RIP Meerkat, Much More Than A Live Streaming App

October 3, 2016

Kerry Flynn of Mashable reached out to me last week for a quote about my experience on Meerkat now that they have officially shut down and pivoted to “House Party”

Thinking about how much of my life has changed and what Meerkat meant to my current success, sparked lots of memories and I wanted to expand on them here beyond what the blog post was able to capture. Read the Mashable blog here!

A year at #meerkat change it all for me at #SXSW
Rocking the vintage throwback today at #SXSWi brings back so many… pic.twitter.com/EWVxtIoX3r

— Brian Fanzo (@iSocialFanz) March 11, 2016

I wasn’t a video blogger, I’m not someone that loves to consume video, the concept of live streaming wasn’t something I thought would have valuable for me and my business. That all changed thanks to a fuzzy little animal that lived in my phone that created a community, that bled yellow and transformed my business my passion, my belief in the power of community. For many meerkat created the mobile live streaming buzz at SXSW, that is now dominated by Facebook and Twitter.

For me I believe Meerkat did far more than pioneer this new way of having conversations with your community via video, it gave early adopters social media power users and many they didn’t feel that they could get their voice heard a community, a platform and ultimately friends around the world. Meerkat had such a profound impact on me that I made the mistake of believing that what I loved was the app, going as far as to uninstalling and bashing periscope when it was first released. But as I started to look at what I found valuable the sense of community, the friends and business partners that I created thanks to meerkat I realize what meerkat gave us was far more than a live streaming app it was a blueprint for rolling out an app, building a community and embracing Of early adopters.

#meekkat pic of @iSocialFanz and @garyvee #socialengagment pic.twitter.com/DXX32B8BRE

— Brian Yanish (@MarketingHits) March 14, 2015

I’ve Livestreamed over 1800 times (still more followers on my meerkat account than periscope), I’ve keynoted at over 50 events in 10 countries in 2016 and I believe a majority of that success has everything to do with what meerkat enable us the community to do in 2015. Meerkat the app might be dead but the friendships, memories & impact on the future of live streaming lives on. I’ll be forever grateful for Ben Rubin and his team and all those who like me spent thousands of hours on meerkat long before it became the cool trendy thing to do!

You can read all my blog posts over the last year about Meerkat: