Toronto’s Scotiabank BuskerFest is in full swing today – with three more full days left of the downtown Toronto festival.
As part of our social efforts – we are ‘live blogging’, for a lack of a better term, mostly on Facebook and Twitter with twitpics, tweets, posts, videos and more throughout the festival. At the risk of sounding like I’m blowing my own horn, Events 2.0 is bloody hard work making simple tweeting feel like a cookie next to a five tiered cake.
The obvious:
- Live event coverage using social media is requires full 12 – 16 hr dedication as majority of tweets are noon to late evening.
- Authors need strong freedom to engage and respond on a massive scale
- Multiple contributors are needed
- Authors need sleuthing skills to also find the conversations that are not following you.
The not so obvious:
- Its not just about tweeting upcoming events or the schedule (which is major enough for a static display that changes frequently – errr). More importantly, the focus has to include making the overall conversation of others heard. That means sharing the twitpics of the masses, etc. Admittedly, I am conscious of not wanting a ‘big brother’ feeling to come across but play a fine line of attentiveness.
- Identifying communication bottlenecks and pushing the information out. I believe this to be an advanced skill. Looking at the operation of a business (in this case, an event) and figuring out how to apply the strengths of marketing vehicles against painful customer experiences. For BuskerFest – the schedule is large, well managed and central in the festival – but there you have it.. it is not virtual. I wish Social Wisdom (us) had been hired earlier so to have integrated our twitter addresses onto the physical signage at the event.
- Don’t force the hashtag. We created #bfto thinking it would be shorter, taking fewer characters and make retweeting easy. But I can’t promote #BFTO enough. The audience is naturally choosing the brand name of the festival – buskerfest – as its #buskerfest. I actually tried to inform the first #buskerfest user but then I realized that is the collective – the wisdom of the crowd emerging. Pretty cool actually.
- Keep the thick skin. We [the festival] got called ‘jackasses’ and given a #fail by @rjstewart as the website isn’t iphone compatible. [i didn't do the site, the site has a lot of positives and honestly, as webby as I am - I wouldn't have thought about making it iphone compatible before April - when I got my own itouch] [note to self - look up the penetration rates of various devices] So @rjstewart – your tweet is fair enough and true – albeit a bit harsh. But I do understand that very geek passion as I too love to pick at slow adoption and I know it is a comment that likely represents the frustration of more people.
I truly believe that the online behaviours and expectations of Canadians (and North Americans) are on fire right now and firms are finding it very difficult to catch up. As indication, Social Wisdom has been contacted by several different agencies who are suddenly seeing ‘social media’ as a key skill and experience needed in RFPs – it is a talent hole in many agencies.
As a last comment – the very ironic thing today was me sitting in Starbucks doing live event coverage while also sitting next to Epilepsy Toronto’s PR person. First off, the PR person is a fantastic person – well connected and, quite clearly, managing a full load of traditional press coverage. And she was busy writing up a press release for the world record that we facebooked about an hour earlier. She was very pleasant about it – asking if I could share some twitpics on the deal. I then pulled up tweetdeck and was showing the stream of tweets and follower responses. DW is great to work with – she was really embracing the social media and also thinking about how we could collaborate and integrate together.
At the same time – my team had tweeted about an upcoming interview not yet occurred – to which she questioned if that was appropriate [being very honest about not yet figuring out where the new lines are with social media - what to tweet and not tweet]. I didn’t know either so I deleted the tweets and could see some learning on both ends around the integration of pr/social media/marketing communications.
Well.. I best get some sleep. I am looking forward to Saturday when I finally attend the festival as a mother and not in a virtual social capacity.
Note:
Sleep gave me a few more thoughts:
* How to better price for social media and also how to price for live event coverage.
* Technology needs on same day for events.
Posted by Laurie Dillon Schalk 
