How to organize a popular scientific event and get a wow effect in social networks? Science Slam Experience

Good afternoon, "Megamind"!

I decided to share my experience and talk about how we introduced the online broadcast of posts in social networks at the All-Russian Science Slam. My name is Pavel Veselovsky, I am the Project Manager of the Regional Center for Innovations in Samara and the founder of the Samara Science Popularization Science Slam Samara movement.
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Briefly about the project: Science Slam - format of the event, invented in Germany. The point is that young scientists on the club or bar scene in 10 minutes simply and popularly talk about their research. This is an international project, invented in Germany and has spread throughout the world. Now in Russia there are already more than 20 cities where slammas are held and it is very cool that the first slam passed in Samara, to which scientists from different cities arrived. I myself was engaged in science at the university and I enjoy having a good time with friends, so this launch of this project in my hometown was a very pleasant goal for me. If interested, you can watch videos and photos from scientific fights in Russia here .


Now to the point. At the end of September, the first All-Russian Science Slam was held in Samara with the support of the Government of the Samara Region and OJSC RVK, which was visited by more than 350 people. From the very first local events, we encouraged users to make posts in social networks (Twitter, instagrams, VKontakte, Facebook) so that during the event an information background was generated and the tapes were filled with content about the event. Initially, it was the traditional contests for the best post, prizes for the fights, the opportunity to take pictures with speakers or against the background of a funny background or character. It worked, but I wanted to go further.

This year we decided to use the service for broadcasting posts of participants from social networks. We were familiar with Twijector , which used to be used as a tweet-wall, but I wanted to accumulate content from several social networks at once. We dug up the Internet, but, as most of us often do, we used the recommendation. The idea of ​​using the Hashboard service was overlooked by the organizers of the conference for IT developers "IT-Locust" (Saransk). The service acts as a "showcase", which shows what is happening in social networks.



Now I can say that while in the market this is perhaps the only tool adequate to the objectives of our event (remove posts from several “youth” social networks by several hashtags and display them in a different order).

With the advent of screens with a "live ribbon", users have a constant incentive to generate posts, to engage in dialogue with each other, which is visible to everyone. In combination with the Instaprinter from Samara developers, who printed a photo of the instagram on a specific hashtag, the tool gave us the effect we needed.

We had examples when one or two users, trying to compete with each other, made about a hundred posts per event. An additional incentive to make the post appeared when the participants realized that they could take home a souvenir card printed on an instaprinter.



Such informational background is usually noticeable and those who are not present at the event, begin to be interested in it. With the advent of “living wall”, users have more opportunities to interactively join our event, this increases the degree of involvement and involvement in what is happening offline.

I really liked that when users understand that there is a manual moderation by a person inside the service (there is a personal account in the Hashboard where you can “approve” or “prohibit” content broadcasting), they try to make posts interesting or even piquant, to the point of permissible. That the moderator missed them, but at the same time that the post was not vulgar. Incidentally, this also concerns the question of what is changing in the behavior of the participants of the event - they are trying to make the posts better, because everyone will see them.

And finally, the numbers:
With the use of a “living wall” from Hashboard and an instaprinter, the number of posts at the event grew 2.5 times. In one day of the event, 100 new participants joined our Vkontakte group (or 7.5% of new subscribers), the full audience coverage and activity in the group on the day of the event increased almost 10 times.

Come to the slam in your city, and if they are not, run them and enjoy it!
Well, finally, video from the event.