Encourage Virtual Attendance: Lessons Learned From #140conf
Posted by Omri on June 23rd, 2009The 140 Characters Conference last week in New York was an interesting case study in how to encourage virtual attendance at a conference. From an organizer’s perspective here are 5 things you could do to facilitate virtual attendance:
1. Set up a hashtag for your conference (for instance, #140conf), promote the hashtag often and early by announcing speakers, parties, sessions, etc., and encourage attendees to tweet by asking questions, soliciting feedback and setting up promotions. The 140 Characters Conference partnered with Mashable and gave away free VIP tickets to those that tweeted. The result was hundreds of tweets like: “Tweet To Win: More Free VIP Tickets to #140conf !“. Essentially this gets the word out, and with enough tweets gets your hashtag listed on the twitter trends list. Each of these things improves the chances of virtual attendance (not to mention actual attendance).
2. Set up and promote a live video feed of the main conference sessions. Unfortunately this has rarely been done well and even the 140 Characters Conference failed to deliver. They partnered with a company called RayV which wasn’t prepared for the load, presumably, and ran into massive buffering problems. Within an hour the live feed was taken down. The next best thing: post the video as soon after live as possible. The 140 Characters Conference did this and promoted the URL heavily through twitter: http://www.140conf.com/watchit
3. Display the tweet-stream onsite. Typically this is done by projecting a constantly updated web page in a public area, if not in one of the main session rooms. The Twazzup page updates continuously so it’s a good candidate for a live stream of tweets containing your hashtag.
Twazzup.com live stream example of #140conf hashtag
4. Leverage other websites that aggregate twitter content and make it easier to follow what’s happening at the conference — and tweet about these services. Two good examples are twazzup.com and socialapproach.com. Although you wouldn’t have to do this for your conference to still get a lot out of these sites, the 140 Characters Conference partnered with each to set up personalized versions of the services. For instance, instead of http://www.twazzup.com/search?q=%23140conf&l=all there was http://140conf.twazzup.com/ which displayed a special “Speakers” section at the top.
Specialized version of Twazzup service for #140conf
The socialapproach.com service has an overlay of tweets on a Google map that is impressive as it zooms left and right showing the tweets live.
socialapproach.com's version of its service for #140conf
5. Offer content exclusively for virtual attendees. Although I didn’t see any examples of this for the #140conf the idea is to host some sessions which include a speaker or panel communicating exclusively with virtual attendees. This can be done using services like ustream.tv or livestream.com (previously mogulus.com), and possibly even tinychat.com. Instead of exclusive engagement with virtual attendees it would be possible to also have hybrid sessions with live and virtual attendees mixed.
From a virtual attendee’s perspective my favourite tool was twazzup.com because it organizes the hashtagged tweets so effectively. The best content continuously rose to the top, either in the links section or featured tweet section. It was also a great way to identify speaker’s tweets and to find fellow tweeters to follow and tweet with. At times the live updating of tweets was too frequent (over 300 TPH, tweets per hour) but you can pause the live updating and read at your own pace. My favourite feature is the dynamic pop-up that appears when mousing over someone’s image which displays enough information to easily determine if you want to follow the tweeter.
Twazzup overlay summarizing tweeter
It will be interesting to see how other conferences take virtual attendance further, and if anyone other than the Obama administration and Facebook can figure out the live video conundrum.
Tags: #140conf, socialapproach, twazzup, virtual attendance, virtual attendee
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