Right now the majority of the Root House team is up in Aspen, Colorado, giving a presentation to the Colorado Open Space Alliance(COSA). On their website COSA describes themselves as:
"The Colorado Open Space Alliance is a statewide organization of publicly funded local and regional open space programs, working cooperatively to share information, create public awareness and foster partnerships needed to protect and preserve the special places of Colorado."
Root House's presentation is titled, "The Viral Power of Video and the Visual Renaissance". What we hope to convey to COSA is the incredible power of using viral video to connect with everyday people. In particular, we want to showcase short length video such as Vine and Coub as a way for people to connect with others who are passionate about Colorado's open spaces.
Part of Root House's presentation will include about 30 minutes where audience members can group together and film short videos about the outdoors. They will then post these videos to Twitter using the hashtag "#cosavid".
By posting these videos online, we are giving a live demonstration of a viral social media campaign which can be monitored in real time and later evaluated using our hashtag. In addition to having listeners post videos, we've decided to live support this event using social media.
Live social media support is a great technique for engaging with an audience in real time. We will detail some actions you can take below and will give you examples from our own event.
1) Live Tweeting
Live tweeting an event is the act of using Twitter as a real time message board to communicate with others attending the event or viewing the event remotely. Here's an example of someone live tweeting the Oscars:
As Matthew McConaughey is on stage giving a speech, @ClayMorganPA is making a joke about the both of them lacking a tan. If his tweet is noticed by other people, he might spark a conversation about celebrities, tanning, and appearance. For @ClayMorganPA this was mostly likely just a random live tweet for fun, but if used correctly it can lead to a lot of free press and marketing, especially for companies.
For example, at the 2014 Grammy's, artist Pharrell wore a very unique hat, which Arby's social media team(who was live tweeting the event) recognized. Immediately, they shot out a funny tweet:
This one tweet received over 75,000 retweets and 40,000 favorites:
Not only did it receive an enormous amount of free press and recognition publicly, it also gave Arby's image at little bit more of the ephemeral and undefinable "cool" quality it needed. Instead of just being a fast food company, it was now a fast food company with style and humor, which set it apart from competitors.
Root House will use live tweeting at our COSA event to encourage people to post up their Vine or Coub videos. Anybody who posts a video will be retweeted, favorited, and sent a personal thank you.
2) Create an Easy to Access Information Database
The biggest problem we foresee with dozens of people trying to storyboard and film a video in 30 minutes is that they might not have enough inspiration or ideas to get started.
To help them out, we will be live tweeting a variety of short videos using the hashtag #cosavid so people can find them. These videos are well shot Coubs and Vines that hopefully will get people thinking about a video they can create. Here's a great example of a five shot Coub that is immediately engaging:
http://coub.com/view/2avrc
We'll be tweeting it out like this:
It's incredibly easy to tweet these out, plus people can access them from anywhere, including on their phones, which makes it a live database.
3) Gain Followers
A great benefit to doing this live tweeting is that we will be in contact with so many people and can use this as an opportunity to connect. With a small conference or presentation it wouldn't be that difficult to search for anyone using a hashtag and then follow them. Following them will most likely lead to them following you, since you are literally in the room with them and they know who you are.
The bigger the conference or the event is, the harder it will be to communicate with all of these people, let alone follow them. It's great to have someone on your team monitor social sites as you are presenting so all you have to focus on is your presentation, but even then, following all of those people would take an enormous amount of time.
Fortunately, someone created BlastFollow, an app that pulls in the Twitter handle of everyone who used a particular hashtag(such as #cosavid) and gives you the option to follow them all en masse. All you have to do is click "Blast!" and every ten seconds one them will be followed from your account.
There's nothing super magical about what BlastFollow does, but it is a huge timesaver during or after an event.
Caveats:
Live support on social media is a great option during events or presentations, but it cannot detract from the real world. Just sitting in the middle of a conference tweeting everything that goes on will keep you from connecting face to face with others at the conference. Instead, having a social media manager or a partner who can manage your social sites leaves you free to network in person.
Article by: Jamie Binns, Social Media
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