Your audience can do more than your staff. Participation will always beat closed systems. When quality isn’t 100% vital, crowds can be your best friend.
At lunch Monday, we talked about conference coverage. We discussed how one might go about capturing the feel of an event, such that people viewing the footage after the fact would feel the buzz, would see what went on, and would get a sense of the value of coming to the event. Thing is, there are only a few dedicated TV crew on staff, and the event is pretty big. What to do?
Your Audience Has Cameras
Encourage photos, videoblogging, podcasting, liveblogging and other “in media res” experience catchers to bring the moments out to the world at large. How do you control what’s said about your event? You don’t. Control of the message went away around 1994. Sorry. The more people out there covering the event, the more coverage. Thus, trust the crowd.
Your Tags are Your Website
Don’t keep all the content on your site. You can’t anyway. Besides, that means people are only coming back to your site, and that constituency you already have. Get OTHER PEOPLE to share their experiences and bring the awareness out to where you need it: in new audiences. Make tags (the metadata that lets people ID posts and information and aids in search) that match your message and event name. But make them easy. For example, tagging things “podcamptoronto2007” is pretty lengthy, so I might’ve done something different. HOWEVER, it’s searchable, and Google knows what you mean. Make tags your website.
Let the Audience Own the Experience
Encourage meetup spaces. Build interview nooks into the space. Do what you can to give people participatory tools. Turn your large meals into facilitated games to stretch conversations and relationships even further. Because all of these things will bring you back even more coverage and more buzz and more a sense that the people who were at the event OWNED the event. And we all treat things we own better, don’t we?
Highlight the Crowd’s Creations
The Beastie Boys knew. They created a movie based on their crowd’s output. Why shouldn’t you? Work with the audience, by the way. Get them to the big names they wish they could interview. Help facilitate a photo op when you can. And then make sure the audience’s efforts are just as well distributed and praised (if not much more) than your in-house work.
It’s a New World
This is how it works around here, folks. It’s participation, sharing, experience by tribe. It’s not that the King is dead. The King has knelt before his people.
What would you do to help an audience own the experience more?