Tag Archive for events

Local Government & Eventbrite

February 9, 2012 7 comments
eventbrite

More of a question for our Local Government followers than a blog post this one.

Does your organisation block access to Eventbrite?

The reason I’m asking this is because we are in the middle of running a series of events and we are using Eventbrite to manage the attendees which include people from Local Government.

We know that all the awesome #localgov people can use Eventbrite because we see them regularly at events. What I have noticed is a number of people have contacted me to say that ‘the link doesn’t work’ for signing up. I know the link does work because we have X number of people already signed up. The common factor in the people who are contacting me, they all seem to be using @local.gov.uk E-mail addresses, so I assume signing up (or at least trying to) from work.

So how many #localgov organisations block access to Eventbrite and stop some of their people signing up to events and being able to network with some of the finest #localgov brains?

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Are you celebrating your community?

January 5, 2012 3 comments
John interviewing the 'Twicket' umpire

A guest post from John Popham about his Celebration 2.0 project which Talk About Local are delighted to be supporting.

Technology should be fun. What do you use computers and smartphones for? Chatting to your friends on Facebook? Sharing photos with your loved ones? Talking to relatives in far-flung places on Skype? Uploading novelty videos to youtube? The vast majority of people who use new technologies do so because they are fun to use and they add something to our lives. So it has always puzzled me why most initiatives that seek to introduce people to new technologies do so in such a serious way. If I’ve never used a computer I am unlikely to want to sit down at a bank of them in an IT suite or on a training course.

 

Celebration 2.0 is a project funded by Nominet Trust (http://www.nominettrust.org.uk), and I am running it in conjunction with Talk About Local. It grew out of a wacky idea I had last Spring, to live broadcast an English village cricket match over the internet as a demonstration of what can be done with a fast internet connection, and to highlight the problems of poor rural broadband. This event became known as Twicket and it turned into a very high profile occasion with national newspaper and radio interest, coverage from regional television, and thousands of online viewers and listeners. I was even interviewed about it on Radio New Zealand. Twicket was a great success in highlighting some serious issues, but it was the unintended consequences that were perhaps more intriguing. These included the commentator, Brenda, who had never considered technology as being important in her life, becoming a cult star on the internet. It also included farmers who were playing in the game being interviewed on national radio about their role in it, and being contacted by Facebook friends in the United States and Australia who had watched them on the field of play.

So, in Celebration 2.0 I am testing out my theory that people take best to new technologies if introduced while they are having fun. I want to introduce people to new technologies for the first time in the midst of celebration events, and I want to convince people who are only occasional users of such technologies that they can enhance their lives and become important to them. At the same time, I want to bring local traditions, customs and cultures to a wider audience. A couple of the things that helped Twicket become such a success were the Americans marvelling at their first live exposure to a “quaint” English tradition, and the popularity of the village gossip imparted by commentator, Brenda.

Please let me know, then if you have a celebration event that you think would benefit from the Celebration 2.0 treatment. Your event needs to be between now and the end of May 2012, and you have to be prepared for me to turn up and do one or more of the following:

  • Live video streaming
  • live audio streaming
  • recorded video via Youtube (or similar site)
  • recorded audio via Audioboo (or similar site)
  • video and audio interviews
  • live blogging
  • Facebook pages
  • event blogs
  • securing and utilising internet connectivity in difficult places

I’ve got one or two events potentially lined up to be part of the programme, but there is plenty of room for more at the moment. Talking with colleagues in the Talk About Local team, we came up with an outline of the kinds of events that might be good to cover, these included:

  • Carnivals
  • Festivals
  • Animal shows
  • May Day parades
  • Well-dressing
  • pub quizzes
  • karaoke nights
  • Well-dressings
  • beer festivals

These are some examples, but any event could qualify, particularly if it is about a cultural tradition which deserves a wider audience. I’ve set up a calendar that you can enter your event in so it can be considered for inclusion. You’ll find the calendar here. Please include contact details and a link to any website where more details of the event can be found.

I look forward to working with you, and, above all, sharing in your celebrations.

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Live web chat with police through your hyperlocal site – hints and tips

June 17, 2011 5 comments

We did a small Coveritlive web chat for local police to talk with the community through my hyperlocal site www.kingscrossenvironment.com .  My local police in London’s Kings Cross approached me to see if they could use my website to reach a wider audience than their traditional channels.  As a one-time serial attender of police community meetings I was delighted to help.  Local evening meetings have their roots in a C19th tradition of political organising and don’t suit many modern lifestyles.  They need to be augmented with modern methods that reflect people’s online communication behaviour.

