Growing Demand Blog

Interview with CoveritLive’s Keith McSpurren

Today we announced a strategic relationship with CoveritLive, a rapidly growing social media company in Toronto, Canada.  The partnership between the two companies includes product integration, a distribution arrangement, and a minority investment by Demand Media in the privately held company. 

CoveritLive has developed an amazing service for creating and hosting live social events on the web. With thousands of companies, large and small, putting CoveritLive into action – we thought the best way to introduce you to the product and our new partner was through an interview with Keith McSpurren, the founder and CEO of CoveritLive.

First, the basics, what are your customers doing with CoveritLive ?

CoveritLive is used to create interesting live events online, incorporating dynamic social interaction. One popular way to use it is for original programming around topical interests, featuring experts and audience participation.  For example, the Dallas Morning News recently hosted a discussion around race relations following the Henry Louis Gates incident.  Dax Holt of TMZ hosts a celebrity show each week. Sky News runs online election debates between regional candidates using our software.  The second popular model is to bring a moderator and audience together to discuss an event while it occurs somewhere else.  Good examples here include the Washington Post covering the Sotomayor confirmation hearings on CSPAN, Marvel Comics bringing ComicCon panels to life from the conference floor, and your own LIVESTRONG.com providing expert commentary and audience participation around broadcast of segments from the Tour de France. 

How many people show up for these online events?

During an event like Macworld, we hosted scores of CoveritLive events from around the world, and across all of these events 800,000 raving Apple fans showed up.   In terms of a single CoveritLive event produced by one customer, the elections in India brought over 500,000 readers together for NTDV.com  And it’s not uncommon to see events greater than 25,000 for things like political debates, severe weather reporting and Q&A sessions with celebrities. While the size of the audience for an event can be impressive, the really amazing thing is the level of engagement.  Audience members arrive and stay for very, very long periods of time.  Typical time on site numbers range from 15-20 minutes per reader for a one hour event to upwards of one hour for most sporting events.  Multi-day coverage like the NFL Draft can keep audiences engaged for hours on end across the weekend.

What is proving to be the best way to draw a big audience?

The best way to draw a crowd is through repeat usage. In this way, the core audience starts to anticipate the live event and they talk about it with their friends, just like they do with television programming.  The results can sometimes surprise you.   Clicrbs.com in Brazil routinely draws more than 10,000 people to their coverage of soccer practices by using pictures and onsite commentary that fans simply can’t get anywhere else.  Similarly, the Green Bay Gazette has been drawing thousands of people to their daily coverage of summer training camp for the Packers.  You don’t have to cover an event of global proportions to draw a big audience.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the use of CoveritLive by media companies and bloggers.  Are you seeing any pickup from other outlets?

I’ve been really encouraged to see big consumer brands start to adopt CoveritLive.  It’s a great way for them to discuss their products and services with their consumers – and capture their feedback.  For example, last week the advanced technology team at GM used CoveritLive during a two day product showcase. Thousands of viewers tuned in to learn more about new cars like the Volt and Terrain and they were able to interact directly with the product teams.  Big brands and their agencies are really focused on “going-social” without the risk of their brand being maliciously denigrated.  CoveritLive neatly solves this problem – safely making the brand more accessible, transparent and engaging with their audience.

You’ve seen thousands of live events that your customer’s have produced – what makes for a successful event?

The most important ingredient is to have a knowledgeable moderator.  You want someone who can provoke an interesting conversation -- whether they are asking a panelist or the audience to weigh in. The second big factor, and it’s an easy one to master, is choosing the best questions from the audience using our moderation tools. While CoveritLive is designed to host many-to-many events, you want to avoid the open chat channel – and manage the conversation, just like a radio call-in show.  Finally, the last bit of polish comes from planning ahead a bit and bringing interactive resources into the event like polls, pictures, video clips or streaming video. We make it very easy for you to do all of these things from our control panel.

What does it take to get started?  Are there any technical integration steps required?

We built CoveritLive as a self-service product that anybody can use. Most of our early customers were media company editors and individual bloggers without a lot of technical skills or resources at their disposal. So it has to be easy and fool-proof.  After you create an account on our service, you are given a few lines of HTML that can be pasted into the web page or blog post where you want to host the event. At that point, you are up and running – there’s nothing else to do.  It’s as easy as embedding a YouTube video on your page.

Can Twitter play a role in a CoveritLive event?

Absolutely.  Panelists can use Twitter as their input mechanism for getting their point of view into an event, and this is becoming a popular feature. Bill Simmons, The Sports Guy, used this approach last week during ESPN’s coverage of the Yankees-Red Sox series.  Another cool way to use Twitter with CoveritLive is to have the event moderator use a special purpose tool we’ve created that scans the Twitter stream for relevant commentary. They can then selectively pull tweets into the event, to add a new perspective.

 As part of our relationship, you’ve announced that there will be integration between CoveritLive and Pluck’s social media suite. How will these products come together?

There are quite a few mutual customers that use both Pluck and CoveritLive – so it has been easy to get feedback around the best ways to tie the two products together.  We will initially focus on connecting the user side of the equation.  We’ll provide a means for single-sign on (SSO) – so that when a registered user logs into a customer site they will automatically be logged in for either Pluck or CoveritLive usage.  That will be available next month.  Following that effort, we will integrate CoveritLive comments into the Pluck persona, so that all of the social interactions that happen on the site are collected into the user profile that Pluck provides.

 Before we let you go, we have one more question around the business model for CoveritLive.  So far you’ve provided it for free.  Will that last forever?

It’s a great question and one that I get all the time from my largest customers. They want to make sure that we’re going to be around to provide this service for many years.  We absolutely have a plan to make money from CoveritLive, but in the early days I thought it was most important for us to get broad distribution of the product so that we could learn as much as possible.  We now have our plans set and later this year we’ll release new versions of the product that will be monetized in different ways. At the one end, there will be an Enterprise Edition that provides a series of features that are really valuable to larger organizations. That will be available for a very reasonable monthly subscription fee.  At the other end, we’ll continue to have a free version that is available for smaller customers – but we’ll probably monetize it through advertising.  The Enterprise Edition is in beta test at the moment. The ad supported version will go into testing in Q4.