York University won gold at the CASE awards for its live interactive social media projection project. Find out how they did it, how you can achieve great results with your own live projection, "gotchyas" to know beforehand and more.

1. Mark Farmer
PodCamp Toronto / 2016-02-21
Social in Real Life
How YorkU won gold by bringing social to live events

2. Today: Social in Real Life
• How we pulled it off: organizing ourselves.
• The software.
• How it works: live demo!
• The keys to success: how to promote your event, to
maximize results.
• Our other experiments.
• The psychology of success.
• The results.
• Lessons learned, “gotchyas” and more.

3. A Successful Year and its
Conclusion
• Spring Convocation 2015:
− 13 ceremonies.
− 6100 graduates crossed the stage.
− 13 honorary degree recipients.
− 3 faculty award winners.
− 3 student award winners.

4. Organization
• Brought together a number of units in a highly coordinated
fashion.
• Relied on Google docs exclusively for planning &
coordination:
− Removed the need for a flurry of emails back and forth to
share documents.
− No versioning control issues with documents.
− Everyone can contribute and modify documents at the same
time.
− Full revision history for documents.

5. Projection
• Was selected as the “big idea” for this convocation by the
working group.
• Had achieved great results at Waterloo, as part of their
“Convosation” project that won a CASE award.
• Is a key part of the “Friday Night Live” series at the ROM.
• Knew it had application to convocation because of the
strong emotional engagement it creates with the
audience.

6. Projection: examples
Convosation: U Waterloo
Friday Night Live at the ROM

7. The projection software
• Examined over a dozen potential candidates and selected
Zoomph. Initially brought forward by ceremonials.
• Zoomph features:
− Full moderation / curation.
− Can pull from Twitter, Instagram, public Google+ accounts
and up to 10 Facebook pages.
− Can pull text, photos or both.
− Slideshow functionality.
− Reliable, with good customer support.
• Hashtag-based for York (#YorkUConvo) but can be based
on search terms or a combo of
hashtags and search terms.

8. Graditude
•Demoed it at Graditude, a York alumni-student event.
− 150 pieces of content.
− Key takeaway:
▪Mitigate risk through testing & smaller engagements.
▪Visibility: positioning, contrast.
▪Prompt, prompt, prompt.
oActually walking up to people and taking their picture.

9. Content is fully moderated in Zoomph

10. What appears on screen

11. Elements of success: accounts
• Created “yorkuconvo” accounts on Twitter and Instagram, to
prepopulate content on-screen while waiting for students &
parents to post their own content.
• Allowed us to thank individuals who made it on the big screen,
for their submissions. This was especially important for those
waiting in line outside, who couldn’t see the big screen.
• They would often, in turn, thank us back.

12. Elements of success: laddering up
• Once we were confident in projection, we went further.
• Added signs on day two, once we were able to see that
projection was working as anticipated.

13. Elements of success: tweeting & prompting
• Live-tweeting from the ceremony.
− President’s office live-tweeted each event, producing a
huge amount of content, which drives awareness.
• Prompt, prompt, prompt.
−Roving reporters prompted students to take selfies while
waiting in the marshalling area.
−Prompted students over the P/A as well.
−Created content for the yorkuconvo and yorkupresoffice
accounts on Twitter,Instagram and Snapchat.

14. Elements of success: contest(s)
• Swag bag contest
− Roving reporters & York
digital properties promoted
one of three YorkU
bookstores swag bags,
which students could win for
the best selfie / convocation
pic.

15. Our other experiments: Snapchat
• President’s office and public
affairs activated accounts for
convocation.
• Important because 300 million
people are on Snapchat, the
vast majority being 16-24.
− 77% of US college students
use it daily.

16. Our other experiments: Snapchat
• Created “stories” at the ceremony.
− Walkthrough of the venue.
− Best wishes.
− Etc.
• Added a geofilter.
− Allows people on site to take their
own snaps and use an overlay
graphic.

17. New channels: Meerkat / Periscope
• Live streaming through Twitter.
− Meerkat: A nine-minute video gained us 17 followers.
− Periscope: Was too buggy in spring, but proved more
reliable by fall.
• Potential for future events, if promoted in advance.
• More about what’s being said / interesting speaker,
interesting content.

18. The Secret Sauce: psychology
• At a certain point, your IT / communications / marketing
career stops being about IT, communications or
marketing and starts being about psychology.
• Nobody ever became head of IT because they were the
best programmer.
• Nobody ever became CMO because they wrote the best
copy.
• They got there because they understood people and how
to influence them.

19. How do you motivate people?
• Cialdini
−Reciprocity
−Scarcity
−Authority
−Consistency
−Liking
−Consensus / social proof

20. How do you motivate people?
• Reciprocity
−People tend to return a favor.
• Scarcity
−Perceived scarcity will generate demand.
• Authority
−People will tend to obey authority figures,
• Consistency
−If people commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they
are more likely to honor that commitment.

21. How do you motivate people?
• Liking
−People are easily persuaded by other people that they like.
• Consensus / social proof
−People will do things that they see other people are doing.

22. How we motivated people?
• Cialdini
−Reciprocity
−Scarcity
−Authority
−Consistency
−Liking
−Consensus / social proof
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=cFdCzN7RYbw

23. Alterspark.com
For your reference: Dr. Brian Cugelman

24. Numbers achieved:
• 5,766 pieces of content created by people using #YorkUConvo alone.
− This represents almost 12X the convocation content produced by
institutional accounts during the spring 2014 convocation.
• Estimated potential reach of over 6.1 million
− This represents almost 90X the reach achieved at
the spring 2014 convocation by the units
mentioned above.
• Trended on Twitter nationally.
• Eclipsed the results for Waterloo’s Convosation
(3,000 tweets) by the midway point of convocation.
• Had to shorten the time on screen from
12 to 10, then 9 seconds to accommodate the
speed at which content was coming in.

25. Sentiment
• Overwhelmingly positive

26. A relationship with “The Big Screen”
• People actually started asking to be on the big screen in their tweets /
instagrams, and started taking photos of their content appearing on
screen.
• Started seeing
“#bigscreen”

27. A relationship with “The Big Screen”

28. Why is this important?
• Tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of people saw
messages such as these, and then liked / shared them:

29. Emotional connection
• Back and forth between parents and their kids.
• Friends sharing their excitement with friends.
• Pride, positivity.

30. Visual impact

31. CASE Awards: Gold

32. Takeaways
• Appealing to the audience’s sense of self, and instant
gratification drive engagement: people need to be able to
see themselves on-screen in-venue, for projection to
achieve results.
−This is common to all live projection events I’ve looked at.

33. Takeaways
• You can only achieve so much on your own channels. By
harnessing the power of the crowd and an emotional
connection, you can achieve exponential results.
− Amplification: we can reach X number of people, but if we
harness X number of people to produce content they share
with their network, we reach X2.
• Prompt, prompt, prompt.
• Reduce risk through testing & trials.
• Measure, if you want to be taken seriously.

34. Other potential formats

35. Questions?
• http://markfarmer.net
• Twitter.com/markus64
• linkedin.com/in/markfarmer64
• Meetup.com/Social-Media-Cafe-Toronto