After several weeks of planning, writing blogs, hanging out (lots) on Google+, tweeting, updating Facebook, sweet talking social media experts to participate, the ‘Hangout Event’ has been and gone.
While a part of me lets out a huge sigh of relief there is also a part has been really fired up and excited about taking part in more events like this.
Group exercises can be difficult, when do you participate? is it enough? is everyone pulling their weight? etc,. I need not have worried about any of these things. The hardest part was deciding on the format of our event. Once my fellow MA Social Media students and I had decided on a Google+ Hangout everything else fell into place.
I paired up with Isaac Griberg, a distance learning student from Geneva. Isaac’s experience with the International Red Cross and my own working for a local authority meant we shared a common interest in working with non-profit making organisations. We decided that the topic of out hangout would be ‘The use of Social Media in Humanitarian Crisis’.
Isaac would use his experience and focus on the use of social media on an international scale, while I would bring experiences from a little closer to home and focus on crisis that have occurred on a local level.
We both produced presentations, set up a schedule of tweets, Facebook and Google+ posts, personal blogs, all to maximise the promotion of the ‘hangouts’. Where we deemed appropriate personal invites were emailed out with some background details about the event, the recipients were all encouraged to visit EventBrite to register for the event of their choice.
Unfortunately, not everyone who registered could attend, but this is inevitable. However, this was never an issue as the topic seemed to generate a huge amount of contributions from our panel! With three guests on our panel being able to ‘hangout’ for the entire one hour session there was lots to discuss, share and ponder over. The only time I had to resort to my ‘hangout’ schedule was when I had to call time. The back-up questions stayed just that, back-up.
I would like to thank all our guests who attended but also the ones that tried but were let down by technology. The ‘hangout’ will be shared with everyone once the screen-cast is edited along with the presentations.
I would also like to say a huge thank you to Isaac for being such a super partner to work with and for all his support and encouragement, this really was a great team effort!
Finally, bit of a confession really. I was so caught up in the logistics of planning and hosting the event that the potential learnt outcomes from the topic completely passed me by. That is until I was in the ‘hangout’. I’ll share these with you in my next blog.
The whole experience has been such a steep learning curve, but one that I’m so glad to be taking part in.
