Stream It

In the latest chapters of "The Art of Social Media," the authors focus on running events and making them appealing to the people who attend and keep up to date on them. A lot of it focuses heavily on the idea of keeping up your social media activity throughout the event, instead of just doing it to drive attendance in the beginning.

A suggestion that I really took to heart, was streaming all of your event live and make sure it's getting out there. Streaming has become a big part of where I've worked over the past couple summers. What may be surprising, is that the organization concerned about streaming was Ohio Government Telecommunications, or OGT for short, because it's a state government affiliated group. A large bulk of our work was not only broadcasting, but also streaming Ohio government press conferences and house and senate sessions. We mainly did our streaming through Facebook Live and Periscope, but what was more surprising than the streaming itself, was the emphasis my bosses put on making sure the stream was always up and running. I know you're probably thinking that, "of course you should always make sure it's running," but my point is that even government broadcasting of events has shifted to include streaming.

This seems to me like streaming should be extremely high on the priority list for all events. I remember watching the viewer count one day on both the Ohio Channel, which is what OGT's TV channel is called, and our livestream and the stream numbers were staying about the same as, or were even higher than our channel viewer numbers. Seeing those numbers, put into perspective just how important other methods of reaching your audience is in this very inter-connected world we live in.