Q&A with Graham Wallington of WildEarth.tv

(Below is Part 2 of the WildEarth.tv case study, an interview with founder Graham Wallington. The first part of the WildEarth.tv case study can be found here.)

In a webinar last week with Hubspot and on their Inbound Marketing Blog, David Meerman Scott emphasized, among other points, the importance of giving up control of your message if you want your ideas to spread. It’s no coincidence that Graham stresses the very same — I think these guys are onto something here. (Any bold emphasis below is mine.)

Your web site says that you came up with the concept of WildEarth.tv ten years ago at the Djuma Game Reserve. Tell us a little about your background and what your connection was to the Djuma Reserve at that time.

Yes, in 1998 I decided to try and set up a LIVE webcam at a waterhole in the African wilderness and with the help of Paul Clifford and the permission of my good friends Jurie and Pippa Moolman (the owners of Djuma), we installed a 30 second refreshing JPEG webcam at Djuma. We called the company AfriCam and this was the beginning of a phenomenon that just grew and grew. From the very early days, the viewers of this LIVE wildlife content wanted to communicate with each other, but in those early days the only social tools available were message boards and chat rooms. To this day there are still people following our broadcasts that were there on the very first day back in September 1998.

According to the “About” page on your site, you started the infrastructure at the camp in September 2006 and first broadcast on 27 April 2007 (South African Freedom Day). What kind of preparation were you doing between then and when the concept first came to you ten years ago?

So much has happened between 1998 and now … in fact a book was written about it by another great friend of mine Peter Armitage (www.africambook.com). I also made several TV productions for various local broadcasters and international broadcasters, this period was very useful as it taught me all about how to make TV programming. On a production for National Geographic in the Serengeti I met my wife, and soon after the series was complete we began work on WildEarth.TV.

It took a little while to raise the capital necessary and once ready WE began preparing for broadcast. From September 2006 until April 2007 WE built crew accommodation at Vuyatela camp, WE purchased the now famous ‘Tank’ (our first LIVE safari vehicle) and had to kit it out with all the transmission gear. WE built and raised three masts to receive the microwave signal from the tank as well as to connect the waterholes back to our final control, which also had to be built from scratch. During this period, while welding at one of the mast sites, WE accidentally started a bush fire which swept across the northern Sabi Sands. Thankfully no body was hurt, but I did think that WE had lost one of our presenters, Pieter Pretorius, to the flames.

WE also had to arrange for a large Internet connection in a very remote location and this took a long time, but eventually everything was done in April and WE went LIVE, but with only enough capacity for a maximum of 80 simultaneous ‘slots’ on our video server. This fact ‘choked’ our traffic for the first year of operations.

What impressed me the most with WE is your use of different social media outlets, what you call your “social ecosystem”: your Ning, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, blog, twitter, Amazee . . . and the incredibly cohesive online community. Did you go into this having any kind of social media strategy, and if so, where did you begin and how did you expand/promote?

This ‘strategy’ was born out of necessity rather than a grand wisdom. WE simply did not, and still do not, have the resources to build our own infrastructure. It was the idea of Glenn van Loggerenberg (one of the WE partners) to use some of the new Web 2.0 services like Blogger, YouTube and Flickr to start creating a web presence.

Thankfully there was already a large community of LIVE wildlife addicts out there who were ready to get involved with our social network. The content from the other LIVE wildlife broadcasters had hardly moved forward in years, and there was this glaring opportunity to come back into this space, that I love, and provide a LIVE safari, which no one else was doing … and still isn’t doing.

Of course the whole point about a safari as opposed to a waterhole cam is the fact that it is conducted by an experienced professional guide. This means that suddenly LIVE wildlife broadcasting was social … it was now as much about animals as it is about people. Much of the social ecosystem that defines WildEarth was, and is, created by our viewers and much of it was born of the fact that WE did not try to control all the activity on our website. So to summarise I would say that an ecosystem develops when there is strong regular content with a human element that binds a common interest group and when the content creator does not try to control the interaction of that community. It is also critical to remember that a defining element of an ecosystem is that it is never static and must remain in a state of constant change and flux in order to be healthy.

Were there any social media tools/outlets that you tried and they didn’t quite work out? Have you ever had to reassess WE.tv’s presence and/or use of any outlets online?

These are quite difficult questions to answer, because they imply that I am somehow in control of this process and am making decisions against some kind of grand plan, which is simply not true. There have certainly been many ideas that have not ‘taken off’ and many services that have not been popular with the majority … yet. But I am not sure that anything is ever lost. A good example of this is the mashing of our video.

