Trick #21: I stream, you stream, we can all live stream with UStream
Lisa Harris
This post is by guest author Lisa Harris, Communications Manager for Web and New Media at The Colorado Health Foundation.
Imagine widening the scope of your organization’s event beyond the venue while allowing audience participation and integration with social media tools like Twitter. You can and it’s “free.” Notice I put “free” in those quotes. More on that later. Ustream is a free live video streaming service that puts the power of live broadcasting in your organization’s hands.
In these days of tight travel budgets and the need for expanding geographic outreach, Ustream can assist your organization take the conversation beyond your event’s walls. As part of our event’s social media plan, my organization recently used Ustream to broadcast sessions from our 2010 Colorado Health Symposium. Our Symposium is one of the leading national health policy conferences and featured discussions on one of the hottest topics out there – health care reform and how it touches all aspects of health care in the U.S.
The 2010 Colorado Health Symposium quickly sold out with more than 400 people in attendance. We decided to setup a Ustream channel to expand access by providing live broadcasts of our plenary sessions. Ustream audience members were also able to chime in on the dialog using an integrated Twitter feed and a chat feature. Not knowing quite what to expect, our Ustream audience grew to over 300 viewers throughout our three day conference and included a college class, bloggers and many constituents who weren’t able to attend in person. We were also able to “syndicate” our Ustream feed via a relationship with HealthGeek.tv. Ustream also allows for recording and provides a nice archive of your event footage.
Ustream tips:
- Practice, practice, practice with your video camera to ensure that Ustream accepts your camera’s settings.
- Make friends with the event venue’s AV staff. Engage your event venue’s AV staff early to let them know that you will be Ustreaming. As Ustreaming grows in popularity, many AV staffers are becoming familiar with live broadcasting and can give you invaluable tips about room setup such as where to place your camera for the best shot.
- Lights, sound, action! Lighting will be important as many event venues use stage lights with a darkened audience space. Work with the AV staff to test the low light settings on your video camera to obtain the best possible shot. Sound quality is one of the most important features of live streaming. I suggest running your sound through the event venue’s sound board for the highest quality. Setup a sound check the day before your event, if possible, to obtain the clearest sound and test all speaker and audience microphones the day before.
I mentioned that Ustream is a “free” broadcasting service. You should factor in your time spent learning how to properly operate the software interface and your equipment. Also, you should account for AV costs to assist with your event. Communication services that promote transparency and widen the scope of our work are tools that have a place in our growing communications toolkit. Give live broadcasting a try to see if it can benefit your organization.
You can follow Lisa on Twitter @LisaHarris10.
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Trick #20: How to tweet, blog, do Facebook even when you’ve got no time.
When I give talks on using social media there’s one question that almost always gets asked: “We’re are small organization. I’m so busy. How am I supposed to find the time to make all these blog posts, tweets and Facebook updates?”
I was talking with Knight Foundation’s online community manager Eric Schoenborn about this the other day. He helped me come up with these three recommendations for time and resource starved organizations that still want to harness social media to help accomplish their mission:
1) Delegate: Don’t put yourself in sole charge of producing social media content. Decentralize communications at your organization. At Knight Foundation, more and more staff gets involved in the production of blog posts. We wouldn’t be able to meet the need for new content in any other way. And the need has much increased over the last two years or so. You’ll still need to review posts before you publish them. But if you don’t write them yourself, you’ll save time. Also, don’t just look inside your organization. Get volunteers to help you with producing social media content. They already know your organization, so they’ll get the hang of it faster. You might also want to explore hiring affordable freelancers on global market places such as Guru.com, Freelancer.com and Elance.com.
2) Facilitate: Facilitate the use of social media by making it easier on yourself. Simply reduce your expectations. A blog post doesn’t need to be a lengthy literary piece. That email you write to a colleague a friend about something your organization just did – that’s a blog post. It’s OK if it’s short.
3) Automate: It’s OK to auto-publish your blog posts to your Facebook and Twitter presences if your resources are limited. That way, when you publish your new blog post, your Facebook page updates automatically, and a tweet is auto-generated as well. Some people may tell you it’s a bad thing to do. And yes, in an ideal world, you’d have time to interact with your Twitter audience, post a couple times a day, answer questions, thank them for retweets, and so on. But if your resources are limited, auto-posting from your blog to your Twitter and Facebook accounts is an OK thing to do – especially if it helps you get started with using social media. When you do auto-post to Twitter you want to keep in mind that your blog’s headlines need to be phrased so they can work as tweets. This means that they need to create interest and be clear enough in themselves.
For a WordPress plug-in that will auto-post to Twitter and Facebook check out this page. You may also want to check out Twitterfeed.com to feed your blog posts to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. You can also google “autopost to Twitter” and “autopost to Facebook” to check out other ways of doing this.
So please remember: delegate, facilitate, and automate to increase your capacity to blog, tweet and use Facebook.
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Trick #19: How to get beginners to try Twitter (tip: you don’t have to tweet)
At Knight communications, we encourage people to use Twitter, because it accomplishes multiple things.
Twitter…
- Efficiently informs folks about our work;
- Tells us what people say about Knight; creates a conversation between us and them;
- Serves as a “customer service” tool through which we quickly answer grantee questions;
- Forms an interactive sounding board that makes us better at what we do;
- Complements and amplifies other communication mechanisms, such as email blasts, news releases and blog posts.
- Opens up all these same benefits to the person or organization starting to use Twitter.
Quite simply, we would love everyone to follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/knightfdn.
However, sometimes newcomers will balk at using Twitter, because they think they will have to start tweeting themselves.
But that’s not true.
As a matter of fact, using Twitter as a listening tool is one of the most useful, most satisfying and easiest ways of getting started with the service.
Thus, to cajole someone into using Twitter, we csan say that they don’t need to tweet to get started. They only need to do two simple things:
- Sign up for Twitter.
- Find and follow folks who talk about things that are valuable to them.
Here’re the two simple steps:
1) Sign up for Twitter:
Sign up at twitter.com. Use your own name. That allows people to find you. Then go to “settings” and fill out a short bio with keywords. Talk about your interests. Upload a photo or an image. Choose a closed-up photo such as a headshot without too much detail. You can also upload some other image if you’re not comfortable using a photo.
2) Find interesting people to follow on Twitter:
Go to http://wefollow.com/ to find people you want to follow on Twitter. On the top of the page enter keywords that describe your interest, for instance “journalism”.
You’ll get a list like the one in the screenshot shown below.
Wefollow.com
If you see someone interesting click their blue user name link. On the page that comes up click the “Follow this user” button. This will take you to his or her Twitter page. On that page, click the “Follow” button below the photo or user avatar.
For starters, follow at least dozen or so people whose tweets will be of interest to you.
To read their tweets, simply log into your Twitter account at http://www.twitter.com.
That’s it for starters.
Later, when you get comfortable, you can install Tweetdeck, an application to replace your Web browser for using Twitter. Tweetdeck allows you to define multiple columns to easily track different groups of Twitter users based on keywords and other criteria. And when you really get the hang of it, then you can start tweeting yourself.
But to get started, simply use Twitter to listen to what others have to say in areas that are important to you. It’s a great and easy way to get started with Twitter.
(You can refer anyone to this page via the following easy-to-remember shortcut: http://www.beginwithtwitter.com)
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