How liveblogs make events of all types and sizes more accessible and attendee-friendly.
Conventions are traditionally large-scale events that can have multiple sub-venues and last days at a time. In recent years there has been a growing trend to digitise different aspects of them. Certainly, one of the more popular methods is to livestream parts of conferences, or to film the talks and offer them online later. Another favourite of larger conventions is to provide an app for attendees that facilitates networking and presents vendor’s information or pitches. These developments have proved to be very helpful and useful, especially this year with so many people staying home. We’ve "attended” a number of online conventions that have been hosted around the world. Yet these large-scale events are still stuck in a learning curve. In addition to, or within the existing digital solutions, there is another easy way to offer information, one that is fully scalable and reliable: via a liveblog.
Share information in real-time!
Liveblogs provide real-time updates and are thus perfectly poised for information sharing, no matter the size of the audience, or its location. Given that conferences will be held remotely for the foreseeable future, creative solutions need to be presented to attendees. Simply providing a link to a meeting or a livestream is proving insufficient. Aside from bandwidth issues or not being able to stay in a meeting, factoring in different time zones is an additional consideration. Since remote attendance means that people can take part from anywhere in the world, watching something live can be rather difficult. By providing a liveblog, which contains highlights from the talk, important information is readily available. Attendees in different time zones or who couldn’t join the talk due to technical issues, can all stay up to date. Photos and videos can even be included, as can livestream links and social media.
Highlight and tag important posts
How well a conference is organised is also of the utmost importance and running a convention remotely presents new kinds of challenges. Luckily, many of the same tips on how to organise posts in a liveblog are applicable whether the convention is taking place “on location” or remotely. A simple way to organise posts is to include tags via our Custom Tag Template feature. Not only do they help the reader to instantly see what part of the conference is being written about, but posts can also be filtered via a drop-down menu.
Marking posts as sticky (the post will always stay at the top of a liveblog, even if it’s older) is the perfect way to make sure that important posts stay visible. Whether it’s about changes to the schedule, new links for “conference rooms”, or health and safety guidelines once in-person conventions are allowed, attendees will always know where to look. Milestones are also a great way to keep longer liveblogs organised by creating linkable headlines for posts that start off a new day or a special talk.
A conference for the record books
Quickly sharing information and making it easy to find isn’t the only advantage of using liveblogs to cover conferences. Thanks to custom tags, marking posts as important, and including multimedia, attendees can catch up during or after the event and even share individual posts to their social accounts. Ultimately, liveblogs aren’t just useful for documenting the event but also for creating a lasting record of the event and added value for marketing future events to investors.