It doesn’t have to be a long planned out project

Our first two broadcasts were scheduled a week or so ahead of time. However, our most recent interview was put together in just a few hours. When all you need is a quiet-ish room, a good WiFi connection, and somewhere stable to put your iPhone, a broadcast can come together pretty quickly.

Have two people on camera if you can

Having two people on a broadcast makes things feel a bit more natural, and allows for some pre-generated questions if your community is quiet. For all three broadcasts we have had two people “on camera”. For the Periscope broadcast we interviewed Professor Settle and one of her research students together. This was great as they were able to interact with both each other and the audience asking questions. Plus, it showcased the relationship between our students and professors and how well they can work together. For the interview with John Dickerson we had asked for questions beforehand but did not receive any. We brainstormed questions in the days before, sent them to him so he had some idea of what we’d be asking, and then used those as the base of the interview the day-of. We followed a similar protocol for the interview with Professor Clemens.

Periscope may have been first, but Facebook Live is much more user friendly

Having comments not disappear is very useful, especially when the person running the broadcast is not the one on camera. For our first broadcast with Professor Settle, I was frantically writing down questions on a notepad as they came in on Periscope while someone else was keeping an eye on Twitter for questions. When something came in I’d raise my hand to get their attention and then read the question out loud off camera. It made things a bit awkward and honestly more stressful as I was afraid I would miss someone’s question.

Always download the raw video

Both Periscope and Facebook Live give you the option to download the raw video to your phone. As much as I’d like to trust these companies to seamlessly save the video for posterity, having a backup is always great. Plus, in the case of Periscope up until a few weeks ago, saving the video to your device was the only permanent copy of the broadcast. This also allows you to put the videos up on YouTube or another video hosting platform to use for other projects.

You must have good WiFi

Securing a solid WiFi connection was the biggest obstacle for us when we did the interview with John Dickerson. The show was being filmed in the historic Wren Building’s Great Hall which had weaker WiFi than Facebook preferred. Facebook won’t even let you start the broadcast if it doesn’t think your connection is sufficient. To ensure we had a good connection I found an ethernet port in a nearby room and ran cable to my MacBook and used that as a private WiFi hotspot to use during the broadcast and it worked great.

Stay stable with a tripod (real or makeshift)

A shaky video can be really annoying for your viewers, so try to avoid holding your device by hand if possible. A tripod is ideal but a makeshift one using books or office supplies will work just as well. The first time we used a file holder that could be placed on a nearby desk that cradled the iPad Air we were using for the broadcast. For the second interview we used a standard tripod with an iPhone 6 held by hand on top (that was a bit more precarious than I’d prefer, but worked nonetheless). For our most recent broadcast we commandeered a small clock stand and a large stack of books to get to our desired height and angle.

You don’t have to use special media equipment (but it’s nice if you have it)

For our first broadcast we used an iPad Air, for the following two we used my iPhone 6. The reason we transitioned was camera quality, the iPhone camera is leagues better than the iPad one overall. We used no external microphones and overall I think the quality and sound were good (or at least, what would be expected for a livestream). Whatever device you’re using, having good, clear audio is key for your broadcast so make sure you check and test this before going live.

We’ve discussed purchasing some external equipment and there are over a dozen live video services out there that integrate with Facebook Live so some improvements may be made (multi-camera options would be amazing) but the simple iPhone works great.

Always test first

We have a dummy Facebook page that we use to test each video before we go live. Before every broadcast we have done a test broadcast. This allows us to know exactly what to expect when going live, check audio quality, lighting, and the WiFi connection.

Composure

As you’re setting up your video be aware of how to frame your shot. Facebook Live will crop your video square when showing it in the feed so make sure your subjects are always in that square frame even if you’re filming in landscape. Also when framing your shot, keep in mind how your video will appear in the user’s Facebook feed: no sound. So try to make the visuals interesting on their own without the audio if you can.

Give people time

It will take a minute or two for your audience to get the notification that you’re live (if you’re not on a scheduled time for your broadcast) and folks will need to get onto Facebook and find your page so give them a little time before diving in to whatever the main topic of your video is. Spend this time introducing your topic, who you’re interviewing, what’s happening on campus, etc. Also, around halfway through your video it doesn’t hurt to reiterate whatever you said in your introduction to catch those that may have come in later in the broadcast.

According to TechCrunch, Facebook will be launching a feature allowing you to pre-schedule broadcasts along with a “waiting room” for folks to wait in beforehand. They’re also going to allow two-person broadcasts (so folks from two different locations in the same stream) so that will be a nice new feature whenever it gets released.

Have you tried one of the live social video platforms? What lessons have you learned?

Cross-posted from William & Mary’s University Web & Design Blog.

