Several months ago, we wrote on this very blog about lifestreaming as the next great social media trend. Weber Shandwick believes that understanding the lifestream format and its benefits will be crucial to any marketer who works in the social media space.

Storytelling hasn’t changed much since the dawn of the World Wide Web, but there are folks in the storytelling business who push the envelope every day. Led by Social Media Editor Robert Quigley, staffers and editors at the Austin American-Statesman recently compiled user-generated photos and content to tell the story of the summer’s hottest day in its Posterous-powered storystreaming project, “A Day in the Sun.”

Also in Texas, Bryan Person used Posterous earlier this month to compile different types of content from his Social Media Breakfasts in Houston.

If you clicked through to the aforementioned links, there’s a good chance you noticed these lifestreams are very blog-like. Others, on the other hand, are feed-like, relying on aggregated, rather than original, content to tell a story. (Kevin Sablan, the Web Task Force Editor at the Orange County Register, recently sketched out his thoughts on what a news-centric storystreaming platform could look like.)

Seth Godin recently introduced “Brands in Public,” a project that enables brands to aggregate content from all over the Internet. (BIP was met with much criticism from various marketers. One in particular said it was akin to ‘brandjacking’.) Either way, brandstreams tell more complete stories about brands than brands alone can tell. If a customer has a positive or negative experience, if a product is faulty, if a company gets a new CEO — this is all part of the brand’s story.

Aggregation has also become a part of search itself. One example, Addictomatic, can create an instant multimedia stream about any search. (Twazzup does the same thing within Twitter.)

But whether one’s lifestreaming efforts are meant to produce content (blog-like) or aggregate content (feed-like), the lifestream format is changing the Internet before our very eyes.

To help make sense of this, we’ve developed The Lifestream Spectrum to identify and help classify some of the different services:


Despite the two very different formats, what these services all have in common is they’re meant to make a user’s digital experience more rich, more fulfilling and, most importantly, more useful. Celebrities are lifestreaming. Brands are brandstreaming. Lifestreams take a one-dimensional story and add more depth.

Brands can use lifestream platforms to tell their own real-time stories in what are called brandstreams. A proper brandstream can comprise the following, depending on the nature of the brand itself:

  • company news and information
  • executive thought leadership
  • corporate culture, events and “life around the office”

We describe this and much more in our new white paper, “What is a Lifestream?”, where we answer the following questions:

  • What is lifestreaming?
  • Why lifestream?
  • What are some types of lifestreams?
  • What are some lifestreaming platforms I should consider?
  • Does a lifestream replace a socialstream?
  • What is a brandstream?
  • How can brands use lifestreaming platforms to better tell their digital stories?

Once again, you can access the white paper here, and if you have any questions, please feel free to post them as comments on this blog entry, or please feel free to shoot me an e-mail directly.