Unlike larger conferences, where you often find professional AV assistants, high quality PA systems, proper staging, lighting etc., smaller workshops are often conducted in situations which make filming more challenging. Aside from the difficulties of positioning a camera in what may be a poorly lit room (for the purposes of filming) without obstructing the view of participants in the room, we often find it is particularly difficult to get good quality sound at such events.

Beautifully lit, HD quality video is obviously very nice, but when you are producing video of a presentation for the web, the sound is the most important aspect to get right. People will often play videos or live streams on their computer whilst working on other things, making the picture quality of the video secondary to the quality of the audio. This is an issue I have been struggling with for a while, along with my husband Rich, who often assists me at events and does much of the video post production for me. After spending hours trying to rescue some particularly poor audio from one such event, we decided that we needed some help and a strategic rethink of how we approach covering these events.

We enlisted the help of a friend, Gavin Tyte, a professional performer who and a former music technology teacher who does all of his own sound engineering and video production. This is the kind of thing Gavin normally gets up to:
 

Gavin was able to give us an audio surgery, in which we assessed our existing equipment, discussed the different scenarios we face at events when we are required to record audio, and established what we can do to improve both our raw recordings and the post production of our audio.

This was quite a wide ranging session, so I want to focus in on just one of scenarios we discussed, and the changes in practice we hope to adopt.

One of our most pressing issues was how best to mic a speaker at a small workshop. We often find that when a local PA system exists (and is turned on!) the microphone is fixed to a desk or lectern. There is normally no way to take a direct feed from this, so we have to position our shotgun microphone next to a PA speaker close to the video camera. However, speakers rarely think to reposition the PA mic to an appropriate height before they start talking, and often wander away from it all together. This is very easy to do in an informal setting, particularly if the room and audience are of a size where the speaker can be heard perfectly well with minimal projection.

The same thing happens when we put our shotgun mic near the front to pick up the speaker’s voice directly. The shotgun mic is directional, and ideally needs to be as close to the speaker as possible to pick up the best possible sound. If the speaker moves around, or chooses to stand in a position away from the mic for the majority of their talk, I have no opportunity to turn it or reposition it without obstructing the view of the audience.

Gavin advised us to forget about any local PA system completely and concentrate on collecting the sound directly, preferably using a good quality wireless lapel mic with the receiver plugged directly into the camera. A top of the range wireless lapel mic set can cost upwards of £500, but there will be cheaper solutions. He also suggested using the shotgun mic in addition to the wireless lapel mic, positioning this close to the speaker and attaching it to an iPod or similar device. This will create a separate back up recording, which can be used to supplement the audio from the lapel mic in the event of any problems. This allows us to take full control of the quality of the audio we get, without relying on equipment in the room or speakers making correct use of such equipment.

Whilst this technically solves our problem, I believe there is a human issue to be addressed here too. I need to encourage organisers to brief their speakers more effectively, not just so that the remote audience can hear them on the recording (particularly in the event that we need to rely on the back up audio for any reason), but also to help improve the accessibility of the event as a whole. After all, anyone in the physical audience who may be hard of hearing will experience exactly the same problem as the remote audience if the speaker fails to use the PA equipment provided effectively.

We discussed lots of other topics in our audio surgery and got some really valuable advice from Gavin about working with professional sound engineers at conferences to get the best possible feed from a managed desk, and where replacing key pieces of kit with high quality equipment will really pay off. Whilst he was able to give us training to make better use of our software for post production, he was very firm: you can’t repair a bad recording. It is vital to take control and invest in the right equipment to get the very best original recording possible. This has to be our focus at smaller events over the next few months to improve the quality of what we produce for our clients.

Hootsuite acquires Twapper Keeper

Thanks for using Twapper Keeper – we look forward to seeing you at HootSuite.”
 
 
 
So begins the long goodbye to an incredibly useful service.

With just a few clicks, even the most casually interested observer could create a public archive of a Twitter hash tag. This was immensely useful to me as an event amplifier, as it allowed me not just to provide visualisations, using tools like Summarizr, but also provided a rich pot of data about Twitter interaction at amplified events.

Brian Kelly’s recent post, Responding to the Forthcoming Demise of Twapper Keeper, outlines the processes currently available for migrating Twapper Keeper archives and suggests some of the factors which may influence decisions by key stakeholders about which archives should be preserved. In this post I will summarise my own response to the announcement, which overlaps with much of Brian’s advice, and consider some of the implications of the withdrawal of Twapper Keeper from my perspective as an event amplifier.

“My” Archives

I feel a personal obligation to rescue the archives I have created myself, but also have a vested interest in the preservation of a number of archives created by others – particularly those which record discussions surrounding events where I have been involved. After all, those archives effectively represent a record of my work to date, as well as a valuable evidence base for future research into the use of Twitter at amplified events.

As a general rule, I do not create Twapper Keeper records for events myself, as I am outside of UK HE and was therefore only permitted to create a limited number of archives. In fact, I have only ever created one archive myself. Instead, I encourage clients to create an archive for their event, as they are (in the main) part of UK HE establishment and are therefore not subject to the same restrictions. Unfortunately, this strategy means that I cannot necessarily rely on someone else backing up archives that interest me before Twapper Keeper disappears, so I have chosen to undertake this myself.

