When Karl Binder and I had the first conversation about the event it was nothing to do with twitter. It was about using technology to come up with a new way conduct a brainstorm and get people to develop new ideas that could lead to some useful action points.
We didn’t want to steer away from the standard conference format just for the sake of being different. Straightforward speaker presentations are great events and Fazeley Digital 09 has included a few of them. However, the danger is that you hear an expert speak, they make some interesting points and before you have had a chance to think about what it really means or how you are going to act on it, the evening is over, the moment’s gone and you are on to the next event.
While many conferences also have people tweeting/blogging out, we wanted to make it a bit more interactive by inviting people to tweet comments in, and for those people to be able to see in a visible way that their point had been taken on board by having them drawn onto our big physical ideas wall.
We also wanted to be able to post blogs, links, pictures, e-mindmaps and let people carry on grabbing a pen and adding to the ideas wall for the remainder of our digital festival before we try and get a proper summary together and the action points joined up.
Karl came up with a great idea for the format and managed to video stream the event so that even people watching in America were fed back to say that they could follow us well.
We fixed on “My dad’s on twitter but he doesn’t know why” because it is a statement that could lead to quirky stories and narratives, but also get people to really ponder why we use social media and how we can use it better.
So basically, the main things we wanted to achieve were:
Process:
- To get the physical audience participating – shouting out, grabbing pens, sharing ideas and experiences
- To get the virtual audience contributing – by following us, telling us they were following us and chipping in ideas that we could feed off.
Content:
- To get social media experts/addicts to take a step back and look at it through new eyes – how could we be using it better and why does not everyone find it a useful tool? Is that something we can/should address by using it in new ways
- To get social media novices to see what can be useful about twittering, blogging, facebook and all the tools that are available and say how they would like them to be used, or what we could do to help them benefit.
It was an experimental event which we hope was really enjoyable. as expected, some things worked and some things didn’t. What we want now are more comments and ideas about what did and didn’t work, as well as thoughts on the points raised by the speakers.
– below are a list of blog posts. We welcome anyone to comment or to email me (km@fazeleystudios.com) with a new blog link. You can also come to Fazeley and ask for our ideas wall in room 36 – grab a pen and get writing. In a week’s time we’ll be drawing everything together to see what we can do next to get some real action points out of the ideas and discussions.
SPEAKER POSTS
JON HICKMAN: COURSE CONVENOR SOCIAL MEDIA MA AT BCU blogpost and another one here
JAKI BOOTH: A ‘RELATIVE’ TWITTER NOVICE slideshow
DAVE HARTE DIGITAL BIRMINGHAM: blogpost
FAZELEY POSTS
ATTENDEE POSTS
I’ve also posted up thoughts on this:
http://daveharte.com/social-media/my-dad-is-definitely-not-on-twitter/