Yesterday, responding to a post Steve wrote on our Social Media efforts at Greenbelt I noted that it’s important to remember that this wasn’t the first year we’d worked with social media at the festival. Flickr has been our most prominent outlet, with the festival’s tags being some of the most visible in the week following the festival for several years now. But as I’ve written about here in the past (from a fairly techie perspective), we’ve made efforts to aggregate content from multiple blogs, social bookmarking services, and the like a few times previously. So what was different this year?

As Steve points out, video is a significantly different medium to photos or text and it has its own set of hooks. This wasn’t the first festival video to be posted online—a few videos had snuck onto youtube in previous years—but it was the first time tools like qik were available to allow live streaming. As I noted a few days ago live streaming currently benefits from its novelty: “this is streaming live on the internet” is a great hook for drawing in guests and viewers. That may well not last, just as blogging has lost much of its mystique over the past six years, but this year it served us well.

The “embeddability” of the content is a very important factor. We’re all pretty used to embedded youtube videos at this point, but it’s only been in the past few months that its become the majority of media storage sites that have offered facilities along the lines of what Dan Hill dubbed ‘tear-off’ content. That’s significant in a number of ways. We didn’t have time to really develop the platform for what we were doing (we’d wondered about using Alfie’s moblog platform but ran out of time) but we knew that if we used qik we could not only export the video later, but we could very quickly embed widgets into blogs and other sites to promote the content. That freedom from worrying too much about platform is liberating, but for achieving attention in a festival environment it’s the ease of embedding that’s key.

Twitter was, of course, a vital component of our strategy. Just as there was no time to build up a platform for aggregating the content, we didn’t have time or budget to do any real promotion, and since this was a very experimental approach we didn’t even have time to build it into the editorial content of the festival’s own website. But we’ve all got relatively large personal networks on twitter (and for some of us our twitter posts are syndicated into facebook) and we’ve been cultivating a Greenbelt twitter account and it was easy enough to post notes there. Whether posting automatically (”I’m streaming live on qik …”) or personally, we saw a very good response and were able to receive some quick feedback. Twitter works really well as a glue between pieces of content you’re generating around the web, acting as a hub for a network that will follow link and engage with content hosted in a variety of locations.

Perhaps the key non-techie reason that things felt different this year was that there was concerted effort from a team. The real turning point for our flickr presence was when we started posting the festival’s official photos there—it gave it a certain kudos for those festivalgoers who may have been reticent and meant we were promoting flickr heavily in our editorial—and similarly having a group of people establishing a body of content provided something resembling a critical mass. Since our online networks intersect fairly heavily there was some reinforcement (”oh, X and Y have both mentioned this, I should check it out…”) but there’s enough distinction that the message went wider than any one of our personal networks. As a team we were also able to exchange skills and discoveries through the weekend which helped enormously when we had so little time to get up and running.

In purely numeric terms flickr is still where the vast majority of social media attention around the festival rests, with views of the photos being an order of magnitude greater than of the videos. Much of the conversation is taking place among blogs, with many scattered posts picking up a few comments. It’ll be interesting to see whether video capture at the festival follows in the footsteps of flickr and attracts a much larger group of producers or whether it remains an activity of a fairly small group. Either way, we’re very pleased with how it worked out this year.

(photo above is by Jon McKay, from his ‘So What Do You Think?‘ project)

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This post is a follow-up to my initial thoughts on our Social Media efforts at this year’s Greenbelt.

Going into Greenbelt I’d made some fairly naive assumptions, primarily that it would be easy enough to just capture conversations we were having anyway and events we were attending. For people whose sole responsibility at the festival was reporting that might have been possible, but for those of us who were already deeply committed to other activities it’s not quite that simple. While Steve, Lisa and Mike were able to gather a lot of great material, and made the capture their primary focus, I was more distracted and my efforts are much thinner on the ground, and decidedly patchier.

Steve was using a Nokia N95 and the rest of us had N82s. We’d heard good things about the N82, and I like the form factor of it quite a bit, but for live streaming the N95 was far and away the better device. It seemed to get stronger 3G signals and had considerably better battery life. Both devices took quite a while to get set up, given that we only received them the day the festival started, and so we went into it cold. If we were to repeat the project with current technology we’d definitely push to get N95s for everyone and more time beforehand to set up, learn the tools, etc.

So, a few lessons for next time:

