Social Media in Supporting Live Events(SMiLE)  is an action research project which began during the recent Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in ArchaeologyConference at the University of Southampton (#caasoton).

We are interested in exploring the dynamics of the relationship between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ communities, such as whether people met at the event as a result of an online introduction, or if they skipped sessions on the basis that they could follow what went on via the live streaming and Twitter backchannel.  The impact of social networking activity on an intended ‘real world’ outcome has historically been difficult to measure, but one of the SMiLE project objectives is to investigate how recent developments in social network visualisation and analysis can enable valuable insights to be generated for the benefit of event organisers and community developers.

We monitored the use of a range of established and experimental social media tools to track how they were utilised by both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ delegates before, during and after the event. We expected that this activity would include information recording and sharing, network building, profile raising and also hopefully help to develop a sustainable community of practice. During the event, we carried out a number of interviews with conference participants about their individual experiences and interactions via Twitter, Storify, Flickr, Vimeo, LinkedIn, Facebook, QR codes and Corkboard. We also set up projects to extend beyond the conference including a Wikiathon and blogging competition.

• If you don’t have social media, you are no one: How social media enriches conferences for some but risks isolating others (LSE blog, May 23, 2012)
• “But who is going to read 12,000 tweets?!” How researchers can collect and share relevant social media content at conferences (LSE blog, June 25, 2012)
• And on Dave Chaffey’s Smart Insights Marketing Blog (11th July)

Project's online presence

Posts about the project: