Last week, we did a lot of live blogging for the Youth for Christ MidWinter. After the conference was over, it was suggested that we setup a how-to for live blogging so that we can replicate this at our regional conferences held all over the United States. So here are several tips on what you would need to do to have a successful live blog at a conference.
- Listen to what is being said up front. You have to start with listening. This is not the time to pass your own agenda or misrepresent those who are speaking. Put to words and photographs what you see and hear and know that those at home only have you to interpret what is being said, so interpret well.
- Take several pictures every session. People like the content that is being learned from the meeting, but we all love to see the visual parts. Make the blog into an experiential process by not only letting them know what you hear, but seeing what you see.
- Only share the highlights, not a transcript. The live blogging is about getting the little nuggets of greatness out of the session, or as we found out at MidWinter, the tweetable stuff. You will not be able to communicate whole stories or illustrations to the blog audience, so sum up well what you here, quote a couple of good points, and leave everything else to the videographer.
- Turn off Twitter updates every time you update. Nobody wants to see a tweet every single time you update the blog, which if done well is every minute or two. So let WordPress or whatever your blogging platform is tweet out the initial post and then kill it after that.
- Use Tweetdeck to follow the conferences #hashtag. One of the best parts of this live blogging is being able to interact with the audience. If the conference has a hashtag, use Tweetdeck’s search column to keep up to the second updates on what people are saying over the social media and use several of those tweets on the blog. Make sure you start with the person’s Twitter handle (and even link to their page, and then copy/paste what they say exactly into the blog.
- Use the best of the best tweets in the blog from the hashtag. When you approach putting tweets on the live blog, ensure that you are only using the best ones, not every single little thing. At the same time, do not duplicate the same content and try to get a variety of people instead of the same person over and over, even if they are killing it.
What tips would you give for doing a live blog?
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