Twitter at Supersonic – Final Report

When I outlined my plans for “doing Twitter” at the Supersonic Festival I obviously didn’t know exactly how it would pan out. Here’s how it panned out.

Preparation

First the practical stuff. With about 36 hours to prepare and zero budget a DIY approach was needed. I had available to me a 9 year old G4 Mac and a hefty CRT monitor, the sort of kit that was cutting edge in 2000 but now struggles with YouTube. On this I installed Seesmic Desktop, a Twitter client that displays information in columns and, most importantly, can have most of the controls hidden away into a pseudo-kiosk mode. I logged in using an unused ghost account to avoid hitting API rate limits on the accounts I was using to monitor stuff. The screen was placed on a stack of boxes and cases and the screen surrounded with explanatory notes stuck on sheets of A3 paper. It looked like this:

On the left I wrote:

Follow @supersonicfest

We’re using Twitter to keep you informed during the festival.

Schedule changes, unexpected goodness, cake shortages, late starts, all that sort of thing.

Follow @supersonicfest in your Twitter for the latest.

On the right I wrote:

We need you to Tweet

The best info comes from the crowd and we’ll be retweeting what we find.

To be found include one of the following in your tweet:

#supersonic / @supersonicfest / supersonic festival

(a note about just putting “supersonic’ meaning you’ll be lost with the jet planes and Oasis fans)

And then at the bottom I explained what each of the columns were in hopefully clear terms. Here’s a close-up of those explanations.

The idea was to drive people to their phones to participate rather than have them simply consume the information. I was demonstrating that their messages were being monitored and would be broadcast through the @supersonicfest account if deemed useful or interesting enough. And even if I didn’t they’d still be available to anyone who did the same searches.

The method

So how did I keep on top of all this myself? Bear in mind I was not just running the Twitter. I was also an enthusiastic member of the audience and I was taking photographs of as many acts as possible. This had to be as streamlined and non-disruptive as possible. I needed to spend no more than a minute or two every half hour checking and retweeting.

It was here that I broke a personal rule. I used Tweetdeck on my iPhone. Tweetdeck is the Twitter app for people who spend far too much time on Twitter and the iPhone app doesn’t skimp on features. While I probably exhibit that behaviour I don’t think it should be encouraged – Twitter should be a background thing that compliments whatever you’re doing, offline or on, not something that dominates your life. In my opinion. But, that said, sometimes you need to be monitoring numerous accounts or searches and that’s when the overkill of Tweetdeck makes some sense.

I managed to keep it down to three screens (click for bigger):

The first column is “Mentions” – any messages with @supersonicfest in them. The second is a search for #supersonic or “supersonic festival”. I could have bundled these two together but suspected they’d be subtly different with the former talking to to the festival and the latter talking about it. I’m not sure if this actually happened – research would be needed. The third column was mentions of “supersonic” without the words @supersonicfest #supersonic or festival. In other words the contents of the bucket after the tweets had been filtered. Lots of noise here but worth checking once in a while.

When I found something worth retweeting I’d tap on the message, then tap on the “retweet” button and finally edit it a bit, usually just removing the hashtag or @supersonicfest username so it wouldn’t reappear in the searches. So retweeting the tweet in the top-left of the above image would look like this:

That whole operation takes about 20 seconds. If that.

So that’s the system. What actually happened?

In practice

First off, there was already a fair amount of Twitter activity happening around the festival. I put this down to two main factors – firstly Lisa Meyer of Capsule had been actively running the @supersonicfest account for a good 6 months before the event, building up a good following and a sense that Capsule used this medium in a way worth paying attention to. Plus the name of the account implied it would be used during the event (this isn’t something I would have advised on, by the way, since Capsule could be seen as more than just Supersonic, but in this case it worked well). Secondly the Supersonic audience is, shall we say, somewhat geeky. These tend to be people who are very passionate about very specific sorts of music and relatively obscure bands and the Internet lends itself well to forming communities around niches. While Twitter is certainly more mainstream than it was a year ago the “power users” will tend to be those who have already found a need for it. I’d go out on a limb and say there were more active Twitter users as a percentage of the total audience at Supersonic than at a more mainstream or art-crowd event.

(Evidence for this also comes from the Collective Memories that had been done in 2007 and 2008 which gathered mentions of the festival across the Internet. As I said in my How To Do A Collective Memory post Supersonic really lends itself to this, probably because the audience tends to discuss such things publicly online whereas the attendees of, say, a concert at Symphony Hall might discuss it offline or in private. But that’s a subject for another day.)

Given that it’s the nonsense on Twitter that forms the glue from which serious “useful” stuff can emerge (See Jon Bounds on this) I needed to ensure that should some “news” occur people would feel it worth tweeting which meant my job was not just to monitor what was being said but also to encourage it. This was particularly apparent on the Friday night which has more of a “big gig” vibe than a festival one. People said they’d arrived, said what acts they were watching and enjoying and that they were going home. I simply gauged the general zeitgeist and retweeted accordingly, trying to spread my postings across as many people as possible to get the sense that people were being listened to. “Ooh, I got retweeted. I’ll write more now!”

Thanks to the festival running fairly smoothly there wasn’t too much urgent news to communicate but I did pick up on some minor if useful stuff. A schedule change was the biggest thing but I also sent out news about the merchandise room, live streams from Rhubarb Radio, cake supplies at the tea stall, the relatively cheap cider, cafes in Digbeth for breakfast, what Nisennenmondai means (Y2K bug) and so on.