The local Sergeant was keen to embrace new media.  But I know only too well the Met  Police is conservative at senior levels about modern media, living as it does in a very highly sensitised media environment.  The local borough press officer had seen me give a talk to the Met press officers about my site and had obtained clearance to innovate.  I suggested a live webchat. My site based in a once crime-ridden area is firmly pro police (two of our contributors have been on the Safer Neighbourhood Panel) and our commenters are of the non rabid variety.  So for the police it was very much a carefully managed innovation risk.

We did the chat with Chief Inspector Claire Clark, Sergeant Michael Atkins and an MPS press officer Susannah Taw.  Clare Hill who writes for the site was also in the room to help me, Jon Foster who runs the Kings Cross social media surgeries was also a producer, but in Birmingham.  I spoke with Mike Rawlins who delivered the very successful ‘Ask the Commander’ web chat in Stoke-on-Trent on his Pitsnpots site, written up here.

Here are some observations if you are thinking about doing a police web chat on your local site.  Much of this applies to any web chat.

It’s great fun – we all enjoyed ourselves, including i think the questioners.  I can’t say that about most local meetings.

Audience and preparation

Even though my baseline comparator was a community meeting where ten people turn up I got that normal ‘party anxiety’ that no one would come.  I have a mature site audience who I know from experience have quite set patterns of behaviour – for instance most of them read the site in a daily email and there are a number that don’t think the site exists and it is just an email service.  So a live chat, at a fixed time with nothing local to compare it to was pushing it.  The police put a notice around their networks including the neighbourhood managers email list.  I pimped the session on Facebook, Twitter and posts on the website.  I approached several people I knew i could count on personally  and a couple of local political figures with big local followings retweeted for me.

The Coveritlive stats show that we had 46 ’readers’ who put in 106 comments with an average reader duration of 52 minutes.  I was pleased with this, comparing it to the typical local meeting.  None of these people had to leave their house, get child care, go out in the dark and wet, sit on hard plastic chairs for hours, tackle fear of public speaking, nor reveal their true identity when discussing serious local crime issues.  Late arrivals could view earlier discussion. More than one of them was cooking and eating their dinner while putting in questions.

I invited questions via other media in advance and played them in as chair (or ‘Writer’ in Coveritlive parlance).  I got questions via email and blog comments too and fed them in, in one case anonymously.

Make sure that the police take care to notify the local press so they don’t get the hump.  This isn’t an issue everywhere and wasn’t for me in Islington.

The chat

Tone.  I stressed that the ‘I was proceeding in a northerly direction’ style of police comms doesn’t work in this medium.  Claire, Michael and Susannah all ‘got’ this and struck a balance between necessary formality when discussing serious topics and more light hearted stuff.  They were game for banter about food (i forgot to provide any, we were all starving the audience was having dinner with which they taunted us with…) and TV shows which helped the mood.

There was a glut of questions at the beginning.  They needed managing and staggering so that the questions and answers don’t get miles out of synch in the chat dialogue.  Someone needs to keep an eye on questions to make sure you don’t miss one, especially when a dialogue develops around an answer.  Send a private message to a questioner explaining that theirs will be answered in turn (Mike’s tip).  It’s good to have a second ‘Producer’ in the room to help manage that.  Some stock text in notepad that you can copy and paste in is handy.  There’s a fair bit of multi-tasking required.

We covered a wide range of stuff from local dangerous traffic, to knife crime, murders, ASB etc.  When questions wander off topic or get into too much detail it’s up to the chair to pull things back gently, the panellists won’t know how necessarily.  I put up a prior warning about not covering contempt, live cases or things that put people in danger. I checked with the police as well if there was anything specific they couldn’t cover due to these issues.

Get some pictures of the session running live and stick them into the chat, have avatar pics for the panellists  (we only had one avatar pic). Good for slack spots and helps connect with the audience.

Polls and trivia questions can also help when there’s a natural pause – we asked how many burglaries per week on average (answer 2).

