Social media lessons learned

Lessons learned from the Social Media / Social Reporting team

Good:

1. We had fun. Yeah!
2. We did a lot of work. Yeah!
3. Connectivity worked very well. ICT team support was great. Yeah!
4. Integration of 'newbies' in the team went very well. Loads of new people got 'recruited' and trained. (Yeah too!)
5. We surely generated a lot of 'social media' noise ! (Triple Yeah)
6. There was a good overall quality of social media output! (Yeah!)
7. The social media team coverage was well appreciated by the participants and outsiders. (Yeah!)

To Improve:

1. Need to check on spelling mistakes on the blogs
2. In general, the "elders" need to check on the quality of their area (blogs, pictures, podcasts, etc..) and guide the others. This is utmost important during the first days
3. We need to be more rigid to organise the coverage of the different sessions as some sessions were insufficiently covered.

> Team coordinator needs to ensure all sessions are covered and assign people to different sessions, a responsibility the team members have to acknowledge and agree to from the start.

1. The more social media output, the more important it becomes to get one page with an overview of all the media - also on the Share Fair Website
2. We need to ensure more 'integrated posts', which combine all social media aspects of a particular subject or session. At this moment, it was too dispersed.
3. We might make a video on the event itself (as a wrapup video)
4. We should define before the Share Fair who is interested in what topics, so we can subdivide the topics (as we subdivided the type of media)
5. We need to further expand the feedback loop (using social media to integrate feedback into the sessions). We need to ensure we integrate this with the session schedule/dynamics on forehand so it does not disrupt.
6. When live tweeting with multiple people from the same session, sit next to eachother so one reports and the other one interacts with the outside audience
7. External blogposts should not be cut/pasted in full. Just a first paragraph as a teaser is good enough
8. Daily wrapup posts take a lot of time. This duty might be rotated, or at least one dedicated person allocated to this task.
9. Ustreaming needs to be fine tuned with better audio (wireless mike for the facilitator), and better video quality.
10. We need to further capitalize on Facebook. (Do we?)
11. We need to clearly promote the key URLs of social media output amongst the participants (posters, small cards with the URLs...)
12. We should use delicious more so that we can bring together everything related to sfaddis and a specific session. This might be easy way of documenting each session. (one problem with this might be that people blog about more than one session in one post)
13. "Elders" could be used to give guidence to newbies (or not newbies) on quality management - as this is also a learning opportunity for many.
14. We need to look at using delicious for linking everything to each of the sessions. One of the tasks that each reporter should be mandated to carry out! This will generate RSS feeds specific for each session.