“Social reporting is a set of skills and tools mixing journalism, facilitation and social media to report collectively and live from an event, capture the moments of the event and develop interactive conversations.”
Over the last couple of years, whenever we have been involved in social reporting at the Share Fairs, conferences, workshops and smaller events we have attended, we have noticed similar challenges and successes. So, when the ICT-KM Program was tasked with organising the social reporting for the Share Fair on Agricultural and Rural Development Knowledge in Africa in Addis Ababa in October 2010, it was clear that it was high time that we document the social reporting team’s experiences and lessons learned in a generic guide.
If you are going to organise an event, a conference or a public meeting, you should seriously consider organising a team of social reporters to help spread the information and stimulate conversations before, during and after the event.
This is how “Social Reporting from Conferences, Workshops and Other Events – A practical guide for organisers” came to life. Written by our social media agitator Peter Casier, who coordinated the social reporting team in Addis, the guide provides plenty of practical advice on how to put together a strategy and a team, and deliver great social reports.
This tutorial is just a taste of the guide’s main chapters and tips. To find out more about the guide, read on.
Social reporting from an event provides a unique opportunity to reach out to even more people than those attending in person.
Because it relies heavily on social media, social reporting also enables interaction with “outsiders” by soliciting their offsite participation in the onsite presentations and discussions, as well as stimulating discussions about the topics the event covers.
Social reporting can go further than that: using event participants as social reporters will result in them being more actively engaged. Social reporting also stimulates your audience to engage more actively with both the content and other participants, to reflect on the topics and discuss them.
Step 1: Define the roles and strategy of the social reporting team
Step 2: The social reporters get to work
Step 3: Pre-event activities
Step 4: Onsite social reporting
Step 5: Post-event stuff
This first version of the guide provides detailed lists of what needs to be done for each of the steps outlined above. The social reporting experience at the Addis Share Fair provides the practical case and examples from which the guidelines have been distilled.
The March 2011 version is far from finished and polished: please leave a comment on this post and provide suggestions on what can be improved, added, changed or just removed. And if you like it … well, please say it! (Peter promised a glass of Prosecco – alternatively a cup of rare white tea – for each flattering comment).
Download the Guide (PDF 900KB)
Photo credit: Antonella Pastore
All content created by ICT-KM is published under a Creative Commons 3.0 license. You are free to share, republish or remix so long as you attribute ICT-KM clearly as the original source.
Thanks, this looks like a very useful hands on guide and I already shared with others as we have a conference coming up in April that we are trying to put together an action list around!
This sounds like a great opportunity for another test drive. Remember to let us know how the guide worked for you and can be improved.
OK, Rebecca. Prosecco or tea?
Peter
Excellent document, it never gets boring. Maybe some more information could still be added on how to automatically connect the different social media. Another interesting development is the beta release of Event Eye. Event Eye brings together all the conversations, chat, tweets, blog posts & ‘buzz’ about an event. Could we turn this guide into a wiki or a Google Doc so it becomes a ‘living’ document?
Prosecco will do Peter, thanks.
Hey Tom,
Event Eye is new to me. Will definitively have a look at it, as “tying all the content together” was definitively a challenge at the Share Fair, and will be for any event (the larger the team, the more content, the more difficult for anyone to keep an overview)…
On turning the guide to a Wiki or Google Doc: I think this is a good idea for the next release, once we integrated all the feedback!
Prosecco it is!
Peter
About aggregators, today I came across a post on ReadWriteWeb on conference tracking: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_track_conferences_virtually.php which mentions Lanyrd as a social conference directory. It can act as a content aggregator (looks like organisers can add links to existing materials around the web to compile the Coverage column), but it seems that it’s mostly oriented to support and facilitate social interaction in the good ol’ personal relationships way. Still, I find it interesting to create a people’s aggregator: see the SXSW conference example at http://lanyrd.com/2011/sxsw/
I am crossposting some feedback I got directly, so we can keep track of it:
From Charles (Knowledge Transfer Africa, Zimbabwe):
Were you able to track the impact of Social Reporting in Addis? It would be good to hear about the reach of your exercise – how far did the message travel globally and what were some of the responses? If possible, a google map could depict feedback from people who responded to your Social Reporting. This mapping exercise could tell us the flow of feedback. For instance, since the fair was happening in Africa, it would be good to see how Social Reporting played its role in surfacing responses from African organisations which could not be at the fair.
Apologies if this sounds too much. I am just imaging this as demonstrating the impact of Social Reporting.
Another comment, related to the previous comment from Charles, also received by email, and crossposted so we can keep track:
From Catherine (Institute of Development Studies, UK):
(…)Am inspired by the format and really pleased that you have taken the time to produce such a thoughtful and practical guide. Love the emphasis on establishing goals up front – sounds obvious but a step that is often missed!