I have used Martin Hawksey’s Google Spreadsheet tool, described in his post: Free the tweets! Export TwapperKeeper Archives Using Google Spreadsheet. I will also take a series of screenshots from Summarizr about each archive to serve as a visual summary of the data contained within the archive, for reference purposes.

For the record, the archives I have created so far are:

Upon revisiting Martin’s post, I find that he is now asking people to help co-ordinate the effort to rescue archives by sharing those they have created using his method. Several of the above already appear, but I have added the remainder to his catalogue.

I will be contacting the organisers of each event to make them aware of the changes and to share the link to the relevant archive, as a matter of courtesy. I will also be making a local copy of each archive to store offline with the other materials from each event.

The Future

I am a Hootsuite Pro customer, so I investigated my options to continue using the Twapper Keeper functionality in its new incarnation. Information about the new feature is not yet easy to find on the Hootsuite website, but I did eventually find this how-to explaining the new process. Interestingly, I also found instructions to download your archive, a feature that Twitter demanded that Twapper Keeper remove back in March of this year, and a pause/resume archiving function.

Hootsuite Pro Feature List

There is of course, a catch. A Pro customer (paying $5.99 per month) can archive only a measly 100 tweets, or purchase a bolt on to archive up to “100,000 tweets and download all keyword related Twitter messages”. When I attempted to upgrade my plan, I found that 10,000 additional tweets would cost me $10 per month, and 100,000 additional tweets would cost me $50 per month.

Luckily, Martin Hawksey is a master of Google Spreadsheet tools and has created this alternative method of collecting tweets and has provided detailed instructions to archive and visualise Twitter conversations around an event hashtag . I will certainly be making greater use of these tools for future events.

As I have mentioned before, you can use CoverItLive to collect tweets and export them as an RSS feed. I tend to have this running as an incidental back up to Twapper Keeper at events, as it is my preferred method of offering interactive access to amplified discussions for participants who choose not to use Twitter. However, I tend to run a CoverItLive event only for the duration of the event itself, so this does not preserve the longer tail of the discussions.

The code for Your Twapper Keeper is still available which enables you to create your own local version of Twapper Keeper for personal use, but at the time of writing the accompanying website appears to be unavailable, so it is not clear whether this tool will remain supported.

Update: John O’Brien has just let me know that the latest version of Your Twapper Keeper is available here.

Reflections

Once again, this is a pertinent reminder of the fragility of using third party online services. However, it also raises a questions about who should care for amplified event materials stored online after the event, and for how long. On this occasion I had a personal interest in seeing these archives migrated safely to an alternative site, but in general I have no contractual obligation to ensure the longevity of materials from the events I amplify. Should I, as a professional event amplifier, be committing to monitor online services and alert previous clients if their materials are at risk? Should I be migrating the content myself? If I take on these responsibilities, how long should they last? And how should I charge for such a service? Even with Martin Hawksey’s incredibly simple and timely solution to retrieve archives from Twapper Keeper, it has still taken a not-inconsiderable amount of time to assess the implications of the changes, create the duplicate archives, share them, and communicate with the event organisers to notify them. Managing the withdrawal of other services may take even longer.

This experience has reinforced the need to consider these issues and to ensure that there is a clear agreement in place with my clients covering whether they want materials from their amplified event to be maintained over time, what should be saved in the event of a service closure, and who should be responsible for migrating that content. My concern is that many event organisers only see short term value in amplification, and may not be fully conversant with the issues. There may also be concerns from participants in amplified events, who agreed to one thing at the time and may not want their contributions migrated to a different environment, which they may have cause to distrust.

Conclusions

I feel like I have waded into a bit of a quagmire here. Many of these issues will undoubtedly be debated in time and at the moment there are so many questions that I could end up writing an EVEN LONGER post just to explore them. But not today.

However, I would very much welcome the perspectives of any event organisers who have used Twitter at their event. Is the long term existence of an archive of those discussions is something you would value? And is the continued availability of online event materials from your event an issue of concern when amplifying their event?
Filed under: curation, preservation, Twitter ]]> http://eventamplifier.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/goodbye-twapper-keeper/feed/ 2 Custard hootsuite logo hootsuiteplans http://eventamplifier.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/open-content-and-open-events-professional-development-in-an-amplified-world/ http://eventamplifier.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/open-content-and-open-events-professional-development-in-an-amplified-world/#comments Mon, 05 Dec 2011 10:13:45 +0000 Kirsty Pitkin http://eventamplifier.wordpress.com/?p=327 ]]> Last week I was invited to give a presentation at Online Information 2011 on behalf of Brian Kelly, who had submitted a paper titled: “Open Content and Open Events: Professional Development in an Amplified World” but was unfortunately unable to give the associated presentation himself.  However, he was able to co-present the talk with me via two pre-recorded videos, thus amplifying himself across time and space.

In my part of the presentation, I discussed the benefits of amplified events, where I feel they sit on the events spectrum, the best practices that have emerged over the last few years and outlined how the audience could get involved.  We also played a quick game of Twitter Buzzword Bingo, which was won by @LISResearch.

As an example of how easy it can be to amplify a talk informally (and entirely for free), here is a selection of resources to help the talk reach future audiences…

First up is a home-spun video recording of my talk, which was recorded on a flip cam with very minimal post-production editing to account from the poor image quality that results from recording a projected video from a distance.

Also available on Vimeo.

And here are my slides…

Also available on Slideshare.

There is also a record of what the audience had to say whilst I was talking on Storify.

Many thanks to all those who helped to amplify this presentation, particularly the session’s Twitter moderator @bethanar, and top tweeters @LISResearch and @ianwooler.  Thanks also to Brian Kelly for giving me the opportunity to make this presentation, and for co-presenting with me from afar.

So, what can you do with LinkedIn to facilitate amplification around an event?

1. Create an event group

At the JISC Conference 2011 we used an event LinkedIn group as an unmoderated space to encourage more detailed discussion of the issues in the run up to and the days after the conference. There were a few seed discussions planted, but the amplification plan for the event stressed that the group was being offered as a community space “for participants to expand their professional networks” rather than a organiser-driven space. Ultimately, there was a relatively low level of actual engagement, although 140 people did joined the group.

This example demonstrates the general theme I have encountered, whereby LinkedIn groups tend to take a long time to mature and often require a core of regular users to get discussion going and keep it moving. The effort involved is therefore quite high and would therefore only be of value to support an ongoing series of events over time, rather than one off events. That said, groups can be very useful spaces to for participants to make connections and build up their professional networks, even if they do not actually engage in discussions within the group.

2. Create an event and send invites

The events feature is not a prominent one, but it is possible to set up an event listing within LinkedIn and invite contacts to indicate whether or not they plan to attend, thereby helping to provide their contacts with a credible endorsement about the event. However, there is no default option to search specifically for events in the main search bar, nor does the shiny new LinkedIn app allow you to discover or set up events.

The feature does seem to be under exploited, with events attracting very few responses from attendees, even for very large conventions. It also appears to be possible to set up multiple event listings for the same event, potentially distributing the actual attendees across different listings and therefore diluting the effect.

3. Tap other groups

If you are part of a group, you can send private messages to other members of that group – either in reply to a specific comment or more generally – to invite them to participate in the discussion around your event. Unfortunately, there appear to be no metrics demonstrating the effectiveness of such a strategy or how many organisers engage with group members in this way as part of their promotional activities. I get a few emails which start with: “As we’re members of the same group, I thought you’d be interested in…” but invariably I am not. If you go down this route you need to research hard and really personalise your messages to really make sure you are targeting the right person and making them feel singled out, rather than spammed.

Alternatively, established groups can be used more effectively for research, which may attract participants more subtly. Approaching an active group community with a serious question and requesting their input can help them to feel involved with the event and engage with the online discussion surrounding it, whether they attend in person or not. Such questions could take the form of: “We’re thinking of running an event about X, and we know X+1 is a hot topic – what issues do you think we need to be discussing? Who would be a great expert to ask to speak?”  You can also link to resources from your event and invite discussion – spreading the materials and the conversation around those materials further.

Observations on LinkedIn Group Culture

In my experience, serious group users and administrators tend to be fiercely defensive of their discussion space. It takes a lot of effort to build up and sustain a genuine discussion group via LinkedIn, with groups tending to be a polarisation between those that permit promotion and those which shun it entirely. Those which permit promotion have difficulty controlling the less tactful behaviour of marketeers and often become wastelands full of billboards, whilst those groups who religiously shun promotional activity of any nature tend to moderate their groups very rigorously. Promoting an event or spreading the word about the amplification of the event discussion through LinkedIn groups takes far more research and tact than simply identifying a group with a common interest in your event’s subject area.

The JISC11 LinkedIn Group

LinkedIn has recently made it possible for administrators to make their groups open, and therefore accessible to non members and search engines. However, not all groups have chosen to go down this route, so it is important to consider this when assessing the amplification potential of engaging and providing resources within a particular group space.

Even when groups are open, the viral spreading of the content of these discussions has to be consciously driven, as notifications about discussions and comments within groups do not appear in detail within the news stream of all of a member’s contacts. This means a conversation is going on, it is being captured, but it is not really be amplified in an easily discoverable and searchable way.

It All Comes Down To Effort…

Part of the problem with LinkedIn from an amplification perspective is the amount of work involved in really connecting with individuals on a personal level so you can share with them without appearing to be spammy. As a platform it is not really as suitable for broad brush sharing techniques possible in many other social networks, making it a more appropriate choice if you are looking for a specific audience, rather than a wide audience.

LinkedIn Group Top Influencers Chart

As with all social media tools, the amount of effort required to make them useful depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve. If you are amplifying to help promote your event, then LinkedIn can help you identify and target specific people, but will involve a much greater investment of time per person. If you are looking for a replacement for the beleaguered dedicated event social network, a LinkedIn group can be a useful asset for longer form discussion, but again will require a high level of investment in time and resources if you want it to be a really active discussion forum in the longer term. Dedicated event social networks require this too, but have the added barrier of requiring participants to complete yet another profile and regularly visit yet another site. A LinkedIn group can be an effective way of replacing the forum functionality within an environment where participants already have a longer lasting presence and can take any connections they make with them.

