Google Hangouts on Air — things I’ve learnt

LJMU TV
LJMU TV
Jul 24, 2017 · 8 min read

After finishing a trial run of using Google Hangouts on Air, I’ve hastily written down some notes — both as an aid to refining future sessions and also to share my tips and experiences with anyone else looking into using the platform for customer engagement.

Testing Google Hangouts for student applicants

Being the first point of contact for rich media on the web, I was asked about looking into a way of using video chat to engage with our international applicants. We wanted to answer any queries about moving over and living in Liverpool and studying at LJMU. As well as providing some key information, we wanted to get across the message that we’re basically nice, approachable, helpful people who want to make that transition as smooth and painless as possible — in addition to building those important human relations that become essential during the lifecycle of a student.

It’s been a steep learning curve, as I’ve never looked at webinar technology before, but I’m excited by the prospect of using video as a tool for engagement — whether that’s one-to-one or by broadcasting to a wider audience.

What follows isn’t intended to be a definitive guide covering all angles of Google Hangouts on Air — these are just some recollections and recommendations based on my personal experiences, in the hope they’ll provide some use to your own outings with the platform…

Research, research, research

Before you start looking at Hangouts on Air for your webinars, it may be worth exploring some other options first — as it isn’t necessarily the one-size-fits-all solution you may be hoping for.

In addition to Hangouts on Air, we looked at Skype and Blackboard Capture for delivering live videos streams — as an in-house hosted solution was out of the equation due to budget and time restrictions. Skype doesn’t allow for streaming to a wider audience than the people participating in the call; Capture operates on Java platform, which can be clunky to set up and impossible to use on some mobile devices.

For these reasons we opted for Hangouts on Air, but for all of the marketing spiel on how simple and user-friendly the platform is, we discovered certain idiosyncrasies and limitations that affected how effective it was at servicing our particular needs.

As is usually the case, the choice you make is a compromise, based on how many boxes the solution ticks — here are some of the pros and cons that informed our decision-making:

Pros

· Robust, externally hosted platform

· Accessible on a range of devices via browser / YouTube app — no need for plugins or proprietary software or app installations

· Good choice for post-session marketing, as the stream is captured and can be made available on YouTube immediately afterwards

· Incorporates engagement tools: Q&A app (though limited to Google account holders)

· Flexible privacy options — you can make your Hnagout public and finable to everyone, or limit it to specified invitees

· Invitation system to help track number of attendees

· Includes YouTube analytics

Cons

· Blocked in some territories, such as China and Vietnam. Skype is also blocked, but we agreed the user friendliness and ubiquity of the platform outweighed the downside of not being able to engage with our entire audience — we also decided we could upload the captured streams to YouKu.com and Sina Weibo afterwards, so people there could at least see the content, if not engage with it.

· You need a Google account to engage with the Hangout. Unless you have a Gmail or YouTube account, you can’t post to the Hangout Event page or the Q&A app that’s integrated into the platform. We solved this issue this by inviting participants to Tweet us before and during the event using a specific hashtag, or by emailing us to a dedicated inbox.

How are you going to present it?

One area that caused lots of confusion was the concept of how information is presented and exchanged during the Hangout. Initially we saw the it as a place where our audience would be participating in a video chat with us, asking us questions in real time. It soon became apparent this wasn’t feasible for a number of reasons, one being that Hangouts on Air are limited to 10 spaces for video chat participants — 5 of which would be occupied by the staff answering queries.

The other drawback is that it would have been very difficult to manage. Imagine 5 people from various countries asking questions, potentially at the same time as each other — it had the potential to be chaotic, plus how would they know who to direct their question to?

It became increasingly clear that we needed to be able to direct proceedings, with control over the content and direction of the dialogue. We needed some sort of facilitator or presenter who could select questions, then direct them to the relevant member of staff for answering. This way there would be no confusion about what’s being asked, and who is doing the answering — plus you can structure the content of your Hangout more effectively.

How you decide to structure and run your Hangout will determine a lot of the decision-making regarding content and technical concerns.

Another consideration is location. Would participants be using their own computers in their own offices/homes? After some initial investigations I decided against this. Although this is technically the situation video conferencing is designed for, it left us open to a lot of potential issues: what if somebody couldn’t connect to the Hangout? If they had technical issues who would be on hand to assist? In the end it became clear we needed a ‘hub’ that housed all the computers and equipment needed for the sessions, so staff could turn up without any prior experience, sit down and take part without worrying about how it all worked.