The audience feedback was good:

‘A great success! And I love that it’s all documented on the site so that everyone can see how it went. Congratulations’

‘Thanks, Will Claire and Michael for running this web chat. I found many of the comments and responses very interesting.’ etc

Technology

Coveritlive is very easy to use, free and more than adequate for this.  You go to their site, register, set up a basic chat and then copy the embed code across to your site.  And err, that’s it.  You run it from a separate browser window.  It uses iFrames and so won’t work on wordpress.com that doesn’t like iFrames – you can post a link on your site and have the chat at Coveritlive.  Worked fine on typepad, will work fine on blogger.

Have a dry run chat yourself with a co-conspirator on a throwaway blog to get used to the tech.  Sergeant Atkinson and his press officer joined me for a tech rehearsal where we did just that.  In particular practice inviting people as panellists – police often don’t have email they can access off network so need to remember their personal email login details to click a link.

Hardware - I wished i had a slightly bigger monitor than my 14” laptop.  Dont’ rely on police ‘laptops’, bring a netbook or two if you can lay your hands on them.  The Islington laptop was fine, but i have heard some horror stories.

In Coveritlive set the police officers up as Panellists – they can see the question-queue but can’t bring in questions.  Have some tech back up as Producers – in my case Clare in the room and Jon Foster in Birmingham.

Put the chat panel in your site some hours in advance just to check.  Open the chat 30 mins before answering questions starts.  Do this manually there is something odd about Coveritlive’s time zones that Mike forewarned me about.

I advertised a twitter hashtag #kxcops for questions direct into Coveritlive but i couldn’t work out how to get twitter into the moderation panel – they came live into the chat unmoderated so I turned it off.  There’s a setting somewhere I missed.

Bandwidth – obvious really but if you are doing a chat in the evening check there are venues with wifi open late enough.  We used the Hub in Kings Cross.  Don’t do it at the police station without testing the mobile signal etc – police tech is so paranoically locked down i wouldn’t touch it.  Mike did his Stoke session at the cop shop on 3G with a router which worked well he tells me.

That’s it – have a go and chip stuff into the comments if you think i have missed anything.

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Facebook in action: creating communities around events

May 22, 2011 7 comments

< Part of Talk of the Town: the hyperlocal handbook for Facebook. Click here to go back to the Contents

This is a clever way of building a community around Facebook’s event platform I noticed being used by the very lovely Stoke DJ and all-round creative Lisa Wilding for her radio show.

Lisa runs a weekly show on 6 Towns Radio. She could have just had a page or group for the show, but by creating an event, her show appears on the front page of everyone she has invited while it is happening.

Tip: think of a regular gathering point – it doesn’t have to be a physical meeting.

The next thing Lisa does is to change the date of her show each week. When I’ve created an event to publicise a festival, I’ve started a new event page and invited everyone afresh. What I could have done instead was to go back to the event for the previous festival (assuming I administered it) and change all the details. This means all the people who were on the guest list for the previous event – including those who aren’t my friends – would get a notification alerting them to the change and therefore the new date.

Tip: change the date of previous events rather than creating a new event, in order to build up your guest list

Lisa also uses the wall of her event as an additional community platform for her show. Again, because she updates the event rather than deleting it or letting it languish in Facebook history, the wall remains up-to-date and fresh for any new people who join the guestlist. The conversations connect her growing community of listeners and she monitors it during to show to respond to any questions.

Tip: add the event wall to your community website and social reporting toolkit

While you can’t send messages to people who like a page or who belong to the new style of group, you can send message to people on event guestlists, except it seems if they’ve been created under a page name. A lot of people message people they’ve invited to an event to give them an extra nudge, as they can be hidden until the day itself. Messages can be targetted to those attending as well as those who have not yet responded

Tip: send messages to your guestlist, but don’t be annoying

The final point about events is that they are a great way of finding out who is organising events in your local area. People also invite the people they know, helping to build up your picture of Facebook locals.

Tip: browse events using the search bar to find and contact local leaders.

In conclusion, while Facebook’s event platform is probably a little more clunky than those built by other sites, its wide adoption for everything from the family barbecue to the festival in the park makes it an effective tool for communities, in more than just the obvious ways.

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The ‘Royal Wedding package’ – social media as a local service

April 30, 2011 No comments

It’s traditional that where the Royal Family leads, the world, or at least influential sections of it, follows. So the major use of social media at yesterday’s Royal Wedding should be evidence, if it were needed, of the final acceptance of upstarts like Twitter and Facebook into Society.

And just as dress designers were busy sketching as Kate came down the aisle, so hyperlocal bloggers might consider how they can offer their expertise for a ‘Royal Wedding package’ to internet-inexperienced corporates in their area.

