So it has been my plan (because my head was in I’m at an event, social remote audience development brand advocate dude, need to cover the event for the remote audience) to document the best I can while enjoying chats and conversation at the event, in the end I let a lot slide because I was enjoying the company of people there and I wanted to take in a lot of the information that was being shared. I wanted to be present and I did’nt have a remote audience directly anyway.
My plan initially was to capture live video (never did), twitter (a few tweets of posts), pics (on instagram, posted little there, wish we had iOS steepshot!), anchor (we used that a lot, with auto making videos for embedding podcasts, that worked great) for podcasts. We never used discord for chat but rather the official telegram for the event and rocket.chat on the go and never posted anything to dtube for video — it wasn’t that kind of event and I’ll explain why.
paid client jobs, remote audience output
it’s actually been years since I’ve done any ‘ontheground’ client work where I would be paid by the client (indirectly sometimes) to capture the even as a spectator, I had no interested per say in the event but I had to be a fly on the way, grabbing context and content that a remote editor could use to either blog about the event in progress or to reinforce the social media profile for the event the year after, it’s often the case that digital agencies come back asking for ‘assets’ half way through the year like you automatically did it all without even asking for it and often times they expect you to have it all nice and tidy and available — obviously, my headspace initially was hard wired to capture the event the same way!
going with the flow, adapting with the tools
because I did’nt have my ‘lead’ or ‘schedule’ with me for this event (my previous business colleague would make this and keep me on track, a fantastic event and project manager I must add) I had to do it my way which meant I used an app to keep me ‘on point’ — the app I chose was something called ‘alarmed’ a paid application that allows you to set an alarm and trigger that so many times a day — mostly this might be used to remind someone to take pills or medication at certain intervals in the day, I used it to remind me as alarms to capture a pic, record some audio, take time out from the person I was talking to and think of the remote audience.
And for the first day or so this worked great until I realised I wanted to be more in the flow of things and actually get to know these people closer than just the avatar — they had so much more going on and to offer and gradually I took my ‘audience development’ hat off and learned to chill and enjoy myself. No client was paying me to be there, it was on our own dime, it was our first train trip together, first plane flight together, first little vacation together — it was time to enjoy it for what it was, to remove the usual hardwired routine that I would normally do capturing it for the remote client audience and just be present, be me. In the moment.
why I did’nt do the live video streaming?
Even thou we were super organised to purchase $29 30gb Vodafone sims at the airport (one worked, the other did’nt because dayle new iPhone 7 plus was locked to the provider) I was concerned if we burned through the data package, streaming video is roughly about 1gb per hour so you gotta be on top of that and I really needed to have data between places, events, catching up, not relying on public wifi networks (with the recent KRACK, I did’nt want to use any) and not being without connectivity — plus, I really was having a hard time having a smartphone again, the iPhone 6 plus was much bigger than the iPhone 4 I had been using and much more capable so it was a finding my feet mission to get myself together with that.
Also, it was different in that with audience development for a client, you have one asset, the client, they have speakers or audience that you are trying to capture for the overall company. At steemfest you have lots of people that are just people, they already amplify to their own audiences in their own blogs, it’s a mindset shift - they are already doing their own audience development - when it’s paid client based you have a requirement to capture what they need for a bigger piece that you have been paid to provide, it was a hard habit to shake but I’m glad I did.
anchor to iTunes RSS feed to youtube video embed
This worked a treat and I’m gonna be using this more and more moving forward, I loved it. I’m just hoping I can find a way to also upload from the desktop any audio file I create between us on the desktop (i.e better quality than just the mobile phone) — but I loved doing this because it fit the flow of the day perfectly, the only downside would have been to have more adaptive ways to select the graphics I want to use — I certainly see a mobile application for the last part of the encoding process needed here.
But to give you an idea how this works it’s fairly straight forward — you grab the anchor application, record a clip, those clips last 24 hrs and then they vanish unless you turn them into an episode, you can stitch together lots of clips into a podcast and push that as an episode. When you push the episode that goes to iTunes and sits in your RSS feed with a reference to the audio file in the feed, the other service I use, repurpose.io then fetches that feed every so often, when it finds new stuff it bonds together the audio and a static image I create with a nifty little wave form and the title of the episode that I set and automatically uploads it to youtube for me.
What worked really well was that I could just record audio back to back, put in effects, could have done separate audio interviews too and push them separate as episodes to embed as video/podcast clips — and that was interesting to me because apart from soundcloud and a few other whitelisted embed codes it can be difficult to get audio embedded and playing in your steemit posts. This made it easier that I could literally get the youtube video url and post that to the steemit post on the go, super sweet and effectively solution if I wanted to get something up quickly.
conclusion
knowing that I would be straight into client work after the event meant that my time was limited, I couldn’t take too much time afterwards to go through pictures or video so I really needed to get my thoughts out straight away and I did’nt want to spend too much time each night doing it — what also make it a bit more challenging is I did all of this via mobile phone, taking no laptop or big computer with me, completely mobile operating.
It worked out ok and I’ve go some improvements to go to really hone that fast turnaround speed for social blogging on the go for ME as well as the remote audience that might be interested in the event — I know the live streams that steemit did really covered that area too so I don’t feel bad that I wasn’t updating hourly or anything like that to a potentially interested remote audience back home.
