At the Oxford Jam event for social entrepreneurs last week, I seized the opportunity to interview Amanda Jones, who handled the social media and online tech strategy for the #OxfordJam #socent event #4change. OxfordJam ran as a simultaneous fringe event to the #SWF10 gathering of big money and big names in the social enterprise ecosystem that convened at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship across the street. It was a co-created event for social change that included a lively combination of social entrepreneurs and social enterprise support providers. Amanda was the core production team dynamo behind the OxfordJam’s online strategy.
I have been a fan of Amanda’s for some time through her fascinating appropriate technology for development design work with @RedButtonDesign, that she has written about at http://www.unltdworld.com/ and on her blog. To learn that such a brilliant young development technology designer is also so naturally social media savvy really heartens my faith in the ability of our online systems to bubble the right people to the top. Amanda Jones is definitely a #socent name to watch in the international development arena. She’s a powerhouse, whose heart is in the right place.
Here’s a clip of an Earth Awards interview with her I found, to give you just a hint of Amanda’s capacity for vision beyond the realms of social media. Taking time out to engineer and execute the Oxford Jam webbed strategy was really a side gig for her, and I think she did a heck of a job.
Amanda and the rest of the Oxford Jam event team (especially Ben Metz and Alise Kertley) pulled their co-created event concept together in about 6 weeks time. Amanda shared with me that she would have rather had 12 weeks so she wouldn’t have had to completely (and controversially) drop all of her design work to do it. In her view 8 weeks would have been ideal to execute a full social media push. That rush aside, Amanda was able to articulate which parts of their online strategy had worked really well, why other parts had not worked so well, and what remained to be done.
Step 1. Set up a basic online event space – had to exist somewhere online before anything else (Success!)
- registered the domain name
- Created 1 black & white and 1 color logo.
- quickly put up a site easy to edit that could hold diverse kinds of content. Amanda chose a simple 2 column wordpress that could easily grow with all kinds of content embedded in it.
Step 2. Open social media channels for pre-connection (Success!)
- Created an Oxford Jam twitter account
- forge behind the scenes alliances via twitter (cross-tweeted w/local media, OxfordTube transport, & other regional audience channels)
- create a delegates list on twitter
- Built a Facebook group + event + fanpage.
According to Amanda, a facebook event gets google-indexed, a fanpage is viewable when people aren’t signed in, and a group is the easiest way to scale quickly, so there are good reasons to do all 3. (Hmmm… As I write this I am wondering how exposure through fanpages will change as a result of Facebook’s change this week that allows people to “like” your page instead of “Become a Fan.”) - Create a Linked In group: this became a great channel for recruiting high quality contributors
Step 3. Set up a wiki for live event content capture (not so successful)
The OxfordJam wiki was a great idea that fell a bit flat, due to a number of unresolved issues within the team. Apparently, to have or not have an event wiki was a point of some contention among the core OxfordJam crew. Amanda shared that “more bravery was needed to get people to actually use it.” I didn’t fully understand what the heart of the team’s fear was surrounding participants use of the event wiki, but I do know that presenters didn’t receive links to the editable pages until 2 nights before the live event, and there was very little prompting at the event for anyone to add systematically to the wikispace. (See my thinking on ways we might address that for next year, below).
Step 4. Set up post event content harvest (Success remains to be seen)
Here’s the part of our conversation where I personally learned the most from Amanda’s plan. How I wish I had done this after the #ned #socent event in February!
- set up google alerts to harvest blogposts
- be sure to keep twitter delegates list current as their content surfaces
- create a composite RSS of delegates blogs
Step 5: Create & maintain content re-seeding channels (success remains to be seen)
I have to mention here that when I asked Amanda about how she would use the social media and wiki content to perpetuate the event online, she hadn’t yet formalized her thoughts about it. Immediately, though, she whipped out a piece of paper and made herself a quick list of things to do:
- send out a newsletter that includes blog reports written by participants
- keep pushing the twitter delegates list
- use the wiki for continued learning
- hold a tweetup (twitter chat) a few months down the line
So there you have it from Amanda Jones behind the scenes. I haven’t shared all of her secrets – there was actually a place in my notes where I’d written “be sure to” and didn’t finish the sentence. I so appreciated and enjoyed the time Amanda took to walk through all of this with me, I felt like a puppy dog lapping up her words. My saving grace in getting coherent notes down at all was that Amanda herself was so clear in her thinking.
Interestingly, the part of the social-change-event-media-strategy “nut” that I personally seek to crack, is precisely the event content capture that the OxfordJam wiki failed to deliver. It felt to me as though some of the issues around which the production team broke down were about control over the kind of content that would be posted. As a participant and an ally to the team I’ve been chewing on this some since leaving the event space, and can think of two ways that wiki capture could be structured for next year:
- We could keep the patchwork feel of the OxfordJam event alive online by framing the session host’s task more broadly, to include online content production. Enable and encourage the session facilitators to think about the web content that they can plan to create in advance of their sessions, and task them with following through on producing that content as part and parcel of their session leading responsibilities.
- Or maybe… we could also define what kind of effective uniform web content all sessions will aim to capture for the wiki, and build wiki-posting tasks into the participant experience with lightly structured content format prompts (a photo of written flipchart notes, notes from 2 participants who agree to contribute to typed record, session prompted questions to tweet out to a wider online audience, etc.) Written instructions and verbal cues at each session could be used to direct participants more systematically to be co-creating structured wiki content.
I think either approach could work toward maintaining a moderate level of management control over co-created content production channels, that doesn’t need to impede the live flow of ideas or intrude too much on the flow of energy in the room. Perhaps a combination of both?
I’d be so very interested to read other’s thoughts and experiences with regard to Amanda’s #4change event media strategy. What else would you advise her to think about in the content harvest process and reseeding of content that needs to keep happening now. Please also explore with me your ideas that come to mind with regard to how to capture live event archives online in a space like the OxfordJam wiki, that can serve to build a useful event legacy.