Potential

LinkedIn does have the potential to deliver many of the key aims of amplification: facilities to spread ideas, extend the event community through personal professional networks, and capture online content in a forum where it can be discovered and discussed. If this is where your active community is already engaging, then there should be no reason why you cannot run an amplified event using LinkedIn.

However, the effort required to create momentum around the conference matter can be prohibitive if there is not an already active community within LinkedIn focussed on your topic. The relative lack of reporting from LinkedIn itself also makes it difficult to build a case that demonstrates the value of the tool as part of a wider amplification plan. For instance, I can often see that articles I have written have been shared within LinkedIn through other reporting tools, but I don’t know where, so I don’t know what discussions may have taken place around those resources, even if they have been shared in an “open” group.

Conclusions

LinkedIn is one of the more resource intensive social networks, which makes it difficult to incorporate into an event amplification plan without considerable investment and planning. The new LinkedIn app for iPhone is very smart and has encouraged me to engage with the platform far more, so I can certainly see how an extended events feature could help it to become vastly more useful, should the development team choose to go in that direction.

Assessing the potential for LinkedIn has made me much more acutely aware of the delicate relationship between event amplification and event promotion, and the ways in which more sensitive, discussion-based amplification activity could inform event marketing much more than it currently does. It has also highlighted the value in researching your event audience closely to identify the social media platform that is most applicable to them, and looking for opportunities within that, no matter how unlikely it may seem or how little evidence may exist to support its use. LinkedIn may not be the event amplifier’s dream of an open, wide reaching platform, but there certainly is a place for it within their repertoire of tools.

Clear Visibility

I was given a cardboard sign with a big picture of a Twitter bird to hold up when I had a question from the online audience for one of the speakers. This meant I was much more visible to the conference chairman, who was therefore able to give priority to these questions. I often struggle to be immediately obvious to the session chair if I am just another hand in the audience, or if I am sitting further back (as I was today) due to power socket constraints.

Effective Communication Channels

I had a direct Skype chat open with someone who was sitting in with the technical team whilst the operated the live video stream. Note: Not a member of the technical team itself. When something goes wrong with a live video stream at an event, the technical team normally focuses entirely on fixing the problem, making it difficult for me to communicate with them effectively. Today, the very wonderful Rebecca was able to talk with them directly as they worked, let me know what was going on and pass my feedback on straight away when members of the audience started reporting an issue via Twitter. This meant I could respond swiftly to these reports, making managing the issue much more efficient.

Greater Integration

The event chair reminded the audience throughout the day about the existence of the online audience, roughly how large it was, and directed comments directly to them, where appropriate, so they would feel included. This made the event amplification feel like less of a bolt on and more of an integral part of the event. At points during the day the online audience outnumbered the physical audience, demonstrating that the wide interest in the event online.

Conclusion

So, thumbs up to the JISC events team for making the role of the event amplifier fit in so much more effectively with the other workings of the event. These little things really do help!

Whilst I find the vast majority of events I cover fascinating, it is quite rare to cover an event where the topic is directly relevant to my work. Measuring the impact of amplifying an event is becoming increasingly important, and I was keen to hear not just the tips and tricks, but also different perspectives on the issues associated with collecting and using statistics.

The key message I took away was the need to work out what you want to know, then measure that. Many of the things you can measure may sound impressive, but may not actually show you have achieved your aims. The idea that most appealed to me was the idea of telling the story of your data to help put the numbers into a real world context.

Summarizr Statistics for #UKOLNeim Hash Tag

We are currently in the process of editing the HD video footage of the event, which will appear shortly on Vimeo, and writing up the event report, which will appear as a guest post on Brian’s UK Web Focus blog. However, I wanted to have a quick brain dump to explore some of the issues that arose from an amplification perspective when tackling this event…

Technical Issues

We were live streaming the event using Livestream and two camera angles. For production, we used CamTwist for Mac. We’ve never used this set up before, so there were obviously some teething problems to get around.

The main problem was that we were unable to obtain a wired internet connection, which meant we were streaming over wifi. This is always far from ideal. We used the Livestream standard settings for the morning session, but adjusted these in the afternoon to try to improve the image quality. We were complimented on the sound quality, but the poor image quality meant that speakers slides were not always particularly readable via the stream. Our initial camera angle did little to help, but moving the second camera over the lunch break to get a better view of the slides improved the situation. It is worth noting that several of the slides were difficult for the people in the room to read in any detail, so were not really suitable for transmitting via the live stream. This meant that anyone wanting to see the slides in greater detail needed to open another tab or window in their browser and navigate to the slides on Slideshare.

Luckily, we were aware that many of these issues were likely to occur, and therefore had clear strategies in place to manage audience expectation and resolve issues. We told remote participants to use the chat facility provided within Livestream to report any technical issues with the stream, whilst using Twitter to participate in an integrated discussion of the subject matter. This separated out support from conversation, and allowed our camera man to monitor and respond to technical issues, whilst I monitored the Twitter discussions. The remote audience had also been forewarned that we would not know until the day what would be possible in terms of streaming, and were supplied with supplementary links to the resources as they were required via Twitter.

