Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

Last week I was able to get out of the office for a few days and attend SES Chicago. It was my first time attending and although a little hectic at times, overall, it was a fantastic experience. If you’re a search or online marketer, I’d definitely suggest you attend. Although I was able to attend, a few of my co-workers were not and, being the geek that I am, I decided to live blog as much as possible. Over the course of the week, there were a few things I learned which I wanted to impart to anyone else who is thinking of also undertaking live blogging in the future. Below are ten tips that I’ve put together to make your life easier.

1. Ask for a press pass: This is something I didn’t actually ask for when I attended SES, but which was provided to me anyway. I did find however that my constant typing in each session was tolerated a bit more because my badge said “PRESS” right on it. And speaking with a few of my press “colleagues” at the conference, they said that when asked, most conferences will give you a press pass, just for the free coverage, as long as you can show some legitimacy in your reporting.
2. Bring an extra battery: Although I never ran out of juice at any one point in the conference, there were a few close calls where I had to duck out of a session a few minutes early so that I could recharge in the press room, which gets me to my next point.
3. Find the power outlets: If you’re in a hotel ballroom or on a conference floor, it’s not going to be easy to find an outlet, let alone a free one. Scope out the conference for a power outlet away from the general crowd and see if there’s anyway you can keep it free for your own use or find out when the best times are to recharge. For a full day conferences, this becomes very strategic in terms of when to charge and when not to charge.
4. Set your laptop to it’s lowest power settings: By bringing my screen brightness down to it’s lowest setting, I was able to save a lot more power then trying to blind everyone with my screen.
5. Take shorthand: Live blogging is meant to be real time and rapid fire. Your readers have to understand that you are going to be feeding them information as it happens, which doesn’t always account for typos. No worries, you can always go back later and create much more verbose prose at your leisure. Just type fast for now.
6. Find more audience: Although I knew I was live blogging specifically for my co-workers and a few others, I knew there was a huge audience out there who could also use this information. In comes Twitter. By searching for #ses (the shows hashtag), “ses chicago”, @seschicago (the twitter account) and some other keywords, I was able to find a lot more people who were also at SES Chicago, but which I had never met nor would have met without Twitter. By reaching out to those audiences, I was able to reach a much larger audience as well as create some buzz around my coverage and get a few links from other blogs and websites in the process.
7. Find tech support: Early on in the conference, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get wireless at all. The keynote ballroom had wireless on the west side, but not on the east side. I immediately sought out and found the conference technical support and the problem was resolved. My recommendation to you though is not to wait until you get to the conference, but even to call ahead of time and get a technical contact who will be at the show to make sure you know what you’re going into.
8. Know the agenda: Although I had looked at the conference schedule multiple times, I constantly found myself going back to the schedule to figure out what was next or where I was going. Depending on how large your conference is (SES Chicago isn’t even that big) you might have to plan for some serious walking time.  So just know ahead of time when you need to leave and how long it’s going to take you to get to the next session to cover it.
9. Have a backup plan: There were a few times my wireless flaked out on me and as a result I opened up Word to just take some quick notes until wireless came back. Just make sure you have something you can quickly pull up in case your wireless or laptop dies and you can continue to report on what’s going on.
10. Find a great live blogging platform: And this is the last and most important tip – find a reliable, easy to use live blogging platform. I used CoverItLive, which was absolutely fantastic. I set up a live blog, embedded some code into my blog, and away I went. It has an administrative interface different than what the user sees, but still very similar. It has the capacity for live polls, posting questions and comments from viewers of the live blog, and a lot of other stuff, which I didn’t even get a chance to use. But overall, just find one that works for you. Remember, make it as easy as you can for your users. If they have to keep refreshing your blog to see updates, it puts a huge strain on your technical resources, but also their time and requires them to actively participate. With CoverItLive, they can just sit back and watch the coverage roll in without having to hit refresh or follow a huge thread down a page.
11. BONUS! Bring a friend: And as an addded bonus, here’s an 11th tip. Along with live blogging, I was also taking pictures when I could (and if I had permission, I would have also taken videos). However, I’m bound to miss something if I’m not typing and instead taking pictures. As a result, I’d recommend bringing a friend to help you take pictures, videos, interview people, or just to cover off on anything you may have missed in your flurry of typing.

Overall, it was a lot of fun for me and really, if you can type, you can live blog. Hope these tips help you make your next live blogging event a success. Let me know if there are any tips I forgot to mention or if you know of any platforms to help make live blogging easier.

The past year has been the most amazing year of my life. I can’t wait to see what 2009 has in store!

I’ve been reading Forrester’s Groundswell book for the last week or so and one thing they mention which really intrigued me, aside from POST, was social technographics:

Forrester categorizes Social Computing behaviors into a ladder with six levels of participation; we use the term Social Technographics® to describe a population according to its participation in these levels.

They have a tool on their website to check specific social technographics. Here’s a screenshot of my specific demographic:

It gives you a good idea of how active your specific demographic is within the online sphere. I’d like to see where I fall even within the “creators” category. I assume it’s somewhere between “content fanatic” and “hyper producer”.

And just a personal aside, if you have not already read Groundswell, definitely give it a read. I’ll put a full review of it up here once I’m done, even though I’m a little late to the game.