Each year, we generate about 9,000 tweets around our October event. In 2012, this number shot up to 25,000. A real-time high-volume event requires an organized, listening infrastructure to optimize Social activity. To help manage this experience, we teamed up with Spiral16 to coordinate our first Social Media Command Center (SMCC). Here’s what we learned:

Define Goals From the Start

We started by asking ourselves what we wanted to achieve? Was it content sharing? Developing our brand’s persona? From previous experience we wanted to ensure quick reaction times, provide a channel for conference attendees to express any issues, and to nurture the community already being built by attendees.

Assign Volunteer Roles Fast, Adapt Faster

To achieve our goals, we built a “Social Concierge” around the hashtag #AskPivot. The SMCC was run over a dozen volunteers and two coordinators. Having lapses in communication was only natural so to safeguard we did the following:

• Allowed volunteers to choose from 4 predefined roles: Ambassadors, Photo-focus, live tweets, or stream monitors.
• Created a resource sheet for all volunteers to reference
• Used a system of communication internally throughout the event (consisting of Skype, google chat, HootSuite, and mobile)

Match Analytics to Original Goals

How effective can you be when you don’t know what you’re doing? Right form the start the metrics played a huge part in dictating strategy. We learned that 89% of the conversation was on Twitter so focused our efforts on this channel. Through real-time metrics we discovered certain conversations centering around new hashtags, and were able to quickly adapt our listening strategy.

Overall, a Social Media Command Center is a great way to ensure your event is making the most and leverage the social conversations that naturally emerge.Download the full case study.