In addition to YouTube’s livestreaming capabilities, Twitter rolled out its own livestreaming option for brand pages late last year – and it’s something meeting planners may want to keep an eye on.

Pepsi’s “Live For Now” campaign used real-time data about who’s “trending” on Twitter to create original programming drawn from a summer concert series featuring popular artists like Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry, and made it available on both pepsi.com (now branded as Pepsi Pulse) and twitter.com/pepsi.  The “Live For Now” campaign was brought about in part by Mass Relevance, a platform that helps companies integrate real-time social content into online brand experiences. Mass Relevance Chief Marketing Officer Matt Corey, who made Pepsi’s campaign part of his case-study presentation during WebMediaBrands’ Social Curation Summit, held July 31 at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, said that it’s vital for companies to build a complete online experience around an event.  Moreover, he said, the content must be curated, especially when there’s a good deal at stake.  Having a filter that takes user-generated content and presents it back to the larger audience is working for Pepsi, which, at the time of the summit, was averaging 38,000 new Twitter followers per day.

What does this mean for meeting professionals? Julian Solaris, editor of Event Manager Blog, pointed out that Twitter has always been a go-to site for events (as opposed to Google+, which is not as widely used) and is perfect for fostering attendee engagement and conversation.  That there is now a livestreaming option just ups its value – for big-budget companies only, unfortunately.

Right now, Twitter’s livestreaming capabilities are limited to large-brand campaigns (read: big bucks), not one-time events.  Which makes Google+ Hangouts on Air all the more appealing for meetings – for the time being.

Read Julian Solaris’ entire post about Twitter livestreaming at convn.org/twitter-livestream.