive’s analytics during the live stream, provide a powerful understanding of the reach and impact of internal communications across an organisation, Niklas said.

“From this full chain of events, if you put them together, would be the most important investment for any CEO out there in the world,” Niklas said.

“They want to reach an empowered organisation, you need people to work empowered. They need to feel the trust that they can try things and fail.

“With the combination of real-time analytics, we are the only ones that can tell you that something went wrong and you can go back and analyse. We open your eyes.”

Cai said if you only had the video component of the campaign, you’d be missing the before and after.

“If you only had the before and after, we know how important the live video events are to establish that convincing people to take them on the journey, connecting with the leadership team, that happens through those live events,” he said.

“When we add the two together we have a much more complete picture.”

To allow you a complete picture of your internal communications, we’d love you to participate in a free trial of SWOOP Analytics and for corporate communications live streaming anywhere in the world, there is no better provider than Hive Streaming.