(..)Have you done any work on impact of the social reporting, what outcomes you might contribute through social reporting vs more traditional reporting. Would love to see anything you have on this.
@Catherine, @Charles,
Thanks for to both of you for the feedback.
You are both right to point out that the “impact” and “reach” of the social reporting efforts (probably both in terms of “how to monitor” as well “showing the practical reach of our efforts at the Share Fair itself”) are something we should add to the guide.
I can already say that:
- While the “impact” is difficult to measure, the “reach” is easier, and can be easily quantified and (Charles!) mapped.
- We indeed actively monitored the response and the reach of our efforts (the retweets, the traffic on our different blogs, etc..), and were surprised by the speed in which “our content” travelled around the world, and how even mainstream media got interested.
- While the propagation of the event’s visibility and content travelled well and far, we also experienced a much more active and positive participation within the event. This is often an overlooked advantage when organising social reporting: We were able to entice as many discussions about social media tools (the “how”) as we had discussions about the content of the sessions themselves (the core of the event).
- Another encouraging significant impact (call it “spin-off”) was how many people, who were not originally part of the social reporters, were drawn into the team, not only to learn about the tools, but also to social-report themselves and more actively participate in the event than being “a mere listener”.
- A third aspect (another spin-off) was a practical one: we used social media tools extensively, and were able to assemble such a large team with a wide experience in many social media tools. Not only did we learn a lot about new tools and techniques from each other, but we were also able to propagate this knowledge to participants in several “social media tool sessions”.. As such, many participants were induced in both the “basics” and “advanced techniques” of social media. It was gratifying to see how many participants started to blog, to tweet, or use any of the other tools, after the event, for their own work/project.
Again, this is clearly something we should highlight better in this guide.
Thanks again for your feedback.
I do not resist to recommend Scoop.it
our users are doing great pages to curate contents before-during and after an event to keep their audience engaged, to follow up on the discussion and create a dialogue (as contents could be suggested to you etc)
SXSWi is an obvious example
http://www.scoop.it/t/sxsw-interactive
but also, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona
http://www.scoop.it/t/mobile-world-congress
Hi, Axelle, interesting recommendation… it takes the concept of aggregation as we are discussing it a bit further towards curation. I think it could be interesting for specific themes in a big conference like SXSW, while for smaller events organising one place where all the coverage is collected would still be useful.
scoop.it — Oh wow!! Is pretty much all I can say. Impressive. A must for our next social reporting event. Thanks for the tip!
What the heck is Prosecco? (you can take that to mean I’ll try whatever it is…)
Virtual conference tracking is a concept entirely new to me … I think it would be useful across the ICT4D sector, so maybe a buzzword worth getting out there…
Prosecco… is … (apart from a critical component in social reporting) a must to improve the quality of one’s life.
(dixit the book “Eternal Wisdom According To Peter”)..
You don’t know what you have been missing!
PS: I indeed think that social reporting could become a critical component of virtual conferencing (not the only tool for sure, but will allow to include off-site participants quite easily)
Thanks a lot for sharing this excellent guide! Very well written, entertaining, and with lots and lots of very useful information… (Prosecco will do, thanks!)
Just two weeks ago we used social reporting for the first time to report from a 5 day SDC network meeting on decentralization/local governance related topics. We focused on video as the primary reporting medium and gave a video crash course to willing participants the evening before the event. You can read a summary of our video-related experience here: http://www.sdc-learningandnetworking-blog.admin.ch/2011/03/23/social-reporting-experience-from-the-dlgn-f2f/
Our reporting followed a somewhat different logic than yours in that we focused on publishing everything on one central website and did not make much use of social networks. This was mainly due to one reason: In a setting of institutional and financial accountability, social reporting has to directly compete with the traditional written report that most people (especially bosses who want to know what you spent all that money for) are used to. Pointing them to a website instead of delivering a printed report can already be met with skeptic glances, but widely dispersed tweets, facebook posting and delicious rankings are very tricky when it comes to justifying expenses and showing concrete results of an event.
Having said that, we could definitely have made better use of social media to PROMOTE our blog among a wider audience.
And a short note that I think doesn’t figure in your guide yet: One key lesson we learnt was that repeatedly showing the products of you reporting (can be a short motivational video in the morning, a slideshow, projecting the website during coffee breaks…) to the event audience can really kick-start the participatory effect. People need to see to believe.
Hey Tobias,
Your tip to show the products of the social reporting in the morning as a kick starter, motivator, wake-upper is really great!
Next time, we should really do this!