When Facebook Live entered onto the scene last year and then opened up live video to all people and pages this past April, that seemed like the true tipping point for live social video as the biggest social network was throwing their hat in the ring. This presented a really interesting new (and more permanent) way to communicate with our audiences on social media and I knew this was a tool we needed to be utilizing at W&M.

In University Communications we are always looking for ways to showcase our great faculty and students. Offering a way for our entire community to interact with interesting W&M people in real time (and ideally discuss some of their research) via live social video on platforms where our audiences already existed was a great melding of trying out an new technology and tying in to part of our general social media strategy.

W&M did our first live social video in late March, interviewing Government professor Jaime Settle about politics and social media. We had planned to use both Periscope and Facebook Live simultaneously (because why not just dive in head first and try all the things?), but at that point Facebook Live was still being a bit squirrely as to whether it was available to all pages or not. The day of the broadcast Facebook didn’t cooperate so we just used Periscope.

Our first Facebook Live post was right before graduation in May, when Face the Nation was on campus to interview our chancellor and W&M alumnus Robert M. Gates. John Dickerson, the host of Face the Nation, agreed to “Face the Tribe” in a short interview after they wrapped up filming of the show.

We completed our second Facebook live broadcast yesterday, talking to Government professor Clay Clemens about the the UK’s vote to leave the European Union.

I think this new way to interact with our audience and showcase great folks from W&M is definitely staying in the rotation. There have been a few lessons learned from these first forays into live social video and I’ll share those in my next post.

Cross-posted from William & Mary’s University Web & Design Blog

Tools for finding related hashtags

• Hashtags.org
• Keyhole.co
• RiteTag

Finding geotagged content

• Advanced Search on Twitter
• TrendsMap

Monitoring hashtags (and social media in general)

• Gramfeed (Instagram)
• Iconosquare (Instagram)
• Hootsuite (all channels)

Aggregators/Display

• Tagboard
• Hash At It
• Eventifier

Automated and Scheduled Posts

• Buffer
• If This Then That

Reposting to Instagram

• Repost (iOS)

Moderated Photo Slideshow

• Eventstag

Hashtag Analytics/Tracking

• Topsy
• Hashtracking
• EasyHashtag

Recommended Facebook Insights Resources

New Insights

• Facebook’s New Page Insights: Everything You Need To Know, hongkiat.com
• How to Use the New Facebook Insights, Social Media Examiner
• The 7 Best Features of the New Facebook Insights, Andrea Vahl
• 3 most useful metrics in the new Facebook insights, InsideFacebook
• The Best Features of Facebook’s New Insights, socialmedia today
• The Only Time You Want Zero Engagement on Facebook, HubSpot

EdgeRank and News Feed

• What Is Facebook EdgeRank and Why Does It Matter?, Mashable
• EdgeRank Is Dead: Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Now Has Close To 100K Weight Factors, Marketing Land
• Busting Facebook’s Most Widespread Myth (or why you are not reaching 16% of your fans!), agora pulse
• What the Latest Facebook News Feed Changes Mean for Your Business, socialmedia today

Tips on utilizing the “full” Post and Page Insights data exports

• Facebook Insights: Monitor These 8 Ratios, Jon Loomer
• Facebook Insights: The Lowdown on the 5 Columns You Should Monitor, socialmedia today

Back in April we mentioned that we were working on a new responsive design for the main W&M website (www.wm.edu), and after a few browser fights (thanks Internet Explorer), a dozen test devices and many hours coding and tweaking, we launched our new design on July 23, 2013. (Grad school sites will follow suit in the coming months.) Now every office, every academic department and every other page on the W&M site adjusts its layout to best accommodate how you are viewing the site, regardless of what device you’re using (desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile).

The announcement

To announce the launch our office made a little stop-motion video (our first!) starring the computers, phones and tablets of various Creative Services staff members:

The motivation

Desktop/laptop view of the W&M website. The green bar on the left is the page navigation, center light tan area is the main content, and the darker tan boxes down the right side are the supplementary content.

The idea behind this change was spurred in large part by the fact that our mobile and tablet visits have gone from less than 2% of our site traffic in 2009 to over 17% of our traffic this summer. With so many mobile and tablet visitors (and more sure to come) we wanted to ensure everyone could easily navigate and view all of the content on our website, not just our homepage (which we made responsive last year).

Prioritizing

So what was involved in this redesign? Up first was evaluating which parts of any given page are the most important, and it is, unsurprisingly, the main content. That main content is why you search Google, click a link in a social media post, or work your way through navigation menus. This needs to be front and center (and top) regardless of how you are looking at the website. So, after our global site navigation and header, the most prominent thing you will see is always the main content. We then ordered the rest of the content: page navigation, supplementary content, etc.

