Seems like forever, but President Obama's second inauguration was just a week or so ago. I was fortunate enough to spend most of Inauguration Day at the Embassy of Canada. If you're not that familiar with the layout of Washington, D.C., there aren't that many private buildings to have an inauguration party near the Capitol or White House or along the parade route. There are a few hotels, the Newseum, the Canadian Embassy, and a few residential apartment buildings. That's it. Otherwise you're on foot, in the cold, where there's not a lot of food and drink to be had.
In true Canadian style, the embassy threw a tailgate party for about 1,000 guests. It was terrific fun. But they didn't just engage their audience at the party in the real world; they also had a small team of people engaging the attendees and people who weren't even there in the virtual world. Here are the five secrets to their success.
Step One: Throw a remarkable event to get the right people to engage with you in the first place.
In the planning stages, it's possible to get so wrapped up in debates about decisions like "what software will we use to display hashtagged tweets with" that not enough attention is paid to real-life aspects of an event to make the overall engagement remarkable (in the Seth Godin sense of the word). That wasn't a problem at the Canadian Embassy tailgate party. There were friendly staff, quick check-ins, free mittens, hot coffee and cider, hot dogs and hamburgers and pastries and soup, Crown Royal and Molson and wine and soda, Mounties posing for photos, heat lamps, Blackberry giveaways, special messages from Ambassador Gary Doer, Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs John Baird, astronaut Chris Hadfield (the first Canadian to walk in space) videoconferencing from the International Space Station, and more. It was simply an outstanding party, the right kinds of people showed up, and wanted to stay all day.
Step Two: Create and utilize a memorable hashtag that lives beyond the initial event.
When I produce charity fashion shows for Microsoft and Bloomingdale's, we use the hashtag #Geek2Chic. It's short, it's catchy, and it is not strictly tied to a certain day, location, or even event. It has a meaning beyond the Geek 2 Chic event proper. Likewise, the Embassy of Canada used the hashtag #ViewFrom501 to conjure up feelings about watching the inauguration, and especially the parade, from their building (the address of the Embassy of Canada is 501 Pennsylvania Ave., about five blocks from the Capitol and 11 from the White House). "View from 501″ is elegant, easy to remember, in the active voice, and can be used for pretty much any future event at the embassy. When somewhat forgettable embassy events in a capitol city are a dime a dozen, the Canadian Embassy is in a position to launch "View from 501 Hockey Happy Hours," or any similar such thing and have the idea stick in people's heads.
Step Three: Use a dedicated staff to curate and deploy social media from official and audience sources.
Staff at the Canadian Embassy left little to chance with social media, leveraging their existing Connect 2 Canada ("Canada's network in the United States") team to watch what people at their event were tweeting, find the best remarks and photos, and then curate that into a stream that was not only online but also on a very large screen set up at the tailgate. This didn't surprise me -- I wrote about C2C using social media for "public diplomacy" in an Oct. 2009 article for Washington Life -- but it's great to see them implementing better than ever. Attendees could watch CNN coverage with sound on one jumbotron, and simultaneously look at people's quips and pictures on another one, adding an entire other dimension to the event. To my eye, the C2C team seemed to choose a lot of tweets with photos, which made the content more visually appealing. At one point, CNN began showing viewers' Instagrams taken from the National Mall and tagged with #CNN next to the C2C-curated tweets. It all got very meta. Particularly on a day when phone and wi-fi connectivity was sometimes hard to come by, embassy staff using old-fashioned computers and large screens for this work was a very wise choice.
Having a decent hashtag and tweets displayed in near real-time on a screen is not unprecedented, of course. However, diplomats don't necessarily have a reputation as adventurous technology and social media users, either. I reached out to the embassy to get a sense of what their social media strategy was at the tailgate event. Alexandra Vachon White, the Canadian Embassy's deputy spokesperson related by email, "As the Embassy offers a unique vantage point to Inauguration festivities, we thought social media would be a great vehicle to provide access to our C2C followers on Twitter and Facebook who were not in attendance. Secondly, the screen featured at the tailgate party provided a vehicle for attendees to share their experiences in real-time. We also thought it was a great way to encourage guests to take full advantage of the activities and offerings of the event." To briefly summarize that: Engage in-person attendees, share valuable information, and spread the story to a wider audience.
Step Four: Identify and interact with influential people engaged with the event
The tailgating party had a "main event" on the ground floor and in the expansive courtyard, and then a smaller VIP event hosted by Amb. Doer on a high floor of the embassy. Both portions had people of note walking around and enjoying themselves. Not only did the C2C team curate a lot of content from "average people," but they also had some more specific goals in mind. It was not lost on them that numerous media reporters and editors were invited to the event. Thus, when they noticed tweets from, for example, Steve Chenevey of ABC 7, Brian Bolter of FOX 5, and Garrett Graff of Washingtonian magazine, they retweeted them, interacted with these relatively influential people, and amplified the fact that they had "VIPs" at the party to a wider audience paying attention from elsewhere.
I had drinks with public affairs officer Alexi Drucker, a longtime member of the C2C team, after the event. I asked her how they kept track of the most pertinent information in real time during what must have been a hectic day for the embassy staff. She told me, "In advance of the event, we identified Twitter handles for all confirmed partners, guests and participating media and actively followed their tweets throughout the day. The feed displayed on the screen in the courtyard was curated to showcase a diverse range of content from a variety of sources. We aimed for a healthy mix of images, Canada-U.S. trivia and guest feedback." Most interesting to me was what must have been a lot of preparatory work prior to the event -- Studying attendee and vendor lists, searching for, confirming, and saving people's public social media accounts, using software to track social sharing, and then using that knowledge to execute a plan in real-time during a six-hour window. No doubt, the work in the week or two before the event saved a lot of time on the day off and removed some of the ambiguity and confusion that social media can contribute to.
Step Five: Promote the brands of your partners and friends in a fun way
Go figure: A lot of the food and drink at the tailgate party was Canadian in origin. But if you're not Canadian, there's probably a lot you don't know about the history of various companies -- perhaps how they've made inroads into the United States (most people at the party were American). After all, a primary goal of embassy outreach is to inform the locals about their country back home. So, we were treated to bits of info about Blackberry (Research in Motion's CEO was apparently in attendance; I didn't meet him), TD Bank (I think there's a TD Bank pen in my swag bag, too), Molson (and I can neither confirm nor deny that I had two to three delicious Molson beers at the party), and Tim Horton's, the beloved donut maker (who also provided warm coffee for attendees). This style of content + "advertising" makes both the main communications team ("stay on message") and the sponsors ("thanks for the shoutout!") happy, without being annoying to the audience that, let's face it, mainly came to the event to stuff their faces with free poutine.
Cross-posted from Publicyte, a blog about technology, entrepreneurship and culture impacting the public good.