To be specific about our arrangement, we opted for an editing suite — with myself setting up the Hangout and controlling things behind the scenes, a facilitator presenting and dictating the content and direction of the session, plus three staff members/students answering questions by the facilitator.

Testing 1–2–3

This was a critical stage of the trial. We found out a lot about what could and couldn’t do during the various trial runs that took place before the live sessions took place.

We found that it was easier to run the Hangouts using iMacs rather than PCs, as they all come with a webcam and mic already included — which just worked straight away, without any issues of the computer not seeing the camera/mics. Luckily we had available the aforementioned suite of iMacs were not being used this time of year. It was quiet, bright and a nice looking environment.

After having some issues using Safari to run the Hangouts — we installed Chrome on the iMacs, reasoning that the Google browser will be less likely to have any issues running a Google product.

One problem we ran into with our iMacs was that they only had a headphone input, but no mic — a ‘feature’ of the later models that prevented us from using the headsets we already had, that have a separate headphone and mic minijack. We worked around this by purchasing some USB adapters, you need to make sure you set up your OSX audio system preferences are set to USB input/output.

We found during tests that, because all of our participants were sat in the same room (not necessarily what the Hangouts were intended for), the sound of the person speaking next to you ‘bled’ into the headsets with the sound coming from their mic — causing an off-putting delay that made it harder to make out what was being said. So if you’re planning to host your Hangout with all participants in the same room as we did, I’d invest in headsets that block out as much external noise as possible.

Another audio issue was that speech from the participants would bleed into other participants’ microphones too, causing a delayed ‘underwater’ sound. This was mitigated slightly by asking participants to talk more softly. If it were an option however, I’d have used acoustic partitions similar to those used in call centres.

By default, the sound quality on hangouts is set to the lower quality setting of ‘voice’. I’d recommend changing this in the Hangout settings to ‘studio’ — which is designed for live music performances, but it also makes a massive improvement to speech audio quality too.

If possible, use a wired internet connection rather than wifi. We were limited to using wifi, which resulted in loss of video stream quality, plus the odd connection dropout — causing everything to freeze and mass panic. If this happens, I’d say continue as normal and things will usually rectify themselves — it’s a good idea to have a spare machine connected to the Hangout, allowing for a quick swap if anything goes wrong for a single participant.

Get scripting

As hosting live video is a new experience for the majority of us at the university, one of the recurring concerns was this: If nobody turns up, if we don’t have anybody asking us questions live, during the hangout, what do we do?

The answer to this of course is to prepare as much content as possible prior to your Hangout — so on the day you’re not left staring at a blank screen wondering what to say. You also need some sort of structure to your Hangout, so it’s clear to the viewer what they can expect. Basically, you need a beginning, a middle and an end. With this in mind I drafted a rough script that featured: an introduction and invitational message/instructions for participation; pre-prepared FAQs aimed at various participants, with breaks for live questions; then a roundup at the end that invited participants to continue to keep in touch with us.

It may be overkill for your hangout, but for us it meant the fallback of having something to discuss if nobody decided to engage us with questions — plus we could rehearse beforehand, alleviating nerves and allowing us to iron out any unforeseen technical issues.

We also adapted our script as we went along, adding and removing questions, rewording some of the clunkier messages and honing things so it felt more natural and conversation-like rather than a scripted broadcast. After the first session the participants were able to breeze through the hangout without referring to the script — so it may be worth considering using short headers or bullet points, to avoid your facilitator looking down to refer to lengthy notes or scripted text.

Don’t panic!

Just because you’re on screen, you’re not there to emulate a professional broadcaster — it’s just a webcast! Don’t get bogged down with looking super slick, or worrying about how well you come across. Your viewers are there purely to glean useful information from a normal, happy, relaxed, regular person — one they can hopefully relate to.

Even with weeks and weeks of planning, there will be technical hiccups. As long as you’ve done everything you can to prepare for these eventualities, you shouldn’t worry about minor problems. It’s a learning curve and as with most things, the only way to really get good at this is by actually doing it.

In conclusion, it’s been an interesting and fun project to get stuck into and one that has opened up a world of possibilities for engaging with our stakeholders. So if it’s for you, just give it a go, have fun with it and let us know how you get on.

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