• Have one team member whose primary role is logistics, not reporting. While it was possible for all of us to get some content, and one properly prepared person could get a lot of content, if there’s any chance of having someone who can manage liaison with the rest of the event, and other logistics, that’s ideal. That person may be able to do some reporting, but don’t count on it. If time allows, that person could also manage aggregation and promotion of your content.
• Get to know the tools in advance. By the end of the festival we all knew our way around the phones, but there were settings we hadn’t had a chance to explore that could have affected quality. Getting off to a quick start is important for confidence, and promotion. I suspect that the sketchy quality of some of my early videos may have put some people off from watching the others, particularly viewers who didn’t know what we were doing.
• Phone companies don’t make your lives easy. I bought a new Orange pay-as-you-go SIM for the festival and ended up spending 40 minutes on the phone getting it activated, and used over four pounds of credit on the call. Once that was done, their “7 days’ unlimited data for £5″ deal worked out well, but these things always take longer than you’d like.
• Build in time to review the material you’re gathering. This is particularly important if you haven’t produced content in this way before, but is good practice either way. Reviewing the content is the only way to work out how to improve, and the review process is another chance to identify particularly successful videos and promote them. Steve did a good job of watching his and other videos and blogging about them as the event went on, which significantly increased his audience. In many festival programmes there will be lulls at certain points in the day and that can be a good chance to find a quiet spot with wifi.
• Talk about what you’re doing. For now, the idea of live streaming to the web is novel and is a strong hook to get people engaged and start conversations. That led to some good interviews, to other people joining in and to ongoing conversations that have spilled outside of the festival.

(photo above is by Jon McKay, from his ‘So What Do You Think?‘ project)

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For this year’s Greenbelt a group of us decided it was time to beef up the festival’s ’social media’ output. With approval from the powers-that-be, the help of some phones from Nokia and the energy that comes from a festival’s buzz, we built up a twitter community, streamed plenty of content live to qik, and enjoyed the fact that the festival’s flickr presence now has a momentum all its own (the official photos had over 100,000 views in the past week and there are over 3600 photos tagged greenbelt2008 as I write this).

One of the perennial questions facing those planning the festival’s online presence is what audience there is when 20,000 of those most committed to the event gather together for a weekend of camping. During the ten years the event’s been at its current site we’ve gradually extended the wifi coverage to more and more of the site, but it’s still far from comprehensive and largely provided just for those who are helping make the festival run rather than available to all. Times are changing as more and more of us have access to EDGE and 3G from our mobiles, but power outlets are in short supply and its not yet possible to get through four days of intensive use without charging up your phone.

Using twitter was a simple decision, though the timing was poor as they turned off their UK SMS service just days before the festival, so it became much less effective as an on-site co-ordination tool. Nevertheless, the greenbelt twitter account continues to pick up followers (its existence seems to have introduced a number of new people to twitter, judging by the number of people for whom it was the first twitter account they followed) and we’re excited to see how it can be used over the course of the year to sustain and build the festival’s disparate community.

Thanks to WOM World/Nokia we had a set of N82s (and one N95) to experiment with qik and between Steve Lawson, Lobelia, Mike Radcliffe and myself we produced several hours of video content, largely streamed live. As time was tight, we focussed primarily on our personal networks for promotion and a qik group to collect it. During the festival the videos had around 3,000 views and the total is now up over 6,000, which didn’t seem at all bad with so little promotion. More than that, there’s been some great feedback suggesting that the quality of engagement is high.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the project was the response from those we were filming and interviewing. So many people were happy to stop for an interview and were fascinated by the technology and the possibilities, particularly the fact that with qik we could get live feedback on the filming and, though we didn’t use it to its full potential, adapt the content based on that feedback.

There are lots of lessons to be learned, and I’m just getting started on wrapping my mind around it so that we can refocus for next year and transmit that knowledge more widely. Naturally, the rest of the thoughts will appear here as soon as they’re ready. And of course, keep an eye on the twitter feed for news from Greenbelt.

(photo above courtesy of the greenbelt flickr stream)

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When running a campaign a good strategy always used to be to ask your supporters to write letters to their local newspaper. Local newspapers are far more widely read than their national equivalents, you’re much more likely to get your photo published in them, and because of their more tightly defined audience they present a much greater chance to contextualise your message and suggest options for local action.

In many ways, that is the campaign tactic that a strategy for web 2.0/social media should build from. It’s not about having a presence on flickr, delicious, facebook, upcoming, myspace, or any of the dozens of other “web 2.0″ sites, though an official presence may be useful in some cases and personal experiences with all of them is a good idea. Instead it’s about resourcing your key supporters to be there for you, just as they would in their local papers.

Your supporters already have networks of friends/contacts in these settings that it would take you a lot of time to build. Those friends are going to pay attention to what is being said because of who said it, when if it came from an unknown campaign officer they’d be far less likely to read it. You’re likely to be busy at your events, but your supporters are free to take photos they can post on flickr and which their friends will look at whether or not they currently follow your campaign. You can put as much time as you like into creating a facebook group, but unless your friends and your supporters’ friends join it, it’ll never take off in the “viral” style you’re probably hoping for.

The task then is to educate your supporters. Encourage them to create and disseminate their own content, and back that up with good quality briefings, access to take photos, and any other options that make sense in your context. And to keep an eye on that content so you can pick from the best of it. We’ve found asking greenbelters to tag their photos with a given tag for each year hugely effective not only in making sure we get included in “top tags” lists, but also in giving us an easy way to access the resulting content and get a broader view of the feel of the festival than we otherwise would.

It’s never been and never will be possible to truly get your message everywhere. New tools may help push your content into new spaces, but the only way to effectively disseminate your message is to open it up and let others carry it for you, interpreting it through their lenses. It’s not a new idea, but it’s one that’s far more important now than it ever has been.

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