Hosting a Live Tweeting Event...

This past spring I had the pleasure of hosting a special event called “Twitter Tuesday” for the Tony Award-winning Alliance Theatre.

The theatre wanted to generate some buzz around the final show of their season, a very Cirque du Soleil take on Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass called Lookingglass Alice.  They also wanted to raise their involvement on Twitter, so I suggested that they allow select audience members to tweet during one of the performances.

From this experience I got several takeaways that would be relevant for anyone interested in hosting a live tweeting event:

• Make your participants feel special. I created a packet for each participant which contained a handout with some guidelines for the evening (tweeting must be done via cell phone, phones must be on silent, no photography/videography during the show, etc.) and some tips I found online at Twitter Journalism about how to live tweet an event, a copy of the show’s press release so that each participant would have some knowledge of what they were about to see, and a copy of a preview article that had been printed that day in one of the local papers.  I placed this packet on each participant’s seat so that when they entered the show they had something waiting for them, and we got so many compliments on that packet!  By treating our participants as special audience members we were able to put them in a good frame of mind before the event even started.
• Set clear expectations. By providing some tips for live tweeting, setting up a hashtag, informing participants of the correct spelling for the theatre’s username, and reminding them of the rules of the theatre we created a friendly environment that worked for our participants and the theatre.  In the survey we provided after the show, everyone said that it was very easy to participate and that they found the entire event to be approachable.
• Pick an event that is well suited for live tweeting. Lookingglass Alice was an extremely interactive, fun, whimsical show with lots of visually appealing scenes.  If we had done Twitter Tuesday with one of the theatre’s more serious, cerebral shows, I do not believe that it would have been so successful.  Live tweeting is very much about reacting to what it happening in front of you, so you want to make sure you utilize this technique when the presentation is full of energy and things worth commenting on!
• Prepare all of your audience and staff. Make sure that you let your staff (ushers, event volunteers, etc.) know that this particular group of people is live tweeting.  It may seem rude to some to see audience members using their cell phones during the show/presentation, so you want to make sure that the people monitoring the event know what is going on.  It also may be helpful to make an announcement before the event begins that lets all the other audience members know what’s going on.
• Make it work for your needs. We could have easily opened this up to everyone who wanted to live tweet the show, but instead we screened participants before we gave them free tickets by checking their follower counts and Twitter participation.  By doing this we maximized our bang for our buck with those free tickets.  We also picked a preview performance for Twitter Tuesday which meant that all of those great tweets and blog posts that followed were out there for the general public to see at the beginning of the run of the show, creating some great word-of-mouth to generate more audiences.

The live tweeting concept works well for performances, concerts, festivals, conferences, and galas.  I’d love to hear your ideas on how live tweeting has (and hasn’t) worked!  Be sure to check out my post at Tizzy Consulting with all the details from this live tweeted event.