Twittering at the Supersonic Festival

This weekend I’ll be at the Supersonic Festival in Birmingham run by Capsule running their Twitter account. I actually speculated about how this might be done 17 months ago so it’s nice to finally be able to put some ideas into practice.

I’ve outlined my plans on the Capsule blog but it’s going to take a bit of advance planning to do it properly. Here’s how I’m going to approach the different bits.

Public screen

Firstly I want to have a public screen showing the Twitter activity. This won’t be perfect but it’ll serve to advertise that stuff is happening and people should log on with their phones and, if they don’t have sufficient phones, serve as a good-enough info point. I had a play with various Twitter Wall type services but decided in the end to use Seesmic Desktop with four columns of searches.

click for bigger

The plan is to have this screen in a window surrounded by pieces of paper explaining what it is and instructions on how to participate.

Getting the info

There are two main sources of information. the crowd and the backstage crew. The crowd can be sourced (see what I did there?) using the sorts of searches shown above. I’ll do this through an iPhone app that lets me save searches and retweet easily. Most of them do this but I’ll probably use Birdfeed because I like it and try to avoid Tweetdeck unless I really have to. I’ll probably also set up iTweetReply to notify me of @replies to the Supersonic account depending on volume.

Trickier will be getting info from backstage, especially as I want to spend most of my time in front of the stages watching the bands. Running up to each stage manager checking on running times does not sound like fun and there has to be a better solution.

Once I’ve identified the key people who will have the knowledge I need I’ll give them some simple instructions on how to contact me and, more pertinently, the sort of things I need to know. If they’re using Twitter then they can join in with the above which is probably the best solution. If it’s something more urgent they can direct message the Supersonic account or send me a text message. I suspect text messaging will be the dominant form of communication.

The biggest trick will be figuring out what makes the Twitter feed useful to people and I’m sure I’ll modify it over the weekend. People will not be wanting to check their phones all the bloody time. They’ll be wanting to watch the bands and maybe check in inbetween sets every hour or so. I need to post enough stuff to make people feel it’s worth contributing but not so much that the service is overwhelmed.

Then, when it’s all over, there’s the Collective Memory to do, but more on that later.