Is live tweeting good for your career? If you want to do something that involves social media, the answer is yes.
On Saturday, Oct. 5, 2013, a group of 28 volunteers under the leadership of Mo Krochmal, executive editor of Social Media News NY, convened at NYU in a real-time newsroom to cover the 21st annual New York Press Club Foundation Conference on Journalism. There were 12 live Tweeters, three photographers, three videographers, four live streamers, four hub editors, an assistant producer and a producer. As part of the organization process, participants were assigned positions partially based on their experience with Twitter and their Klout scores.
These scores ranged from 12 to 61 and averaged 32 as a group before the event, and 35 afterwards, a 9 percent increase. A couple individuals saw Klout scores jump as much as 50 percent. Most of the active "sharers" saw single-digit growth, especially those who came in with above average scores. According to Klout, the average score is 40. Users with a score of 63 are in the top 5% of all users.
Julie DeVito (@jdevito91) was the top live tweeter for the event with a super-human 149 #NYPC2013 tweets among 1,500 total for the event as measured through Saturday night. Her Klout score jumped to 48 from 40.
Nina Zipkin (@ninazipkin) followed with 79 tweets and her Klout went to 51 from a 45, while live streamer Susan Sawyers (@susaw) had 68 tweets and her Klout moved to 55 from 54.
Other top tweeters included:
- @regina_gorkana 61 tweets
- @gorkanaus 51
- @mwashchyshyn 50 tweets
- @mwashchyshyn 48 tweets
- @matthewcreegan 42 tweets
- @theabug 40 tweets
- @kuangkeng 39 tweets
The Tweetarchivist.com analytics service counted 1835 tweets on the hashtag, with 538 coming from Twitter for iPhone, 377 from the web, 274 from HootSuite and 191 from TweetDeck.
Despite its growing popularity, Instagram only tallied 28 mentions of the hashtag, the same as Twitter for Blackberry, according to Tweetarchivist.
Topsy, the Twitter analytics service, counted 1,737 tweets on the hashtag as of Sunday night. Anthony Quintano, who does social media for Verizon and formerly worked for NBC News, had the second most popular retweet
@anthonyquintano Tip: Don't use hashtags on keywords anymore. Only use a hashtag if a custom hashtag is created or you create one. #NYPC2013
Click the linked Tweet to see the conversation around it.
The link to the event dashboard page for the livestreams was shared 72 times as the most popular link.
The event's plenary panel with @Sree Srinivasan and the luncheon keynote with Buzzfeed's Ben Smith (@buzzfeedben) produced 25.53 viewer hours on Oct. 5 and 2.47 viewer hours for Oct. 6, as measured by Livestream.com
The social team also created a unique production with consecutive live streams from each of the breakout rooms, using the Bambuser service, web cams and laptops connecting through WiFi. The four live streamers: Matt Creegan, Brenda Kessler, Kiratiana Freelon and Susan Sawyers produced 11 live streams, attracting 254 viewers, including 119 live viewers. Susan Sawyers' stream of the opening plenary was the most watched with 47 views, while Brenda Kessler's stream of the mobile panel attracted 43 views as of Sunday night.
As a whole, the numbers from the live streams are impressive. The event was sold out, so the streams meant that adding to the reach of the content without affecting the attendance.
Technically, the live streams did not meet the standard of broadcast quality video. To make that happen, it would take thousands of dollars of equipment and bandwidth.
The dashboard page that held the large Livestream embed and the four Bambuser embeds, even at a smaller size, overwhelmed most browsers and crashed flash.
The embeds are now off the page and will be replaced with hyperlinks to the archived videos.
Photography and edited video was shared on NYPC Facebook Page, Social Media News NY and Twitter. Some 63 photos were posted to the NYPC Facebook Page during the event, earning 21 shares, and 15 likes.
There's more, like Jackie Baylon's Storify of the opening session. There are wrapup stories from live tweeters and more to come in the next few days, creating an archive of an event where this group of reporters pushed the boundaries on technology.