The major changes

Tablet view. Here the right column has been moved below the main content area and the top “global” site navigation has been adjusted from one row to three.

As you begin decreasing the width of your browser window we adjust the global navigation to become three columns rather than one row (since the single row will no longer fit).

We then move the right column, which contains “widgets” with photos, Twitter feeds, related links and other supplementary content, down below the main content area.

So, with this first batch of changes nothing is removed, only rearranged to best showcase the content (this is a key feature of responsive design). Once the page width is even narrower, the menu on the left side of the page drops down below the main content as well (keeping its familiar green background for continuity). However, keeping in mind that page navigation is a useful and important part of the page, we provide a “Site Menu” link so you can quickly get to that area when you need to. In between all of these steps the content is stretched to fit the width of the page, and photos and tables are resized to be as visible as possible.

Those with a careful eye may also notice a few style tweaks, all made to enhance the user experience. We removed busy lines from the menus, adjusted the color and size of the content headings, and increased the font size and line height of the content. All of these updates were made to give the site a bit more space to “breathe” and to make things easier to read. We also ensured that our treatment of text links is consistent throughout the site, helping with the overall usability of the site—if a word is bright green (underlined or not) it is always a link.

Cheap as free “mobile version” for all, no app needed

Mobile view. A link to the site menu replaces the menu itself and the main content comes up front and center, with supplementary content following.

One of the best parts about a responsive design is that it is a seamless improvement for the folks creating the web content. Nothing changed in Cascade (our web content management system) from the web editor’s perspective. They still enter their page title, content, photos, links and so forth, just as they always have, except now the content they entered is mobile (and tablet and desktop) “friendly.”

What’s next

Currently our team is focusing on updating our four graduate school sites with their own responsive designs. Along the way we’ll also be making a variety of supporting sites responsive (those W&M sites not hosted in Cascade, like the directory, W&M Experts and W&M Events).

What do you think of our new design?

In previous years our office had helped collect photos for the Commencement ceremony opening slideshow. With the doors opening at 9:30 am, this slideshow repeated for a couple of hours, followed by a video of the graduates making their traditional walk across campus as they prepared to enter the arena. This year we still wanted to do a photo slideshow, but with a twist; we wanted something that was different, something engaging and something fun, so we turned to social media.

Last year we used the #wmgrad hashtag to track Commencement-related activity (and archived it in our first Storify). This year, in the weeks leading up to graduation, we teamed with the folks in Student Affairs to get the word out. Realizing the wealth of potential photos available, we encouraged the soon-to-be-graduates (via email listservs, our student services portal, Twitter and Facebook) to post photos of their graduation experiences to the photo sharing site Instagram using the #wmgrad hashtag…and we were not disappointed!

@tobesurprised: Ringin that bell. #wmgrad #onetribe

@jocelynray: GRADUATING! #wmgrad

Within hours of the first email being sent out with the instructions, photos were retroactively tagged with #wmgrad and new photos came streaming in. We had dozens of photos from each graduation-related event, from ringing the Wren Bell on the last day of classes, to the Candlelight Ceremony the night before graduation, the Walk through the historic Wren Building and across campus to the Hall on Sunday morning, and finally coming out onto the arena floor and being greeted as the W&M Class of 2013.

We wanted to be able to monitor the photos coming in as well as present them in an appealing way, so we turned to a great little site called eventstagr.am. Evenstagr.am offers a service where they will pull photos from Instagram for any given hashtag(s) and create a web-based slideshow (with various customization options). All of our interactions with the eventstagr.am support folks were stellar; they answer questions with lightning speed and even offered to be available on the weekend for support during the event. On Sunday, as new photos came in to be moderated and were approved, they were instantly and seamlessly added to the live slideshow playing on the big screens in W&M Hall. Those seated in the audience were able to watch a near-real-time photo feed of their graduates’ experiences leading up to this momentous day.

@tlchamberlin: Alma mater, hail! #wmgrad

@samsh1ne: #wmgrad

It was exciting to see the photos coming in, with over 10 photos a minute coming in during the peak of the walk across campus. We ended up with 322 photos in the slideshow (tantalizingly and ironically close to W&M’s 320 years of existence). Nearly 200 graduates participated via the hashtag and we had over 1,100 photos tagged with #wmgrad by the end of the weekend. Afterwards, all of the photos used in the slideshow were put into a Storify and shared on Twitter and Facebook so students, their families and friends could find the photos later to look back, reflect and enjoy (so far the story has been viewed over 830 times!). We also created a Storify of the entire weekend’s events so that we could showcase some of the photos and well-wishes from, during and after the Commencement ceremony.

