Where to begin: Life as my muse

On January 28, 2009 @NAIT live tweeted a traditional media blitz with Canada’s Iron Chef Rob Feenie from Cactus Club Cafe, when he was announced as the Institute’s first Hokanson Chef in Residence. This was a big learning experience for us all. Below are twelve tips for anyone considering a similar live media blitz Twitter event.

1. Listen and get to know your audience. You hear this all the time when people give advice about getting involved in social media, but if you skip this step, you won’t have an audience. This takes time, but the beauty is that you can start right now by setting up a Twitter account and engaging with people talking about you/your organization or topics that you’re interested in. Also very important is to get to know the people in your audience both online and offline. Tweetups are a fantastic way to get to know local people on Twitter.
2. Determine the appeal. People are live tweeting all the time. For our media blitz though, we knew that because it wasn’t public and because of the chef’s celebrity that people may be interested in watching. Our media relations specialist Rayne Kuntz @kuntzie suggested a YouTube video. It was only later that I asked if I could tag along to live tweet it, to give our audience real-time direct access. We figured this could appeal to foodies and people involved or interested in social media, traditional media and public relations.
3. Get buy-in from the media outlets. Since our plan was to follow Chef Feenie in-studio, it was important that the media outlets knew what we were doing in advance. Fortunately in our case, Rayne worked in television for almost 20 years and had no problem getting access for both the video and microblogging.
4. Get critical feedback. While we were very excited about this idea, it was only in chatting with others that we were able make the idea better. People within our department, the Institute’s Social Media Discussion Group, students and external stakeholders made suggestions about their expectations for such an event. The suggestions ranged from making the chat available on our homepage, providing steps to get involved for those unfamiliar with Twitter and avoiding the use the lingo in order to appeal to more people.
5. Practice.  It is important to get to know your tools and their limitations. In order to prepare for our big event, I live tweeted a class with instructor Jason Dabbagh on January 16 (Culinary Date Night at Servus Place). While I was only using my iPhone and was only in one location, this helped me determine how many tweets were possible and what my battery life would be like (44 tweets over three hours with just under ½ the battery life left). Also, I switched to Twittelator Pro to post to Twitter and to post my pictures to Twitpic, because I can manage multiple accounts on my iPhone.
6. Prepare and tell people.  We posted directions about what we were doing on our homepage calendar and we told as many people as possible about the chat. We also knew in advance what our day was more or less going to look like. So I prepared some posts including previously shortened URLs (with Tweetburner and Cligs to also track click through rates), found media and the chef’s employer (@cactusclubcafe) on Twitter and also planned some posts based on where we were going to be.
7. Create a hashtag to group the chat. Creating a unique hashtag (keyword with the # symbol preceding it) helps people see what you’re talking about, but also helps with measurement once your event is done. We used #naitchef then we were able to group the chat in Tweetchat for more knowledgeable Twitter users.
8. Make it easy for your audience. We knew that our potential audience had varying degrees of knowledge of Twitter. By using Tweetchat and having real-time updates on our website, we were able to make it more dynamic by having real-time posts appear instead of directing people to a static Twitter page that they would have to refresh. We also posted instructions in our homepage calendar, offering various options to get involved.
9. Account for technology failures. Twitter goes down, all applications tied to Twitter go down, batteries die, wireless networks go down and Internet connections get lost so it is important to have a backup plan for all these scenarios. One of the worst things we could do was build up excitement for our event but fail to follow through. We had a backup plan for each possible failure and brought extra tools along. I had a spare laptop, spare camera, spare laptop battery, power hookups for the vehicle, a wireless connection from Telus for my laptop and a Rogers connection on my iPhone.
10. Make sure you’re not in the way or interrupting. The night before, when I was charging all the batteries, I made sure to turn off the ringing on my phone, muted my laptop and turned off the flash and sound on my backup camera. The day of the event I simply observed and communicated what I saw in the studios and when we were in waiting areas or the vehicle, I took the opportunity to ask the questions that were coming through. I also dimmed my laptop the night before so that I could save battery life.
11. Measure. By using URL shorteners and a photo service like Twitpic, we can tell how many people clicked through on our content. New followers, the number of people that interacted with us, blog follow-up posts and traffic to various pages on our website are all part of our metrics. My goal was to get ten comments/questions from different users on Twitter.
12. Take the risk and have fun. Doing something like this made me very nervous. I was more excited though by the challenge presented and the opportunity to try something new, so I had to get over my nervousness. We’ve received so much positive feedback (typos and all and I would do it all over again, maybe next time attempting video or audio clips.

Facts about the day:

• 91 posts by @NAIT including replies and posts the day before
• 48 comments/questions from users
• 23 users interacted with us, most were local although we did have a few from elsewhere including Calgary and Guelph, ON
• Many more watched the chat and we’re still gauging its impact through web analytics and future posts
• Four autographed cookbooks were given away
• A summary of the chat will be posted at www.nait.ca/naitchef
• A representative from our student newspaper (The Nugget) and two sections of PR students in our business school also participated, which demonstrated our mandate to provide “education for the real world.”
• At CBC Radio One, both the laptop wireless card and my iPhone worked. In studio at CityTV only my iPhone worked. At CFRN, again only my iPhone worked in the green room. In the studio at CFRN, my iPhone worked when I was by the door, but further inside the studio I lost the connection.
• At the Ernest’s dining room at NAIT, the laptop wireless card worked most of the time, but I did eventually lose the connection. The iPhone kept going though.
• Because it offered the best connection, most of my day was done on the iPhone. I would still bring a laptop around though because when you can get a good connection, you can copy and paste posts and links. The iPhone does not have copy and paste capabilities.
• The tweeting actually made it to air at CityTV as did a local blogger’s question.
• A funny part during the day is that I forgot to tell our van driver that I had posted a picture of the van on Twitter and told people to honk when they saw us.  Our driver Bruce was waiting for us when someone was honking at him and he had no idea why – I felt bad.

Watch our behind the scenes video from the day.

Originally posted January 30, 2009

Update: June 10,2009

This initiative was recognized with a gold Canadian Public Relations Society Award of Excellence in Social Media at the On the Edge conference held in Vancouver.

Diane Bégin accepts the CPRS national award for NAIT.