Today Facebook announced its latest response to its latest privacy backlash about user privacy settings during a press conference. Rather than embrace the Internet medium by permitting a video (or even audio) livestream of the press event (or open it up to the millions of Facebook members with concerns), media were relegated to a 1980’s style of calling in to listen or attend in person at Facebook’s HQ to take notes. The other popular choice in the year 2010 is to live blog for their readers. The purpose of this post is to provide insight into strategies for planning live blogging coverage of a company event by your PR team or by your media outlet, using today’s Facebook privacy press conference as a use case.
I selected both CNET and ReadWriteWeb for live blogging coverage and had them running side-by-side on my laptop. (Background: As a news and political junkie, I’m accustomed to using multiple sources of information at once to track the latest live election night exit polls and vote counts across political Web sites, local and national news sites, radio live stream (NPR and local news stations via iTunes), and broadcast/cable on my TV. I turn my home into a virtual election night HQ.)
So now I was ready and excited to “watch” Facebook’s live “text only” news event via two quality tech news outlets, and I’m very happy that I did. What a difference in coverage style, information sharing, audience engagement and blogging platform! Both outlets provided a valuable service for their audiences, but approached it very differently.
Read Write Web
Reporter Frederic Lardinois offered a traditional straight forward, no commentary account of what was being said at the conference, from Facebook executive presentations to the media Q&A session afterwards. There was no interjection of personal opinion or insights on the privacy topic – simply an account of what was happening. It was a very clean reporting style focused on the event only. However, there was one humorous moment during the Q&A when a CBS reporter was tapped to ask a question via phone, resulting in the following post: “Q (CBS): (Dude doesn’t realize he is on the phone and talks to a colleague.)” Embarrassing for the CBS reporter, but still, I knew what was going on!
Additionally, RWW used GoogleWave as a live blogging platform experiment, something I hadn’t seen before. I liked the clean interface, but there was no audience engagement experience. In a post-event tweet exchange with Frederic, I asked about the interactive capabilities of GoogleWave during a live blogging session. He replied, “not this time. The wave is public, but we didn’t open it up for commenting to keep things organized. Next time we will have 2 waves.” So this first experiment didn’t include the interactive piece, but I look forward to what that experience will be like. The lack of community interaction detracted from RWW’s live blog coverage, but the style was clear and concise without interruptions and distractions by audience comments in the live blog stream.
CNET
Reporters Declan McCullagh and Caroline McCarthy collaborated from different geographic locations for CNET’s live blog coverage. The style was part commentary and opinion, part straight reporting plus curated audience engagement during live blogging. Both offered valuable context and background to the press conference, similar in style to what election night analysts would offer to help the audience make sense of the information being reported.
However, the tradeoff to that approach was some missed reporting of Zuckerberg’s statements during the press conference and no coverage of the media Q&A portion of the event, during which NY Times tech reporter Nick Bilton asked Zuckerberg: “Q (Nick Bilton, New York Times): What are your plans for the upcoming location service? Will this create another backlash? A (Zuckerberg): We will try not to create another backlash. The new privacy controls will affect the location sharing. (Zuckerberg is not ready to make any announcements regarding location.)” Well, that perked me up! (I made a mental note to stay tuned for a future Facebook live blog press conference.) Other reporters from GigaOm, Wired, Mashable and Robert Scoble asked questions as well. I liked knowing what these tech outlets asked and how Zuckerberg responded.
CNET used a live blogging platform with a robust curation backend called Cover It Live. It offers a lot of bells and whistles, and has a free version (no ads), free ad-sponsored version, and an enterprise version with some revenue sharing opportunties. But the moderation process was a bit mysterious. It delayed showing audience comments (no real time) or prohibited them completely. For example, Declan posted that after Zuckerberg completed his statement that he received a flood of press releases from privacy advocacy groups, including the Progress & Freedom Foundation. I submitted a comment logged in with my twitter handle and shared that it was recently reported that Facebook made a contribution to this public policy organization, which is against regulating online privacy. I wanted to share this with my fellow audience members as an interesting factoid in real time, a la Ustream.tv (minus the video). Not only did my comment not show up (which made me realize it was being moderated), but when I went back to review for writing this article, the archived version of the live blog omitted this post. Thanks to Cover It Live’s editing features, editors can fix typos and even delete posts before submitting as a final archive. So now live blog coverage can offer a revisionist experience post-event. Not sure I like that approach for a news organization that I trust to stick by what it posts on the public record, but there are benefits for companies live blogging events for a clean final version.
Additionally, audience comments that were let through by the moderator appeared in the live blog stream (not in a separate window) and made the experience visually busy (they were in italics and different font colors), especially when both reporters began to engage the commenters while also reporting what was being said at the press conference. This dialogue resulted in some news information gaps.
Live Blogging Planning Tips
Whether you’re a news organization or a company having an event that you want your PR team to live blog, take time to think through the style of reporting and voice you want to use with your audience, the platform tools you want to have on the backend for content management, editing and archiving, and how much openess you want to offer your audience in terms of asking questions and sharing comments during the actual live blog coverage. If you’re going to curate comments in real time, indicate this clearly on the page to your viewers with a link to a section that explains your company’s parameters for what gets posted and what doesn’t. Don’t risk alienating your audience. If is is a pre-planned event (i.e., not a live news conference) review the event’s agenda in advance to pre-determine coverage emphasis or style shifts, such as straight reporting to lighter commentary. Treat it like a live TV broadcast. be sure to prepare ahead of time so you’re ready with background information and topic factoids to add color to the narrative and to answer any questions from the audience that you can anticipate. The audience expects you to be their trusted expert.
And if you’re a news and information power user, like I am, follow more than one outlet when watching a live blogging event so you don’t miss out on information and have a variety of participation options.
(Disclosure: I didn’t pre-plan this article. The dramatically different experiences I had inspired me to share this.)
Follow Us!