So by all accounts this social media experiment was a success, and we look forward to adding this as a “new tradition” on W&M’s historic and tradition-filled campus.

~Tiffany Broadbent Beker (@tb623)

@jbvandyke
#wmgrad Walking there!

@lolciraptor: Tryna walk across campus #wmgrad

Photo by quinn.anya

purpose of having this directory?” Yes, like a phone book you can use it to look up a particular organization’s social media channel, but that usually means you already know it exists (either the organization or the channel). But what about if you’re a newly admitted student? Or a newly hired employee? Without even really looking at the particulars of the list it’s easy for them to see W&M is (as so many colleges are nowadays) very present on social media. By seeing this, they can look through the lists and find organizations that they want to connect with, or are interested in joining, in a more personal and interactive way than just visiting their website.

A social media directory isn’t just useful for new folks or for looking up a random account. If you’re in charge of social media for an academic department, you can go through and see what your fellow departments are doing, get ideas, share posts or tweets, perhaps even strike up a conversation with the person behind the page. For Creative Services, I know these lists are invaluable for keeping tabs on the happenings of campus and what our community is currently focused on. By following all of the student organizations on campus you get to hear about the little concert that is happening in the student run coffee house, or about the award a volunteer organization was given for their service, that you may otherwise not hear about. You can then share those stories on your “official” channels, helping your followers and fans feel more connected to campus.

Twitter lists are maintained on the main @williamandmary account for all of the Official-ish and Unofficial accounts and make sure that the main accounts follow every account on the list in an effort to show support for those accounts and what they’re doing.

Every three months Creative Services does an audit of all of the accounts, checking to see whether they have posted anything in the last few months. If a “slogger” (aka, slacking blogger) is encountered, an inquiry email is sent to the manager of the account, asking if it is still active or whether another page has replaced the one on file. It may feel a bit “big brother-ish” but often this helps the manager to realize that the page or account has been a bit neglected, and either they request help with ideas for things to post (this is where they are referred to the W&M social media resource pages and SMUG group), or the email simply spurs them to post just a bit more if it went off their radar over the past semester.

What other uses do you see for a social media directory?

This project started over two years ago, combining  a “Web Communities” page that was maintained in our content management system and a Twitter-only stream of updates from the (then) two dozen or so College-affiliated accounts. Realizing that updates for more than just Twitter could be shown using the various RSS feeds and web API’s available, the stream of updates was expanded to include Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. The list of Twitter accounts that had been used in the previous site, along with the Facebook pages, YouTube channels, blogs and Flickr accounts that we knew of from the Web Communities page were combined and divided into two lists so things would be a bit easier to find and particular audiences could have an easier time finding what they needed.

This directory worked well for a while, but as more and more organizations on campus joined in on social media and the variety of social media options continued to expand (Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn) the two column list began getting a bit unruly. So at the end of 2012 the social media team decided to revamp the directory portion of the site by moving the data into its own database (using Codeigniter to manage things). This allowed the lists to be more easily filterable, offering different viewing options as well as creating an administrative back-end so that anyone on the team could add or update an account (rather than hand-editing a PHP file).

Do you have a similar site for your institution? What challenges have you faced implementing and maintaining it?

Graduates - Photo by Stephen Salpukas

Our office has been playing around with a site called Storify over the past few weeks (http://storify.com/about) which helps you to tell a story by curating social media content. The idea behind Storify is that you search for a particular Twitter hashtag (like #wmgrad for this year’s commencement), or for comments on a given Facebook page, video from YouTube or photos from Flickr, Instagram, etc. and then hand-select the best bits of content to use to tell the “story” of an event. You can intersperse your own text in amongst the social media entries as well to provide more context or detail to a story. Using a simple and friendly interface, Storify lets you create a permanent record of (typically fleeting) tweets, posts and photos about a common topic that otherwise would be floating around on the internet seemingly unrelated to each other.

Frequently, Storify is used to recap current events or information from conferences or presentations, and it is also frequently used to “live blog” an event. There has been buzz about using Storify in higher education for quite a while, Jen Doak from CASE wrote about Storify back in June of last year. This year, many schools utilized the site to capture their commencement activities (it was even a topic on HigherEdLive’s roundtable on commencement coverage).

In addition to individuals and colleges, there are government agencies (like the White House and the U.S. Department of Education) and news organizations (USA Today College) also using the tool.

I first played with this personally using April’s spooning record breaking attempt as an example. Intrigued and impressed by how easy it was to create a fun story, I presented it to our social media team and it was decided to create an account for W&M to use to capture all of the great bits of social media content generated by our community.

Check out the #wmgrad 2012 story on Storify