Yesterday I was doing some social reporting with David Wilcox and Steve Lawson for a really interesting symposium looking at how technology can help in (and get us out of) the current cold economic climate, organised by Jamie Young at the RSA.There is plenty more on the blog and the event wasn’t the end of the process as you’ll see in a second.

As well as the keynote speeches and panel discussion the main meat of the day was discussion of four papers that had been commissioned on Supporting Innovation, Sustainable Technology, the Interconnected Society and finally Public Services.  I was live-blogging the last two sessions using CovertItLive and you can ‘replay’ the session to find out what went on.  Jamie is busy gathering together all the feedback the results of this process will be published shortly

• My pictures
• David’s videos and my videos
• The Twitter backchannel (everything tagged #techcold)
• Kathryn Corrick’s write up of the Interconnected Society session

I’m doing a bit of social reporting today with David Wilcox at the 2009 World Entrepreneur Summit being held at the (more than) Goodenough College in London.

There is some blogging taking place at the Crowdvine social network that has been set up to support the event and the various videos, pictures, tweets and audios (if that is a word) are being collated over at Pageflakes.

David is collecting little audio interviews using his iPhone and something called AudioBoo -importantly you can capture a picture too, so you can put a name to a face.  We’re liking it here as sometimes a video camera shoved in your face can be a bit intimidating, but most people seem comfortable just chatting – and the sound quality is pretty good, especially in a buzzy but noisy venue.  Check them all out here.

Burslem’s finest, the eloquent and erudite Clare White, has beaten me to a post about social reporting with her guide to social reporting events. All I can add is some of the things I’ve learnt from doing a bit of what has come to be termed social reporting (coined as far as I can tell by the godfather of social reporting, David Wilcox who himself has some excellent reflections on 2gether08).

You need to remember there are several different audiences for any event and this should guide you as to the way you need to report it, and unless you’re Channel 4 and also have the help of Richard Jolly for an something like 2gether, you are not broadcasting the event. Social reporting is about (horrible phrase alert) ‘adding value’ or giving a flavour for those audiences.

So, before, during and after the event, it is for:

1. The people who aren’t there -  Those who inevitably cannot for one reason or another be in the select group that are able to be in that rooms or rooms. Like any radio show, if you don’t say it on air, it hasn’t happened. Similarly, imagine you are viewing your event from afar, and can only see the website associated with it – if all you can see is the out of date booking page, the event effectively hasn’t happened.

2. People who are at the event – bit of a novel one this – and it helps if you have some big screens displaying what is going on, (or small ones, set the homepage of the browsers in the cybercafe to the webiste where you are posting stuff if the event has one) You can use things like Twitter to crowdsource questions, and you can solicit questions from the website or blog by asking for comments, so keep an eye on comments.

3. The great unwashed: (or potential sponsors, attendees of your next conference or event – yes they might pay to come next time instead of watching it unfold online, Time Team). Whatever you produce is a historical record of what happened – it won’t be everything, that would be impossible (and you’re not broadcasting remember) but a flavour, interviews with speakers after their keynote – not the keynote itself. And that should inspire people a year or more down the line to get involved.  The event was probably expensive to put on, so make the most of that investment, and record some of it, and make it work for you during the weeks and months afterwards.

Do

• Have a plan about what you’re going to cover. You can’t be everywhere at once

• Agree a unique tag and stick to it -wherever you are posting content (Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, Slideshare etc) You’ll find that Google is your friend when it comes to a search for the event, gathering all these resources together.  On a smaller scale if you’re set up on Twitter and create a #hashtag, then a page will automatically be created that grabs all of the above in one convenient place, even if you haven’t got a specific social reporting site set up.

• Take pictures, regularly get them off the camera, edit and tidy them up using something like Picasa (free and even Mac people can use it now) and upload them. Get some bankers – signage, people mingling, key speakers then more fun shots. You can use these as placeholders for posts that you don’t have a specific picture for  (I’ll do another post on workflow for getting pictures at an event soon)

• Grab other likely looking people with tiny laptops and fancy looking phones and give them a login – they might turn out to be great guest bloggers, who can help out while you gather other material (video and photos) to illustrate their posts. This happened to me with Darragh Doyle at Shine 2008.

• Bring a 4-way power adapter and extension lead (you will be able to rent out time at your sockets – there is never enough power)

• Have a Power Monkey handy to charge up your phone/camera/anything else portable

Don’t

• Try to social report an event you are actually taking part in- I’ve tried it, it doesn’t work.  If you can get more than one person helping out, then set someone up in the corner to field all the incoming multimedia, make sense of it and upload it.

I’ve not really touched on video as this is still something I’m getting to grips with, but I can recommend Qik, to get streaming and almost live, embeddable video straight from your phone. Be warned, you’ll need either wifi on your phone or a banging 3G (preferably 3.5G) signal and lots of battery power to push video up to the internet.

Someone like David Wilcox can even manage to extract some sense from a bunch of reprobates – maybe that isn’t the greatest advert for social reporting but if you weren’t there see what you missed…

Other useful links/events that have been socially reported

• Dave Briggs on Social Reporting
• Josien Karma on Social Reporting
• David Wilcox and others on Social Reporting
• ruralnet|2005 conference blog
• ruralnet|2006 conference blog
• ruralnet|2007 conference blog
• Collaborate|2008
• Shine 2008
• Futurechoices