From the very beginning our viewers would rip the LIVE stream, mash it on their computers and then upload their finished creation to sites like YouTube, Photobucket, Flickr, Facebook, our social network, etc. WE just loved this and saw it as a great way to create a kind of highlights system for WildEarth. So Emily and I started a weekly plan to get the crew to shoot a bunch of behind the scenes stuff and play it out before the afternoon safari on a Friday afternoon with a LIVE explanation, and then asked one of the presenters to discuss the weeks highlights for about 10 minutes before the safari. The plan was for the audience to rip this material and then mash it into a polished package and WE would select the one we thought was the best and call it the official highlights package. Well this just didn’t work. Our audience would rip the material, but then simply add music, cut in some of the sightings from the week and upload it. The problem was that WE were approaching this mashing thing from a traditional TV production perspective and just failing to see that this was not what our audience wanted or knew.

Today WE approach this slightly differently … our crew make a short show called WE-BiTS (WildEarth – Behind The Scenes) and we upload that to our YouTube channel. The audience rip the scenes they like, when they like and do with this exactly what they wish, under a Creative Commons 2.5 license and then upload their creations where ever they want. Emily trawls around the web every week, finds the mashups that grab her attention and then writes a blog that highlights them.

The lesson was that you should not try to control the creativity of your audience, but rather provide an environment that people are free to create.

Your online “family” seems very dedicated and die-hard. Did you know any of them online prior to WE or did they come after your launch?

Many of the WEfamily have been watching my broadcasts from the first day. Many of them are, however, silent. What I mean by this is that only a relatively small percentage of our WEfamily communicate with us. There are a great many ‘lurkers’ that just love watching the streams, reading what others write, snap and mash, but are not necessarily comfortable or interested in interacting directly … they are, however, no less a part of WE. Many have been like this for a decade and will stay that way. They often live in the US physically, but there whole lives revolve around WildEarth … they sleep when WE sleep and drive and walk when WE do.

Do you pay much attention to your analytics on WildEarth.tv? What kind of traffic do you get, and from where? Are some days/times more popular for viewing than others?

By far the majority of our traffic comes from North America. However, Germany (because of our partnership with Zaplive), the UK and other European countries are growing fast. Our traffic is still relatively low at about 50,000 unique viewers per month and about 450,000 stream starts. WE do serve about 120,000 hours of streaming video and this is a testament to how ‘sticky’ our content is.

The reason that WE are not more popular than we are is because of a few factors. Firstly, WildEarth has never done any marketing, and the days of a ‘build it and they will come’ strategy on the Internet are long gone. In 1998 when I launched AfriCam the flood of instant traffic was massive, but in 2009 there are billions more websites to compete against. Secondly, our prime content is between 05h30 and 08h30 CAT and then again between 16h30 and 19h30 CAT, which equates to 22h30 and 01h30 EST and then again 09h30 and 12h30 EST, which are not great TV or entertainment viewing times. This will be resolved by expanding our content offerings by investing capital into further vehicles, shows and locations, something which will hopefully become possible as WE slowly grow.

I noticed that some members of your online communities/territories are moderators, did some of them initiate your presence in various places online?

Absolutely, our admin/moderator team are the core of our community. Karen, Colleen and Valorie are three of the hardest working volunteers you will encounter anywhere. Without them I would be totally lost and frankly would be too scared to get out of bed. Not only do they manage and maintain the social network on Ning, the WildEarth Myspace presence, the Facebook group and pages, the WEtwits social network, the WildEarth Intranet on Google Apps and the WildEarth.TV website, but their eyes and ears are everywhere. If a problem begins to brew somewhere in the far away reaches of the network, they know about it, why it is happening, and usually by the time the sun is coming up in Africa they have it under control. It would be completely impossible for such an ecosystem to flourish if it was not for an alert and focused pride of lions and that is what they are … the WE lionesses.

I’m sure this has probably happened, but have any of your online community members actually visited the Djuma Reserve because of WE? What was it like?

Many, many of our audience members have visited Djuma, and I am sure that many more will as well. WE have an arrangement with Djuma whereby if guests come to stay at Vuyatela (the Djuma lodge), they are brought to our camp by their ranger and get to have a tour of our camp, meet the crew, sit in the director’s seat and then if they wish one or more of our crew will often join them for dinner at Vuyatela. There have been times when large groups of fans have come through while touring various African webcams. Essentially our community is really a community of wildlife cam addicts that watch several LIVE wildlife broadcasts … WildEarth’s is just the best of the bunch!

You mentioned that you have a team that tweets when there’s something interesting going on live. So this is an online team, or is it people at final control, or both? How do you do that?

The WEtwits team is a relatively new team and very much still in its infancy. Basically WE called on our community for volunteers to help us build a powerful Twitter service. When folks volunteer they are issued with a @wildearth.tv email account which gives them access to our Intranet on Google Apps. Additionally they receive a detailed mail explaining how it all works and invited to join the official WEtwits social network (which was built by the admin team on the Ning platform). Here WE explain, develop and share all the various details about how to Tweet, access info for the @wildearth Twitter account, the do’s and dont’s, etc. Then when the volunteer is ready to take on a shift they log a time in the WEtwits calendar on the Intranet (which is not public) and then they monitor the LIVE activity during their shift and Tweet the action as they see it.

This is a great service to those of our followers who are maybe not at their PCs or TVs. Many of our followers receive our Tweets on either their iPhones or via SMS (text message). I love this service as I am able to stay abreast of every sighting on all cams, while I go about doing all the other things that need to be done.

Whenever there are camera difficulties or anything, your crew is sure to inform the various community areas about it. How many people usually are responsible for this?

When Djuma goes offline or there is a technical difficulty that means a change in our schedule, WE work very hard to get back on air ASAP and also make sure that our community are kept abreast of what is going on. If it is a smallish issue that has not taken Djuma offline, the crew announce our status and progress on air regularly. If Djuma has been forced off air, or if it is a big issue that may take 12 hours or more to resolve I will Blog the situation and keep updating this. Whichever it is, our admins will then take the info and make sure it spreads fast through the ecosystem.

In addition, there are many viewers that are members of our official network and or read the blog, who will then carry this info to the message boards and chat rooms that are not part of the official network, but still form part of the ecosystem. The news travels fast and people really appreciate strong honest and open communication. Also, our crew work incredibly hard to fix problems and this strong communication makes sure that their hard work is known and appreciated by the audience … it helps strengthen the WEfamily.

Do you have your own in-house web-team aside from your online community?

No, WildEarth has no full time web-team. All web development on our website, www.wildearth.tv, is undertaken by the phenomenal, talented and creative team at Zaplive.tv in Germany. Under the leadership of Christian Steiger, they have managed to build a platform that promises to forever change the world of LIVE broadcasting. With amazing achievements like the ‘seekpoint’, which promises to make cloud editing a reality in the very near future, and a system for the inclusion, control and dissemination of LIVE wildlife broadcasts which will allow us to help those who wish to show the world wildlife to finally be profitable and let them focus on the content and not on the technology. I can not say enough how important it is to build an ecosystem of partnerships with people who know what they are doing and are driven passionately to do it.

WildEarth.TV runs on a flat management structure that allows all the various individuals to work around the clock on any and all aspects of what WE do without having to clear every decision or communication through a top structure. As a result WE run more and sleep less …

Tell us more about the WEangels. How did they come about, what have they done and what kind of things do they have planned?

The WEangels came about as a result of realising that wildlife conservation is far more about people than it is about animals. This is often hard for people from 1st world countries to understand, but the reality is that unless the impoverished communities that live around the ‘islands’ of wilderness left on our planet, benefit directly from the wildlife, they will harvest it in order to survive. WE appreciate that there are many non-governmental organisations that are much bigger than us, that do far more than WE ever can, but we wanted to do our bit to save the planet. WE decided that the best way to do this would be to do small things for the people of a small village near Djuma called Dixie. With a population of about 450 people, few of whom have jobs and all of whom live close to or below the bread line, their needs are vast.

To begin with WE decided to raise the money from our audience to take the very youngest kids to see Beverley Hills Chihuahua in Nelspruit some 3 hours drive from Dixie. The money literally poured in and WE had raised enough within about a week or two to rent a few buses and drive all the kids, plus several adults, to Nelspruit. Few of the kids had ever seen a paved (tarred) road, or a double story building, let alone been in a city. Then they each got popcorn, sodas, etc. and went in to see a movie, which none of them had ever done. Afterwards, they all went for a hamburger lunch and made the long journey home, singing all the way.

Those of our viewers that donated and helped became known as WEangels, because they were like angels far from away making a difference in the lives of those that were forgotten.

Since then WE have raised enough money to buy 146 kids Christmas presents and lay on a Christmas lunch for 600 people … all broadcast LIVE. Now WE are working on an ambitious plan to provide fresh running water to all the residents of Dixie. Already WE have raised $5,000 from a competition called the Amazee Bucket, where our community managed to win 2nd and 3rd place by joining our projects. The next step is to fully cost this project, raise the remaining money and get water to these people. Much of the coordinating and admin is done by Stacy Manfredi and the WildEarth Admin team.

I noticed you use Amazee for your WEangels fundraising projects. I’m not that familiar with that platform (yet). Could you explain how it works? How’s it working out for you?