Let’s look at what it might include for a local event that an organisation might want to promote, such as a conference or festival.

Basic tools
The Royal Wedding site utilised Google App engine, which I don’t know well enough to comment on, but if you’re technical enough it certainly looked good and seems to have a free entry point. You could put together something just as slick using WordPress; possibly a hosted install but it could be on WordPress.com if it is non-commercial.

The main site had all the important informative pages and posts, downloads and links, then everything else was embeds and links to Twitter, Facebook, a Youtube channel and Flickr. The full social experience and more stable – if one channel crashes under the weight of millions of viewers then others should hold up. Take note, BBC.

If the organisation commissioning you has social accounts already, it’s ideal to update them during the event but if this is impossible set up special channels that link back to any accounts they already have.

Essential collaborators
Setting up the platforms and putting them all together is easy enough, but your package will stand and fall on the content. My experience is that the more I’m involved in an event, the less time I have to comment on it, so a dedicated team is best (the exception is unconferences, which have the very lucky position of a mass of fine attendees for whom reporting is habitual). The organisation should pay or deploy as many experienced people as they can find or afford. If there’s a limited budget, you’ll probably know people willing to do it for the fun of it and a free lunch, but don’t put goodwill on the line if it’s an organisation that can really afford to pay.

At the very least, the full package should include one person each who is good at writing, photography and video and at least one more person whose sole responsibility is getting it all online, captioned and credited, not forgetting spellchecking and basic editing for a consistent voice. Can you spot a typo in Clarence House’s tweets? I think not.

The designated tweeter should have adequate knowledge of what is going to be happening and the ‘feel’ of the organisation and be confident with a variety of styles: formal, fun, responsive, as appropriate. Exclusive content aimed squarely at potential fans of the event will get the most retweets. Anything longer than a tweet can go on the blog, but keep it all bitesize, interesting and accurate.

Photography needs to be very personable with good light and no boring rows of backs. Try to get some in advance of the event to illustrate the channels. Will and Kate had their portrait photos from Mario Testini which might be out of reach, but you get the idea.

Beforehand, make sure any necessary permissions have been sought – either by giving participants a clear way to opt out or through formal media consent forms. If it’s a public event like a festival then photography is fine, but use your judgment and make sure parents are happy before taking photos of children.

Agree copyright and reuse considerations with the photographer and commissioning organisation upfront to save arguments later. The royal wedding photographs have all-rights-reserved copyright, but the ‘for editorial use only’ permission and large size means that bloggers have been able to use photos that are as rich and professional as those with a lot more cash. Good photos make bloggers very happy indeed, so encourage your photographer and organisation to do the same with at least a selection of photos and make other local bloggers aware that they are going to be available.

All content should go onto social channels quickly and be shared across the channels. Not only does this make the most of any interest, come Monday morning when everyone comes back to work you shouldn’t have to mess around with any more collation of material, it will all be online already.

Moderation
Look, no comments! Clarence House were crystal clear here. None of their own platforms had comments, only signs of positive engagement like views, likes in Facebook, favourites in Flickr and some positive retweets. This saved a lot of time-consuming moderation while they still participated in the chat on Twitter through use of a mixture of hashtags.

Rather than trying to manage too much, positive engagement with fans generated positive responses, added to the all-round good feeling. Following the line of the wedding service, the moderation policy simply said to the critics, haters, jokers and cynics: we can all tweet peaceably together. Success is measured by ‘top tweets’ lists and Clarence House came top many times during the day.

Measurement
Assuming someone has paid for all this, they’ll want to know what they got for their money. After the event, build in time to put together statistics about positive engagements such as number of followers, likes and retweets, plus any good stories of engagement as a result of the coverage (positive curated comments can be added to the website like so). If there are any questions or leads that the organisation should follow up try to make sure they get to the right person in a format that they can respond to and help broker contact if they don’t use the social channel in question.

Legacy
An event can be a great launchpad for further social interaction and building up a wider brand. Savings through use of third-party services is also worth noting. The Royal Wedding’s Flickr presence was in the account of the British Monarchy and the goodwill generated on the wedding day will undoubtedly have a good effect on their reputation and, in tourism terms, Britain’s profile more generally. Whatever was paid for the coverage of the weekend, this sort of good publicity is likely to be worth a lot more. On a much smaller level, hyperlocal bloggers can offer the same service.

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