Intrigued by Brett St. Claire’s foretelling of Google’s new “Hangouts on Air” feature to be rolled early next week, the GraphicMail team today started experimenting with the platform - to see if it will be suitable for staff use and communication across their global franchisee network, with the possibility of migrating our product webinars onto Hangouts.
It's really handy for our business that you can filter friends into different circles in Google+. So far we've been creating circles for different language groups in our international team.
Brett St. Claire, Google’s Head of New Products for Sub-Saharan Africa, made the announcement about “Hangouts on Air” and that the feature will be available for South Africans by monday as a gripping climax to his talk titled “How social media is challenging online marketing”, presented at the 2012 CTICC Marketing Indaba on the 10th of May.
Members of the GraphicMail marketing and design team were in the audience listening to Mr. St. Claire, prior to presenting their own workshop on email marketing.
We’ve really taken to Hangout’s screen share ability, which will be especially useful for doing business-to-business conference calls.
Since GraphicMail has become reliant on using Google docs extensively, we’re very pleased that it’s been integrated for access and sharing via Hangouts, and also that you can even add some of your own apps to the platform.
One of the advantages of Google+ as group-chat destination is that most people already have a Gmail address, or are somewhat familiar with the service, and so it’s not as intimidating as using one of the many other voice calling tools out there on the web that may not be as well known or trusted.
About “Hangouts on Air”
This feature lets you broadcast live sessions for anyone to watch — just like some music stars and political figures have already been doing.
Hangouts on Air can be posted on your Google+ stream, YouTube channel or website by checking “Enable Hangouts on Air.” It also allows you to monitor the number of views, record the live session and share it.
The feature previously was available only to a small group of broadcasters starting in 2011.
Thanks Google, for making life easier for us GraphicMailers!
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