Integrate Your Event With Social

Live events play a critical role to engage consumers with a brand or product thru out the life of a campaign. The challenge with events is they are usually bound by geography, size of venue and of course cost. Many brands use social media to extend the reach of events with roving reporters who are live tweeting, creating hashtags for people to follow and posting twitpics.

All of these are great ways to extend the event but why not take coverage to the next level with a live broadcast? Creating a live show from an event is a great way to engage consumers and maximize your reach.

Solutions from Livestream and Ustream allow mobile broadcast stations to be set up from virtually anywhere with an Internet connection. No Internet access? No problem. The Livepack from Livestream is a turnkey hardware solution for wireless live streaming at HD quality. This makes man on street coverage much easier as you can literally point the camera and go.

Recently we live broadcasted from an event. The concept was a behind the scenes sneak peak of a show with exclusive interviews from campaign spokes people and attendees. Our goal was to create new ways to extend reach of the event, engage with consumers not able to attend and drive action by getting people to tune in.

The results were excellent by comparison. The brand micro-site saw its single largest traffic day since it launched in November of 2009. Visitors tuned in for an average of 10 minutes, which is five times longer than an average day.

Not only did people tune into the broadcast from over 20 countries, 70% of them explored at least three additional pages within the site. The live coverage of the event coupled with active monitoring and engagement on twitter proved to be a great recipe for extending the event experience.

Before plugging your camera in and going live here are some tips for a successful live broadcast.

• Create a “Show” not a stream: Fully develop the story you want to tell with a mixture of live coverage and pre-recorded video. This requires more up front planning, pre recording of videos and more tightly incorporating segways to pre-recorded video.
• Promote across channels to build awareness of the show: Using email, social channels and engaging with online influencers played a huge role in the success of this online event.
• Encourage viewer participation by bringing them into the “show”: Another way to engage viewers in the live broadcast is to in create points of interaction with event goers and online viewers via twitter, Facebook or chat. A simple example of this would be a Q&A with attendees.
• No wifi – No show: In situations where you rely on a wifi connection it is essential to test each physical location the broadcast will air from. This will ensure there are no dead spots. For venues that do no provide wifi/wired capabilities you can also have lines dropped or secure a rental of the LiveStream Livepack.
• Poor lighting and sound can ruin a great effort: Having the right equipment can make or break the experience for your viewers. Plan ahead and be prepared to bring additional lighting especially if you are broadcasting indoors. The use of microphones will also significantly increase the audio quality for those tuning in.

Live broadcast are certainly not for every situation but can be a great way to maximize the investment in offline events.

This was originally posted at http://blog.ogilvypr.com/ .

http://SocialBusinessToday.net - The Best in Social Business