Social media in action

Scott Clark asked a ques­tion on LinkedIn ear­lier this week:

I’m putting together a mag­a­zine arti­cle about how arenas/venues may use social media, such as blogs, twit­ter, face­book in inno­v­a­tive ways.

I’ve dis­cussed some of these issues in pre­vi­ous blog posts, which I’ve listed at the end of this page. So I wrote a response and posted it to LinkedIn on Tuesday.

Scott has pub­lished an arti­cle about live events and social media, so I am repost­ing my response to his LinkedIn question:

Live blog­ging at a con­fer­ence makes more sense to me, sim­ply because com­puter usage and Inter­net access are much more com­mon at aca­d­e­mic and pro­fes­sional events than at performances.Many per­for­mance and sport­ing venues have posted rules about mobile phones and cam­eras, partly because of intel­lec­tual prop­erty issues and con­trac­tual oblig­a­tions. Mobile blog­ging through smart­phones and PDAs is the only prac­ti­cal way to imple­ment social media inter­ac­tion at these events.

These restric­tions are also in place to min­i­mize dis­tur­bances and dis­trac­tions for the audi­ence and the per­form­ers. It might be inter­est­ing to see a real-time Twit­ter dis­play of com­ments dur­ing an event, but would every­one want to see that infor­ma­tion? Would the per­form­ers want to limit access?

Because “big name artists” tend to use estab­lished busi­ness mod­els, includ­ing the record­ing indus­try and con­cert venues, these artists have lim­ited room for inno­va­tion with social media.

Artists who use a more open license such as Cre­ative Com­mons might wel­come and encour­age audi­ence inter­ac­tion and moblog­ging as part of the event. As more musi­cians decide to release their own music online, some will embrace social media as an essen­tial part of their mar­ket­ing and community-building plans.

Another excep­tion might involve visual and per­for­mance art. Event spon­sors could invite and encour­age atten­dees and exhibitors to moblog their com­ments, as long as the par­tic­i­pants accept the event’s licens­ing scheme. Social media can pro­vide a means for real-time tran­scrib­ing and record­ing an audience’s reac­tion to a gallery open­ing or museum exhibit.

I’m assum­ing that in all of these exam­ples there are some con­tent fil­ters in place. Event spon­sors usu­ally don’t want guer­rilla mar­keters to post or send com­ments that pro­mote a rival brand. Local reg­u­la­tions might pun­ish event spon­sors if the moblog included inde­cent or ille­gal content.

Col­le­giate sports are a case in point. Dur­ing the cur­rent bas­ket­ball sea­son, main­stream jour­nal­ists and sports blog­gers have stu­dent sec­tions at sev­eral uni­ver­si­ties for rude and unsports­man­like behav­ior. Taunt­ing, intim­i­da­tion and name call­ing hap­pen at sport­ing events and on social media every day. While most col­le­giate ath­letic depart­ments hold them­selves at arms length from Face­book groups and blogs, these depart­ments always have some inter­ac­tion with stu­dent sec­tions at the actual events.

Related posts

• 25 Feb­ru­ary 2008: Social Media 101
• 10 August 2007: Forty-somethings flock to Facebook
• 4 June 2007: Illi­nois high school holds diplo­mas after crowd celebrates
• 5 August 2006: Iso­lated Amer­i­cans are try­ing to connect

Tagged as: copyright, Creative-Commons, music, network, social, sports, twitter