The Remote Experience

Miquel Duran from the University of Girona blogged about his experience as a remote participant in the event. He observed on Twitter that it really made a difference when speakers looked at the camera and addressed the remote audience, which unfortunately happened only occasionally. For me, this emphasised the need to really brief your speakers carefully about making a connection with the remote audience in the same way as they would aim to connect with the physical audience using eye contact. I had not really considered this as a priority myself when I have watch live video streams remotely, as I normally just listen to the audio.

Ann Priestly also highlighted the amount of window switching required to access the different materials. This helped me to think a bit more about the, albeit sketchy, line between the amplified event and the hybrid event. Amplification can be applied to any type of event (traditional, hybrid or virtual) and is really about using multiple channels – particularly social/sharing channels – to get a message out to the widest possible audience across time and space. A hybrid event does the same thing, often with the same channels, but normally presents the material in a more co-ordinated way to create a crafted event experience, in much the same way as the experience of in-person participants is crafted by the event organiser. The more hybridised an event becomes, the more centralised the focus becomes, making attendance as a remote participant more about going to a fixed location at a fixed time and receiving a tailored experience. The picture I have in my head at the moment is of an amplified event organiser scattering seeds over a wide area, whilst a hybrid event organiser plants bulbs in a very specific way.

The Event Amplifier as a Guide

During the event there were multiple channels used to amplify the #ukolneim workshop, including Twitter, CoverItLive, Slideshare, Livestream and the iPhone app Shhmooze (as reviewed by Brian). Post-event we also used Vimeo and Storify. The unification strategy involved links to these materials from various pages on the event website, and guidance tweets from me via my @eventamplifier account, directing participants to the different resources as and when they became relevant. However, you couldn’t see all of these resources together simultaneously unless you organised these things in different windows on your screen.

Whilst this gave remote participants flexibility, particularly for those who were following along on the periphery whilst working on other things, I appreciate that those trying to follow in a more complete and active way may have found the navigation between distributed materials a barrier. I think this really kicks in when you provide a live video stream, which makes the timeliness of finding resources more crucial.

My take away from this is that when a live stream is provided, that is the point when there needs to be some kind of co-ordinated dashboard or page where remote participants can see everything they need in one place, rather than across disparate windows. I also need to emphasise my role as a guide through the materials available more, in addition to providing the commentary, so that remote participants have everything they need, when they need it.

Before I became an event amplifier, I studied Creative Writing and New Media, where I learnt various techniques for telling stories using digital media. Many of these inform the way I work today, but I rarely get the opportunity to be really creative, as most of my activities revolve around reporting and presenting the story of an event in a factual way.

However, I often wonder: why don’t conference organisers tell stories to present their event more creatively? Short stories told through images, video or audio in the run up to an event could help with marketing, and effectively communicate the context of the event without subjecting potential delegates to a wall of dry text listing often over-inflated aims and objectives. You can also present something of the character of the event, which might help to attract the right people. Make them good enough, and people will share them via social networks, thus promoting your event for you.

To be clear, I am not talking about viral adverts. In my admittedly purist view, conferences should be brought together to review and solve problems for their target community. Where there are problems, there are stories which can stand alone and entertain. The story, whether dramatic or comic, will establish a context for your event, which the viewer might associate with either intellectually or emotionally. A link to your event at the end is then all you need. You have given someone some entertainment, made them think about an issue they might be facing in different way, and established a connection between this story and your event. They could even engage further by voting for the character’s next move to complete the story, which could be shown at the event itself.

This wouldn’t necessarily be an easy undertaking. You’d need a good writer and quite a lot of insight into your event’s audience to be able to create something that your audience will empathise and engage with. Many commercial organisers may not have the time to get this level of insight, nor do they necessarily have an appropriately skilled writer on their team. Marketing departments are often geared up to think in terms of promo videos and brochure copy, rather than in terms of stories.

There is also not just the quality of the storytelling itself to worry about, but the quality of the production. Producing professional videos can be extremely expensive and time consuming. However, there are lots of different, more cost effective options to make a well written story come alive on the web. I’ve experimented with a number of different ways of creating online stories which can be achieved relatively cheaply, including:

Podcasting

Get yourself a good microphone, find someone with a good reading/acting voice and some royalty-free background music, and you can produce some effective pieces. If your audience are used to receiving content via podcast, this will be a great way to reach them with something a bit different.

Machinima

If you want to produce an animated video, try using screen casting software to capture video footage from a virtual environment like Second Life, then overlay an audio track. There are areas of Second Life where permission is granted to film, which are listed here. Circulate this via video sharing sites to help people discover and share your video.

Comic strips

If no-one wants to appear in a video, have some fun taking melodramatically posed photographs and use these to create a comic strip version. This could be animated with audio (the easiest way would be to screen cast a PowerPoint presentation transitioning between the images, then overlay the audio), or simply circulated as an image via a photo sharing site like Flickr.