Amazee is a social collaboration system, and in my opinion the best example out there. The concept is simple, you create a project and build a network of members that either contribute financially or otherwise depending on the objectives of your project. Amazee provides the tools that bring like minded folk together and allow them to coordinate their efforts.

The key factors about Amazee that got my attention are the fact that it is run by a very hard working team that genuinley want to build a network that helps other people change the world. They know what they are doing and do it all day. There is really no point in trying to create a better system because you won’t and using Amazee you are standing on the shoulders of giants. Secondly they have a very international membership and I think that this is important. It is too easy to get into a very US focused ecosystem, and while the majority of our traffic is from the US, I think it is valuable to all concerned to have a very international flavour to our network. Again, diversity is healthy. Finally, Amazee actually offers money in the form of the Bucket competition or the Facebook Rally that is running now. This allows our community to get involved to raise money for a just cause without having to reach into their pockets, this is obviously great in these economic times, but also a very strong bonding force in a community. The community that competes together, stays together.

You mentioned you’re soon launching a TV channel in the UK. How soon will WE.tv be available on TV in the US?

Hopefully soon! WildEarth is now LIVE on SomethingTV 24/7, which is actually a historic moment for this concept. It has been a dream for many many years. WE are looking for broadcasters and pay TV operators that have the vision and foresight to carry our channel on their platforms. The US is obviously a big and important market and WE hope to be on TV set near you soon …

What’s this I hear about adding broadcasters from other networks soon?

It has already happened. Hancock Wildlife Foundation have already gone LIVE on the WildEarth Network with two of their bald eagle cams, and by the time many read this interview two more will be LIVE, with several more in the immediate pipeline.

The concept is really a very simple one … it has been difficult, and usually impossible, for small companies trying to broadcast wildlife LIVE to even cover their costs let alone make a profit. The problem is that the better your content, the more traffic you get, which means that your distribution costs go up. Effectivley you can be so succesful you go out of business, which is exactly what happened to me before. The key is to reduce your distribution costs and make a revenue consistently through the viewing session. So what WE have done is put several in-stream advertising deals in place so that WE can monetise that video streaming, and now WE are offering other LIVE wildlife broadcasters the opportunity to stream to our head end in Holland.

As long as their content meets our approval WE will insert ads into the stream, allow them to embed the stream into their websites and WE will cover the distribution bandwidth costs out of the in-stream advertising revenue. If there is a profit WE will share that 50/50 with the broadcaster. The more video WE serve through this system the cheaper per stream it gets and therefore the more profitable. This system allows us to band together and reduce the costs by working cooperatively.

Whats important to remember is that the broadcasters do not loose their identity, do not loose their websites and do not have to send their audience and traffic to WildEarth. They just embed their streams, like you would with a YouTube video, and away you go. The broadcaster makes the same money whether the viewer watches the stream on WildEarth or whether they watch it on their own site or anywhere else in the web.

This will hopefully encourage more people to take the ‘risk’ of entering our young industry and help those that have been around a while expand their content offerings. This new ecosystem of broadcasters will hopefully be seen as a way for us all to work on the principle that a rising tide should lift all ships.

If someone were interested in sponsoring WE through advertising, whom should they contact? What kind of advertising do you offer?

If they are in the US, they should contact www.scanscout.com as they are handling all our US in-stream traffic. If a company outside of the US wishes to advertise or if you are a broadcaster looking to be a part of the WE network get hold of me on graham[AT]wildearth.tv

What’s next for WE.tv? Do you have any other new developments in the works?

There are several new developments in the works, but they all build on what WE already do and have. We hope to get our channel distributed onto more TV platforms and hopefully more broadcasters will join our network. There is a massive content expansion plan in the works, but the exact date and time of this is still being worked out. There are also several other channels coming, based on some very very exciting technology that we have been working on for years. As well as very ambitious plan to build a social network of animals … for wildlife, by people.

What is your ultimate vision for WE.tv?

Ultimately I see WildEarth as a critical undertaking … more of a mission … to tell the truth about nature. Not to overhype it, make it all about dangerous animals that kill each other and people, but to create a whole new genre of natural history television that is about an honest portrayal of the animals that WE share this planet with. At the same time it would be good to make a difference to the planet by connecting people, with a shared interest in wildlife, for the purpose of helping other people conserve that wildlife.

Thank you very very much for bothering to learn more about what WE do. You have not only helped others to understand us, but you have forced us all to take a harder look at what WE have created. This has been most interesting and most encouraging.

All the best,

Graham

All photographs used with permission. For those interested in learning more about WE and its involvement with Amazee, there is a short interview with Graham at Amazee.com.