2. Opening up festivals online
Helping people who cannot be at your festival experience it
Ways for people to interact with your festival before, during and after
Extend the life of your festival
How to market your festival to new people
And how you can do all this for very little money
3. Who am I?
Worked for the BBC for 10 years
Started in radio then moved into „interactive‟
Worked on:
Glastonbury
Live 8/Live Earth
Reading Festival
Radio 1‟s Big Weekend
BBC Electric Proms
BBC Radio 1 Interactive What about you?
4. Radio 1‟s Big Weekend
World‟s biggest free ticketed music festival
Major UK and international artists
Takes place in a UK city in May every year
But only 30,000 people can attend
The BBC is a broadcaster who needs to reach as many people as possible
And we want to involve the
audience in what we do…
5. 360 Broadcasting: Radio – TV - Online
What we know about these mediums:
People listen to the radio in the background and for long periods
They want variety and don‟t like long sets by one artist
People choose to watch a TV programme but, unless they are a
fan of particular artist, don‟t want to see long sets
People sometimes use the internet to surf and see what they
find, but usually they go online to find something they want
And the audience….
6. 360 Broadcasting: Radio – TV - Online
What we know about the audience:
Some want the backstage gossip and interviews
Some have a general interest in music and
just want to hear the hits
Some people are fans of one artist and just want to see them live
Some are musos and just want to watch loads of music
So how do we keep them all happy….
7. 360 Broadcasting: Radio – TV - Online
Radio:
Broadcast from the festival all weekend
Shows filled with showbiz – backstage gossip, interviews, colour
A single live track every half hour during the day
Two hours of highlights each night, including most of the
headliner‟s set
All promoting TV and Online coverage…
8. 360 Broadcasting: Radio – TV - Online
Normal TV:
90 minute highlight shows each night
The best tracks with a few interviews
Interactive (Red Button) TV:
The whole festival shown „as live‟ over 8 hours
Watch on digital TV from any BBC TV channel
But if you want everything…
9. 360 Broadcasting: Radio – TV - Online
Online:
Watch the whole festival webcast „as live‟
Watch full sets anytime for 7 days after the festival
Or just watch the best track
Watch interviews and backstage films
Look at 100s of photos of the artists on stage
Read or write your own reviews of the performances
But that‟s only a small part of what we do online…
10. Using „friends‟ to reach new audiences
The artists who were performing at Radio 1‟s Big Weekend had
millions of „friends‟ on MySpace and Bebo
We want to make sure all their „friends‟ knew about our event
We give the artists “We are playing Radio 1‟s Big Weekend”
badges to put on their profiles and official websites
We asked the record companies to include us in newsletters,
bulletins and any other marketing they sent out
This started a useful relationship with the
people who ran the artist‟s websites…
11. Use popular websites to connect to the audience
We knew YouTube was massively popular
We knew people liked watching funny videos
So we ran an Air Guitar competition
To enter you had to upload your video
to YouTube tagging it Radio1,
Bigweekend07 and the artist name
Got 100,000s of views
And we showed the best at the festival
12. At the festival – audience photos
Audience photos always really popular
We wanted to take as many as possible
So we photographed 5,000 people
All were put online that day
Everyone told to look at the
website to find themselves
All photos could be added to MySpace,
Blogs etc – with branding and link back
to the BBC website But it was not just
about our photos…
13. Encourage people at the event to record it
Bloggers
Competition for people to come
to the event and blog it
At Glastonbury we gave people
smart phones so they could blog
throughout the festival
Photographers
Competition to win a
photo pass for the event
Ask the audience to MMS
photos to the big screens
And then there‟s Flickr…
14. Flickr.com
Massive photo sharing website
We used it first for John Peel Day:
hundred of gigs across the UK
We could never cover ourselves
So we asked people at the gigs to
take photos and upload them
to Flickr
We have done this for every
festival since
But it is not just about audience photos…
15. Flickr.com
We upload our best photos to Flickr
So when people search for an artist
they find us and our festival
If someone wants to blog about
the festival they can use our photos
Very easy and quick way to get
photos to the press
Flickr costs US$24.95 a year
Photos are very shareable..
16. Slideshows
People fill their MySpace/Bebo
profiles with photo slideshows
So we made all an embeddable
slideshow for all our galleries
Make them for free at:
slide.com
And then came the
BBC Electric Proms…
17. BBC Electric Proms
New festival
We needed to find lots of ways to promote it
No one knew our website existed
This time is was about getting
BBC Electric Proms onto other websites
We needed to use the websites our audience use
Starting with music websites…
18. last.fm
Social network music site
Very popular with music fans
Tracks what you listen to on
your computer/MP3 player
Recommends music and gigs
based on what you listen to
Links you to other people with
similar music tastes
And anyone can enter a gig or festival…
19. last.fm
We set up pages for each gig and the
festival as a whole
This meant our gigs appeared on the
artist pages of everyone performing
People who were going added
themselves. We then appeared on all
their pages
After the gig, photos were
pulled in from Flickr
But if you don‟t do music…
20. Upcoming.org
Event listing website owned by Yahoo
Big in America
Covers music, arts, sport,
performance, family, comedy,
education and festivals
Users can join or „watch‟ events
But the big one is Facebook…
21. Facebook
Most popular social network in the UK.
Growing fast worldwide
More organised and easier
to use than MySpace
Users take a lot of personal ownership
Events are a big part of the website
Great for organising parties
There‟s a lot you can do with events…
22. Facebook
Details of the event, location and time
People attending can invite their friends
Everyone attending can:
Add photos and videos
Post messages and reviews for
everyone to see
Builds a community around the event
Very easy to set up…
23. Facebook
Fan/company profiles
Spread very quickly through „friends‟
Greater control as only you can
post photos/videos
Can be used to set up events
It‟s about being seen…
24. Video
YouTube generation /
broadband connections
Online video became big in 2007
Free to host online
(But costly to make)
We needed video from launch
on BBC Electric Proms…
25. Video
We filmed interviews with the key artists
They talked about their plans
They explained BBC Electric Proms
They marketed the festival
very effectively
Now we needed to get the videos seen…
26. Video
There‟s lots of video websites:
YouTube, Blip.tv, Daily Motion,
Metacafe, MySpace, Reever,
Veoh, Yahoo Video
Tubemogule.com can upload to them all
And video needed to be „shareable‟…
27. Video
Every video on the Electric Proms website
had the code people needed to embed it
People could add it to their blogs, MySpace
Press/media could take the video
We gave them to record companies for
artists‟ official sites and MySpace
Uploaded the video to Facebook events
We kept making videos…
28. Video
We added films in the run-up to the festival
Filmed loads more during the festival
(interviews and features)
Would make a great podcast
What about during the event…
29. During the event
We wanted to find a way to reflect the live event on the website
Webcasts is an obvious idea but
They are expensive
They are hard to do
No one watches them (!)
So we looked at what conferences do…
30. Twitter.com
Microblogging website
Post short messages about
what you are doing
Update via the web or
mobile text message
Used throughout 2007 to report
from conferences
At the BBC Electric Proms…
31. Twitter.com
Reporters in each venue with
mobile phones
They texted live updates of what was
happening during each performance
Unique report of each gig
New website coveritlive.com is
even better
But what if you don‟t have a website…
32. Ning.com
Create your own social network for free
Upload photos and video
Blog about what is happening
Visitors can sign up and join the discussion
Ask questions when people sign up
Could easily be the whole
website for your festival
So…
33. In Conclusion – It is all about sharing
Look at what assets (photos, videos, text)
Look at what websites your artists/speakers have
Look at what websites your audience use
Then put as many of your
assets out there as you can