Conclusions

To be successful, such a project would need to be both original and well executed. It would undoubtedly fall within the marketing budget for the event, rather than under the amplification, but could be more effective than traditional marketing materials at building an engaged online audience around these digital objects in advance of the event, if structured the right way. Many of these techniques could also be used to create some more imaginative representations of an event as part of the post-event coverage.

Might be fun to try out anyway!

We take these numbers to indicate the level of engagement surrounding an event. But is this what they are actually telling us?

A recent post by Ann Priestley challenged me to think about the ways we measure the online engagement with a conference. She presented a graph from Socious, who use the high peak of activity during an event and sharp tapering of this activity after the event as part of their argument to sell their product. Their implication is that unless your event has a long tail of post-event activity, it is not as successful at long-term engagement.

My concern here is that it is easy to confuse “activity” and “engagement”. I admit that I have been as guilty of this as anyone else. The number of tweets generated during an event can sound impressive and help event organisers to see the value of supporting the use of Twitter by the audience. However, the number of tweets on a hash tag only represents the level of current activity, not necessarily the level of ongoing engagement. At the end of the day, all event-related activity tapers off sharply after the event itself, moving aside for more natural discourse and engagement with the topics, without the constraints of the event identity and structure.

Activity vs Engagement

Engagement is very much a soft issue and difficult, if not impossible, to measure accurately. Activity is easy. You can see outputs of activity very clearly. They can be tagged and identified and measured and visualised. Engagement is much more subjective and dispersed, along with the audience.

Tweeting prolifically during a conference may demonstrate how actively engaged the audience are with the topic at that point in time, when there is a collected audience sharing that experience with them in real time. However, after the event the ideas discussed and the connections made may not be associated with the conference hash tag, making them difficult to trace. We can’t currently record new follows that result from use of a conference hash tag (to my knowledge!) and we can’t automatically determine if a conversation a month afterwards is an extension of ideas raised by the conference unless the participants have tagged it. Once the flush of public activity around the event is over, this might not be appropriate for either party, so the traceable link diminishes, but the engagement with between the participants about related issues remains.

Equally, a reflective blog post after the event demonstrates that one individual was deeply engaged with the issues raised at that point in time. If it is tagged, we can find it. However, unless we measure the number of people who read that post over time, commented on it or linked to it (both literally and thematically), then we have no idea whether it has led to further engagement beyond this point.

Problems with Long-Term Reporting

Conference producers may be interested in connecting everything back to the original event, but the delegates themselves are usually more interested in the topics than the event identity. This makes it especially difficult to attribute the results of engagement to the event the further away from it that you get. With an amplified event, the person engaging may only have a very general awareness of the original event which triggered the content or conversation in the first place, significantly reducing the likelihood that they would tag their response to make it traceable.

The level of research and the amount of time required to get a clear picture of the long term level of engagement with the event outputs is often outside of the scope of most conferences. This results in an approach that favours generating maximum activity around the event itself to get as much stuff out there as possible, then trusting to the quality of that content or just hoping for the best in terms of long-term engagement. However, this assumption is rarely reflected in the post-event reports, giving the impression that once this initial activity has died down, that is the end of the engagement and there is therefore a problem to solve to increase long-term engagement.

Attention or Response?

It also depends how you define engagement on a fundamental level: is it about attention or is it about responding?

People can engage with an event just by listening: in a lecture, an audience can be engaged without speaking, or creating any measurable activity at all (except perhaps a lot of noise over the following coffee break). We have very little information about engaged listeners at amplified events. We know how many are watching a live video stream, but we can’t tell how many have left it running whilst making a cup of tea or are only half listening. We know how many people could possibly see tweets relating to the event, but we have no idea if or when they might read that content, or how deeply they will engage with those tweets. With more people learning how to temporarily screen prolific conference Twitterers, we cannot even guarantee that they have seen them. We may get better at this, but we can really only know “how many” not “how deeply”.

Another word for engagement might also be “impact”. This is a popular word at the moment, particularly in HE circles, where my event amplification services are often used to increase the impact of an event by disseminating information as far as possible beyond the confines of the conference hall. Impact, in this case, is quantified by measuring the number of people a message reaches.

Brian Kelly has made this argument before in relation to Slideshare as a way of extending the life of a presentation – increasing its impact by increasing its visibility over time. But again, whilst we know how many people have looked at the slides, we do not know how deeply those people engaged with those slides except where their engagement led to what we could call an extreme response, such as embedding the slides into a blog post to reflect on them in more detail. This is highly engaged activity. But what about all the people who merely linked to the slides? This more casual response is not currently reported by Slideshare, so it can be difficult to trace. What about the people who showed them to a colleague or used them in a class? There is no way to get a complete picture, any more than there’s a way to judge the way a paper handout is used post-conference. The only difference is that no-one questions the value of the paper handout!

Conclusion

How we define engagement and impact will affect the types of metrics we attempt to collect to demonstrate the success of an amplified event over time. However, accepting that engagement with the event will not necessarily lead to clearly definable, traceable digital objects may be the first step in rethinking not just how measure success, but what we are trying to achieve through the event in the first place.

