Author: Editor

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Live Streaming & Group Chat

Live streaming has become robustly more popular in 2016 and it’s expected that the ways it will used will boom. RumbleTalk has already seen customers using group chat in tangent to live streaming services and for this reason we’ll be taking a closer look at the advantages of doing so.

Live Streaming Today

In the last couple of years alone, companies like Facebook and YouTube have released free tools to live stream directly from your computer or phone. There’s no need to buy expensive software or equipment and this low cost barrier makes it accessible to just about everyone.

There are several companies that offer free live streaming now. Facebook Live and YouTube Live  are among the top providers and there’s also Twitter’s Periscope. For more professional (and paid) services, companies like Livestream, DaCast, and Ustream offer end to end features.

Without having properly tested the gambit of options out there, we’re not going to recommend one service over the other, but we would love to hear from our customers what they prefer. So if you do use a live streaming service for your organization or company, let us know!

Including Chat with Live Streaming

With the raw and connected feeling live streaming provides, it’s recommended to include your viewers in the experience by giving them an avenue to comment and participate.

Some live streaming platforms do offer chat services alongside their video stream, however these are oftentimes extremely limited. This is where RumbleTalk group chat becomes the best alternative.

RumbleTalk is a premium group chat services that offers a full range of bells and whistles not offered in basic chat services. Here’s a few examples:

  • Custom login options
    RumbleTalk gives chat owners the option to choose one, some, or all available login options; choose from anonymous, guest, Facebook, Twitter, and password protected users.
  • Live messages
    Most messaging applications used within a live streaming service are forum style. RumbleTalk group chats are live and instant to match the pace of the live stream. Some services limit the number of characters each comment can contain, for example: RumbleTalk allows 10 times more characters than YouTube and has no limit on how many messages can be sent in a certain time frame.
  • File/Image/Video sharing
    In some cases, you’ll want your audience to be able to share more than just characters. With RumbleTalk, users can upload files, share images, and even embed videos. But this is just the beginning. A RumbleTalk group chat has features for just about every type of communication.
  • You control when the conversation begins and ends
    RumbleTalk group chats are turned on and off by you, the administrator, whereas some services only offer the option to chat during the live stream, RumbleTalk group chats can start before and go on after the live stream has ended.
  • Archiving and further use
    A RumbleTalk transcript can be archived and exported for further use. We have customers who use the HTML transcript after the fact to increase their SEO/SERP results with this keyword rich content.

When is RumbleTalk Right for You?

A majority of live streaming scenarios don’t require all the perks of RumbleTalk group chat. So when is it right for you?

We’ve found two conditions that make RumbleTalk a good choice for live streaming.

First, your live stream must be active on your website. If you are only broadcasting on YouTube or Facebook or any other live streaming service, then you’ll have to stick with their commenting service.

However, if you embed the live stream on your website (click here for instructions on this for Facebook and YouTube) then you can also embed your RumbleTalk group chat alongside it. You’ll be able to customize the group chat (with our admin panel or CSS) to match the look and feel of your website.

If you’re considering whether it’s worth it to embed the video and chat, consider the impact you’ll have on your sales or call to action when you keep your customers on your website rather than sending them away. Plus, we’ve made it simple to customize and embed.

And second, your viewer’s participation must be important. Bluntly put, if you don’t care about your viewers comments or if your viewers don’t care about the larger community participating in the live stream, then RumbleTalk may not be right for you.

However, if you are using a live stream to connect viewers in a more tangible way, you’ll want to give them the best platform to fully express themselves. That’s where RumbleTalk comes in.

By giving your viewers a live group chat with all the perks listed above, you’ll enable a dynamic discourse to take your live stream to the next step. You’ll get more engagement and out of your viewers and your viewers will get more value from your live stream.

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For more information, pricing, product features and demos  visit the RumbleTalk  website or contact support(at)rumbletalk(dot)com.

Posted on by Editor

Today We Are Celebrating 500,000 Group Chat Installations!

 

But numbers aren’t everything – we have a lot to be proud of.

We’ve increased the speed of our loading time and messages by using caching technology and loading components from a global content delivery network (CDN).

There are a million different ways to communicate on the web and each one is fit for its unique purpose. RumbleTalk offers consumers an extremely efficient and instantaneous way to communicate with groups big and small.

With this in mind, we’ve designed our back end with a time saving infrastructure.

RumbleTalk group chats cache information so that the data you’ve already seen will load without delay.

We also store copies of our information all over the world so that wherever your group participants are, the information will be sent from the closest server. This sheds off milliseconds and, in some cases, full seconds the first time someone opens a chat.

Our fall back architecture is so good that in the event that any connection is lost for a short period of time, you won’t even notice it.