Sharing immediately

On Saturday morning I brought up the search pages on Twitter for #supersonic, @supersonicfest and “supersonic festival” from 8pm to 3am and printed them out on 6 sheets of paper which I stuck next to the monitor with the title “What you said on Friday”. It was raw and uncensored and included a few criticisms but that was important. This had to be genuine in order to get people to be genuine. To run something like “tell us what you loved and we’ll stick your tweet on the wall” would have been pointless. And, to be honest, they weren’t telling “us” what they loved. They were telling their friends. We were just picking up on it.

Some of the tweets during Sunn O)))’s set on Friday

I did the same thing for Saturday (you can see both in the photo at the start of this post) which, since it ran from 4pm and was a lot more social, had a lot more messages. This time I copied the text into a document and edited out the cruft (“half a minute ago from web · Reply · View Tweet”) so I could fit them all into a manageable 11 pages. While I did spend a fair amount of time figuring out how best to do this once the system was in place it would probably only take an hour to do, if that.

The effect of this on the Sunday was quite striking. Along with the 40 or so real-time tweets shown on the monitor there was a record of not just what had happened on the previous two days but what what it had been like. The festival had been reviewed by the festival go-ers and published immediately, analogous to those daily newspapers that get published at large trade events or conventions. Because it was posted in the Rhubarb Radio studio which was constantly occupied I found out people were constantly checking it out, both for current and yesterday’s news. Some of this was people finding their own names but there was definitely interest in this. And as such it became a meeting point and a place for striking up conversations with strangers. People gravitate towards information that is relevant to them and talk around it and that this happens offline as much as online.

So during the event we’d provided a space, both online and off, for people to socialise. I’m under no illusions as to the importance of this – it’s a tiny part of a large whole – but it fits nicely with the cafe, food court and bars and hopefully helped people meet both online and face to face. It satisfied my requirement that social media adds value with the minimum of disruption and without getting in the way of the important stuff – in this case the acts on stage.

The data

After the event we were left with a whole load of data. I did a bit of analysis here and Neil took it a bit further. While one should always be careful with statistics some of the visualisations are at least interesting. Take this Steamgraph taken directly from the Twitter search results:

Here you can see in red the conversation about Goblin simmering over the weekend in anticipation of their performance on Sunday night. That’s not too surprising since they were a headliner and the same goes for Sunn and Thorr’s Hammer about whom buzz is expected. But it’s interesting to see Tartufi and zZz getting some action.

The steamgraph hints at another use of this data. It’s in real time. Whereas reviews on blogs and in magazines are written after the event and photographs are calmly selected and processed before being uploaded, this is raw reaction to the festival as it happened. We can slice through this and see what people thought about the festival at 10pm on Saturday when they were at the festival at 10pm on Saturday.

Here’s a very simple web page with all the tweets divided up by hour. If I find the time I’d like to divide this into web pages for each hour and include photos, videos and excerpts from reviews from the collective memory. Maybe it’d work better as a book – the crowdsourced report on Supersonic 2009. There’d be copyright issues for sure but that doesn’t stop it being an interested idea.

But the surface has only been scratched here. Because this information is fairly structured we can play with it and see patterns. But we should also be aware that this is only a small sample of the audience. 146 individuals contributed to the pool of data including some of those listening online. The attendance at Supersonic is roughly 1500. That’s less that 10%. Which, actually, is pretty good. Before I looked that up I was expecting it to be much lower. Hmm. But it’s still a minority and conclusions should be drawn with that in mind.

Conclusion

So, was this worth doing? I think so. The act of visibly listening encouraged more feedback which has value and it added a new facet to the community Supersonic attendees. While there wasn’t a conversation happening between Capsule and the audience per se (Lisa was busy, y’know, running the festival and I can’t speak for her) the liberal re-tweeting did communicate the fact that they were listening. And the uncensored public nature of the medium did encourage honesty which at least one person picked up on.

ZpoonZ wasn’t too happy with the scheduling

That’s not buried away in the survey or in a private email. That’s in public for everyone who’s searching for it to see. Now in context that’s just one person and its importance should be judged alongside the rest of the tweets. But this sort of transparency should only be attempted if you’re prepared to deal with all the feedback being public. If he’d sent the above on Saturday afternoon it would have been on the wall on Sunday (and in the interest of balance I did re-tweet this one). I believe Capsule have the confidence and self-belief to take that on the chin, or at least see it for what it is (complaints about scheduling at festivals are nothing new). Would you?

If I were to do this again I’d…

• Get more people to contribute. Since it’s a very low-impact activity I’d try and get volunteers or sound engineers based at each stage to tweet what was happening in their area with one other roaming around monitoring the searches. Given the lead time I didn’t have a chance to integrate the project into the workings of the festival and while this wasn’t a problem it would have made it more interesting and useful to get a “back-stage” view.
• Have a bigger screen. Not necessarily a projection (they’re hard to read) but certainly something that more than one person can read at any time. Maybe four screens, each with a different search on it.
• Have more Twitter stations. This brings in costs and potential security issues, no to mention greater potential for things to go wrong, but it would have been nice to have a monitor in the cafe and the food court and at the entrance to each stage. 90% of the audience weren’t on Twitter, it seems, so how can we bring that information to them more effectively.
• Get the print-outs up quicker. Set up a system that scrapes and cleans up the Twitter search so it can be printed out on-site and posted up ever couple of hours.

But ultimately it would depend on the event. I understand the Moseley Folk Festival are looking to do something with Twitter this year (which is why I’m writing this up now). That’s a very different style of event with a different audience so a number of the nuances of Twitter at Supersonic won’t apply. But hopefully the general stuff will.

I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface on this but at 2500 words I’d better stop.

Any questions?