When I got the invite to come out to Columbus to be a part of the 2011 Ohio Educational Technology Conference I was super excited. Originally, I was to work with Cover It Live and SCVNGR but Mother Nature, an overworked network and a variety of other causes had other plans for me.
Cover It Live is a micro-blogging platform used to enable conversation and feedback during live events. It’s a great tool with plenty of functionality, but due to a variety of causes, it just wasn’t going to happen at this year’s conference.
SCVNGR is a location based social media gaming platform that allows users to complete different challenges using their phones and amassing points. The game itself can be a load of fun and a great way to get people to explore different locations. Museums and Zoos have been setting up Treks in SCVNGR to help school students learn about the different exhibits. Once again, a great tool with loads of educational value, but it didn’t quite take off.
There were a number of contributing factors to these great tools not working out as we had originally hoped. The first reason is that the wireless and 3G coverage at the Greater Columbus Convention Center wasn’t consistent enough. When you want people to do challenges with their phones that involve connecting to the Internet, it’s imperative that the user experience is smooth and fast because people have places to go and things to do. The second reason is that people didn’t know about them. While we had begun to spread the word at the conference, people didn’t really know what was going on with Cover It Live and SCVNGR. There was no link on the conference page to them and they weren’t listed in the program book. Next year, we’ll have a more integrated communications plan.
So, seeing as how we pulled the plug on my two main responsibilities, what did I end up doing? The answer is quite simply, a little bit of everything. Talk to any event planner and they will tell you that flexibility is the name of the game. You never know what’s going to happen and you need to be ready for whatever it is that’s going to come up.
So what came up? How about horrible icy weather that shut down most of Ohio? Yeah, that’s right. Ohio was shut down! But as the old adage goes, the show (in this case the conference) must go on.
On Monday, I worked to promote the social media outlets using the digital signage. This involved putting together the screens, streamlining the presentation of the digital signage and keeping my ear to the ground.
Because of the bad weather, there were a lot of cancelled sessions on Tuesday. And when you have thousands of people at a conference, it’s uber-important to make sure that people can go to sessions that they want. My job on Tuesday consisted of scheduling repeats of hit presentations and other popular topics and finding available rooms.
On Wednesday, the weather still wasn’t much better hence the number of people at the conference had dwindled down substantially so we decided to mix it up a bit and take some videos. My 13 yr old cohort used a Flip camera and interviewed the conference attendees while I worked at the video editing. The feedback we got was great.
So how was the conference in my opinion? Great! No, it’s not because I have to say that, it’s because it’s the truth. The number one rule in social media is to try new things and see what works. That’s what we did.
Social media is a lot like a dance. As your partner moves, you need to move with them. It’s a back and forth symphony of relationship. Just as you need to be prepared to respond to your partner’s move in a dance, you need to be ready to respond with social media as well.
We paid attention to the needs of our client and the conference attendees to meet our goal of increasing participant interaction and providing creative solutions to challenges. We are proud of our role at the Ohio Educational Technology Conference 2011!