Elastic Network Model

I have recently been exploring a new app called Color, which allows you to see photos and videos taken using the app by anyone within 150ft of you. The app lists those who have shared photos within this vicinity as your connections, on a temporary basis. This is your elastic network, according to founder Bill Nguyen. The app essentially aims to be a revolutionary social network platform, enabling you to make connections with those around you via pictures and video.

The app has received quite a lot of funding (a reported $41 million) and bad reviews (currently averaging at 2 stars on the App Store, with several reviewers lamenting that they could not award 0 stars). The problem seems to be that for it to work successfully you need to have a number of people around you taking photographs using the app. This could be encouraged at a larger event, but is not as likely to occur out in the streets on a normal day.

As a tool for events, I can see the benefit of encouraging delegates to use the app to collect a variety of angles and perspectives on the proceedings – particularly at trade shows or exhibitions, where there are more visually stimulating things to photograph. Enabling delegates to see who is in proximity to them, the way they are seeing the event and a visual representation of what they find interesting, could be a good way to help facilitate introductions. However, a search for tweets in the local area could also achieve the same effect, and whilst obviously not such a visually stimulating medium, could arguably be a more useful way to informing a delegate’s decision to say “Hi!” than a picture of the same object that the delegate can already see first hand in front of them.

People who are in the area can collect photos and videos from those taken around them by others, but if you are not in the same geographical space, you will not get that benefit, meaning the app potentially has less value as an amplification tool for those outside of the event. Albums can be shared on Facebook and Twitter, but these represent someone else’s movements around the event space and chance social connections.

Whilst I am still undecided about the best application of this app within events, I was particularly interested in the idea of the “elastic network” used to describe the social aspect of the app.

What is an Elastic Network?

I couldn’t find any references to elastic networks outside of molecular science, except when associated with publicity surrounding this particular app. I’m quite surprised that the idea has not been explored in an events context and fleshed out in more detail.

My understanding, from the way the expression is used in relation to Color, is that an elastic network is a flexible network of connections or potential connections, calculated based on shared experiences. In the case of Color, the shared experience is physical proximity, but if could also be participation in a themed discussion or event. The key aspect is that your network of connections evolves based on who you connect with regularly, and expands and contracts in response to the level of activity within each relationship, rather than any permanent bonds. Relationships are ordered based on the level of actual interaction, rather than any conscious organisation on your part. Thus it encourages social interaction rather than passive following behaviours.

Elastic Networks at Conferences

If you attend a conference in person, you enter into a temporary, elastic network with the others around you. You are in immediate proximity to them. You see them. You can read their names, job titles and affiliations from their name badges. You don’t know anything else about them without engaging in a deeper, but controlled conversation. You don’t subscribe to follow a constant news stream from everyone who attended that event. You network by identifying and building high quality connections within the context of small group and individual discussions, quickly tuning out the surrounding crowd. If the conversation does not yield what you are looking for, or reaches a natural conclusion, you walk away to a different physical space, surrounded by different people. Your local network shifts depending who is around you physically.

Elastic Networks at Amplified Events

An event hash tag could be considered an elastic network, gathering people temporarily around a digital object which represents the shared experience. However, I would argue that amplified events are perhaps not as naturally elastic as physical events, or as flexible the participants might assume them to be, due of other factors – mainly the design of the social networking platforms we use to facilitate amplified events.

Most social networking platforms want you to have lots of friends so you engage more with their site. Therefore, they place an emphasis on adding to your permanent network by creating more intimate connections at a comparatively early stage of your relationship with someone. If a person says something publicly that interests you, the evolving convention dictates that you “friend” or “follow” them in order to initiate a more personal conversation. Even within Twitter, you have to commit to follow a person in order to send a private message. In most social networking platforms, this process makes the historical activity of both parties more visible. There is also more of a permanent bond, which has to be consciously severed. This can be more socially damaging than excusing yourself to get another coffee at a physical event. Your network, therefore, does not shift flexibly so much as continually expand. This has some obvious advantages in terms of helping to start off longer term relationships that emerge over time, but it also has its disadvantages in terms of the general noise levels that you could be inviting into your daily news stream.

Do Amplified Events Need to Become More Elastic?

I think the emergence of an app like Color will make us question how we view our connections and the level of commitment we make to online relationships whilst participating in a conference or event. Social networking platforms that allow loose, temporary relationships based on a shared experience, such as proximity, may become more popular within events as people seek to engage in conversations, but limit the noise they bring into their every day news feeds.

I also wonder whether we need to think more about the role space plays within a conventional event and how this could be translated for online and amplified audiences. Current models usually involve one large discussion space (such as a Twitter hash tag), which can be very loud, repetitive, and fast moving, and where the natural order of a discussion can be easily disrupted without heavy moderation, which is often inappropriate. Whilst many delegates thrive in this soup-like conversational arena, if we want to progress to the next level – where the online and physical experience of an event are more akin – we need to think about how we can facilitate more intimate conversations without necessarily forcing participants to commit to trusting social media relationships and taking the conversations underground in order to get the peace to focus.

It might not be a tool I end up using, but Color has certainly convinced me that space may be the next concept we need to explore in amplified and hybrid events.

