Wait, two What's New articles in a single week?! What can we say? We ❤️ improving, and we're not afraid to show it. We're pumped to share two amazing enhancements to your streaming and attendee engagement experiences - Socio Streaming Brands, and Custom Tab. We've also added an Analytics Tracking Alert and Dark Mode for the Web App, plus a couple bonus updates. Have a look.

Socio Streaming Brands

Live streams are a fantastic way to engage remote attendees and enrich their experience while adding value for your sponsors, speakers, and organization by weaving in custom branding assets like Overlays, Logos, and Video Clips.

What if you have a lot of custom content, and not all of it is useful for every stream though? You shouldn't have to spend precious seconds during a live stream feverishly hunting through your own content to find what's useful for a given sponsor or session. That's why we've partnered with Restream to bring you Brand folders!

When you visit the Socio Streaming studio, you'll see the new Brand button. Click the button to add a new Brand or switch between up to 5 existing ones. Captions and everything on the Graphics tab — Theme, Primary Color, Logos, etc. — are unique to each brand. Just like before, all assets in one studio are shared with every other studio in your event.

There are tons of applications for switching between sets of branding assets, so let your imagination run wild!

For a complete look at using the Socio Streaming studio and Brands, check this out.

Custom Tab

Socio's own Chat, Q&A, and Polling features have been a mainstay for attendee engagement in Agenda sessions and Live Stream features for a while now. That family just got bigger with an awesome new sibling - the Custom Tab!

Now, when you edit an Agenda session or Live Stream feature, you'll see a new toggle under the Attendee Engagement section. Toggle Custom Tab on, name it, and enter a URL for an embeddable, mobile responsive site that appears as another engagement tab for your live stream!

Websites like Sli.do work well, but there are many more possibilities. Simply remember that the custom tab content has to be responsive - able to resize itself automatically - to fit inside the engagement panel on the Web App and to be usable on mobile devices. Websites' privacy settings may also prevent embedding. Simply remember to test any site you use before showing it to attendees. 👍 

We're excited to see all the ways you'll dream up to engage your attendees with this new feature, so if you think of an awesome use case, let us know! 

Analytics Tracking Alert

Informing your attendees about data privacy and honoring their preferences are more important than ever. Show your security-conscious attendees you value their privacy choices, and equip them with knowledge about your security and data practices. 

When attendees join your Socio Event or Community, we track their actions so you have the insight you need to improve your events, show sponsorship ROI, award Continuing Education credits, and understand how people interacted with your content. Some attendees can't be tracked for metrics because they're using an ad blocker or private browser session.

We've added a new option to the Web App Settings page. When someone logs into your Web App, and the Socio Platform detects that they can't be tracked, they'll see a pop-up.

If the pop-up is set to "Warning", they can close the message and go about using the event. If it's set to "Prevent Access", the message will keep appearing until the Socio Platform detects that they can be tracked. The Show Me How button leads to this article that helps them allow Socio through their ad blocker.

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This new setting is set to No Warning by default for all active and upcoming events and communities, but you can customize the message to suit your situation.

For details on controlling this new feature in your event, check this out!

Metrics

Along with this release, there's a new Tracked Users sheet in the Metrics export. Check out our Metrics article for more information on interpreting and exporting data.

Web App Dark Mode

When you visit the Web App page of your Event App, you'll notice a new toggle for Dark Mode. When the toggle is turned on, all attendees who join your event via a web browser will see the event in Dark Mode. 

⭐ Keep in mind, attendees can't turn dark mode on or off themselves — only you can do that. Dark Mode isn't available for Branded Apps or the Socio App.

Make sure to hop into your Web App as an attendee and test things out for yourself to make sure your branding and color choices all jive well.

And more...

• We've added support for 3 new languages - Danish, Slovak, and Romanian.
• All live streams through Socio Streaming by Restream and the Socio RTMP player now stream at 1080p by default on web and mobile. 
• Socio now passes attendee language selections to Slido when a Slido link is opened externally and the Pass data to URL box is checked! In a Custom Tab, Slido will update with the selected language.

That was a lot of reading. Have some pie. 🥧 

As always, keep the feedback coming, and we'll keep working to make Socio the best in the biz.

Hop over to the Socio Platform and take a look for yourself.