Failures can happen on the user’s end or on the provider’s end. In either case, RumbleTalk has built in fail-safe measures to keep the conversation going.

When your users have a server failure, RumbleTalk group chat seamlessly queues messages so that when the problem is fixed, the user is back in the chat without having left it.

And if the failure happens on our end, we have a network of back up servers that instantly take over to ensure the conversation goes on without interruption.

RumbleTalk has further optimized its mobile web app. Faster loading times, adjustable fonts, and full screen chat rooms are just a few of the pieces we’ve added to our software.

Mobile browsing is here to stay. If you want your community to engage from their phone, you have to have a mobile optimized chat.

Whether or not your website is optimized for mobile users, your RumbleTalk group chat will be. When a user enters your group chat room, they’ll enjoy our modern and efficient web application fit for and adaptable to tablets and smartphones.

We’ve improved the default settings and functions so that font size can be adjusted by the user, the chat can be expanded to full screen, as always speed is priority. We also offer the ability for you to customize using the mobile version separately from the web version using CSS. This way you can simplify your design to further enhance the user experience.

We’ve added a login SDK so that your users can use their identity on your website to log into your group chat room.

A recent addition to our features is the ability to use your existing user data base for your group chat. Once a user logs into your website, they’ll have their information auto-populate their profile in the group chat and they won’t have to log in a second time to participate.

We’ve also expanded our software to provide enterprise solutions.

We are now capable of white-label integration for other software platforms to be able to offer their customers group chat services. Companies who partner with us can either add this as part of their package, or partner for revenue sharing. In either case, the company’s customers have access to all the features of a RumbleTalk group chat.

RumbleTalk also has a new REST API that allows a company to control and manage their chats in every way directly from their system. This is best utilized by organizations and companies that want to manage a large number of group chat rooms.

THANK YOU!

We know that none of this would have been possible if it wasn’t for our existing customer. So THANK YOU! You’ve supported us and cheered us on through our first 500,000 group chat installations. Our promise is to continue to improve and to be the very best group chat software on the market.

Thank You!
-The RumbleTalk Team

Posted on by Editor

Online Community Leadership: The Founder’s Mentality

The Founder's Mentality

RumbleTalk customers are by and large online community leaders, and a lot of times the founders of those communities. When I heard that Chris Zook and James Allen were writing another book together titled The Founder’s Mentality, I was instantly intrigued. I was lucky enough to receive complementary advanced copy of the book and will use this blog to discuss the topic.

You can also read my review of the book on Goodreads here.

The first thing you should know is that this isn’t a peachy story about what a founder’s mentality should be in order to achieve success at the outset of an organization. Tellingly, the full title is The Founder’s Mentality: How to Overcome the Predictable Crises of Growth.

This book is about the mentality you should have if your business is stalling, sliding downward, or in a free fall to bankruptcy. The quick answer, as the title suggests, is to get back to what made the company a success in the first place. The characteristics that (successful) founders embody don’t have to and shouldn’t go away once the company has scaled. However, the process of growing and scaling a company all too often undermines these qualities that made it a success in the first place.

But not all hope is lost for large and struggling organizations

Zook and Allen’s research is used in the book to explain that when a company grows a number of factors remove the business from their best potential route

Some of these factors are:

  • Layers of complexity are added that slow down the decision making process
  • Territorial departments protect their budgets rather than moving resources where they are needed
  • A culture of “this is how we’ve always done it” prevents innovation

These become weights on a sinking ship when the market changes. A business needs to be adaptive, resourceful, and flexible in order to out-pace fast growing competitors.

Zook and Allen use many excellent examples of companies struggling with this situation and how they turned it around.

This is the reason you should read the book

Zook and Allen together have a great background to get information that otherwise isn’t accessible to the general public. It was fascinating to read about the internal workings and failures of some of the world’s largest companies and how each one turned around its situation to then lead the market.

There are also examples of companies that were not able to turn around their situation.

In either case their research shows that simplifying the business structure to be lean, efficient and focused was a necessary step to be on the right path.

Even though the book is about companies in crisis, it’s value can be gained as a cautionary tale and a reaffirmation for founders to stick to their guns.

I was reminded of a Ted Talk I watched a while back about the “Why” factor. Why do you make your product? Why do you perform your service? This is where the company and the company’s message should start.

Lessons for Online Community Leadership

RumbleTalk sees online communities in many different forms.

But at the core of what our customers use our product for, online community leaders offer group chat rooms for their members to tap into the collective emotional or informational knowledge of the community.

After reading The Founder’s Mentality, I hope that online community leadership feel empowered to strip away excess and focus the core of their mission: to bring like-minded individuals together online for a greater purpose.

Lacie Larschan

Posted on by Editor