Answer: In the wild!

Blog posts and articles can act as effective tools to build up to and wind down from major conferences, making them useful components of amplification and event marketing strategies alike. Their longer, reflective nature makes makes them perfect for providing a context to an upcoming event and a summary of a recently completed event, whilst also being close enough to traditional media in form that less digitally-orientated organisers can understand the benefits and manage the process confidently.

I do believe conference blogging has a valuable place at the amplification table, but recently I found myself considering: “Where is the best place for that blogging to take place?”

Most of the work I do tends to be in Higher Education, where events are run as dissemination and collaboration forums, forming only a part of the overall activity of the organising group. These groups are often research centres, with ongoing activities which make their websites a trusted and respected hub for information about their specialist subject. People naturally go to them to look for reliable resources, and therefore blog content relating to their conference fits perfectly into the context of their existing websites.

But what happens if the event organiser is a commercial conference producer, with no specialist knowledge or background in the conference topic? Should they have a topical blog related to the event hosted on their website?

Regardless of the obvious SEO arguments, I am leaning towards “no”, from an amplification perspective.

Audiences naturally go to a commercial conference producer’s website for logistical information about events, but not necessarily for regular, trustworthy commentary about related issues. Organisers may want to build a topical community around their site as part of their ongoing marketing for a conference series, but they will be competing with lots of independent sources which are not trying to sell a £500 ticket on the side. They would also have to source a lot of great content and keep it maintained and fresh all year round, which may not be within scope.

To effectively use blog posts to amplify an event, you have to go to where the readers are and give them really useful content that doesn’t feel like a sales pitch. If you are a commercial organiser with a website geared up to sell conference seats, this means you need to research alternative locations to place your (tagged) blog content, which have credibility with the audience. These could be industry sites, the personal blogs of speakers or participants, sponsors’ websites or networking sites like LinkedIn. Positioning interest pieces, session previews, speaker interviews and topical questions out in the wilds means that more people will see your content in a natural context and start to see a picture of the problem space your event is (or should be) designed to explore.

The problem with this approach is that it involves resigning some degree of control. You could have limited control over how it looks and what comments get attached. You might not even be able to write it yourself. If the content is not appearing on your own site, you may find that you need to enlist some advocates in the field to write and publish content for you to achieve credibility in these independent spaces. The process is therefore more complex than simply writing some copy and slapping it up on the event site, and requires a more considered event amplification strategy.

Therefore, to amplify a commercial event using longer form content, such as blog postings, I would suggest that conference producers need to do the following:

• Recognise what their website is good at, i.e. delivering logistical and promotional information about the event;
• Commission blog content (scene-setting/taster content, interviews or debate stimuli etc), which can be published out in the wilds where their intended audience spend their time;
• Recruit advocates to increase the amount of coverage generated;
• Concentrate on aggregating and sharing links to this content, to appear as a showcase on their own site, rather than hosting it locally;
• Monitor, respond and comment.

The event amplifier can co-ordinate the practical aspects of the above and produce some of the core content for publication, leaving the event organiser to concentrate on their area of expertise: the event experience. As part of their strategic role, an event amplifier may identify suitable locations for content, carry out interviews with speakers/sponsors or research and write topical pieces for submission to those sites, co-ordinate posts from advocates and integrate the dissemination of all this longer form content with the rest of the amplification strategy. The event amplifier will also be geared up to monitor and respond to comments as part of their efforts to build up the conversation around the event, and will be equipped to aggregate and present all this activity in an appropriate way so that visitors to the event website can find all of this material, even though it is not being hosted directly on the event site.

Its not just about sales…

Blog posts are not just useful for pre-event build up. Whilst live coverage from your event is often better delivered via tools such as live video streaming or in the form of a bite-sized live commentary via Twitter, longer, more reflective blog posts summarising the event deliver great value once the everyone has gone home and wants to recap or follow up on particular ideas.

However, if you are not running a dedicated event blog on your site for the reasons above, you need to think more creatively about where that post-event content could appear to help amplify your event most effectively.

If you have a good relationship with an industry blog, they may be happy to post selected summaries from your event to provide an exclusive insight for their readers. Sponsors, exhibitors and speakers may also be keen to promote their involvement by accepting guest posts from your event amplifier. Your advocates can be encourage to write up their reflections on their own blogs. All of this activity can again be collected on the event website, but it will be taking place out where the conversations are.

The down side

As with all strategies, there are trade offs. The key one being measurement: if the content is not hosted on your site, how do you measure how many eyeballs it is attracting?

Part of your research needs to include getting a clear idea of the readership of each of the locations you target. I don’t just mean the numbers. How many is not as important as who and how likely are they to share with others in their own social networks, both on and offline. Amplification, as opposed to social media marketing, is not about generating visibility to encourage purchasing: it is about talking and connecting. You are trying to start a conversation around your event. Not everyone involved in that conversation will necessarily buy a ticket and attend in person, but by participating in the conversation they will be contributing to the event experience.

Conclusions

Conference content can take many forms, and an event amplifier shouldn’t just consider how to create that content, but should also be considering where it should go to best create a dynamic and wide reaching conversation about the event.