Social Media Greenroom

Building on some initial forays into politics and social media that myself and Christian Payne made last year, the Sleepydog team have been playing an advisory/brainstorming role with Thomson Reuters that evolved into something we like to call a social media greenroom.

So far we’d used a combination of Twitter and LifeCast to pull in questions / feedback and then create a space for more conversation around the subjects that a Thomson Reuters Newsmaker event throws out. When Davos came around we had another brainstorm with the Reuters team to discuss the best way to amplify their presence out in Switzerland. It was very gratifying to see the team out there hit the ground running and also be able to provide some live conversation back here in the UK as feedback to their work.

Having already broken a few barriers with the Labour party and the Conservatives (that event itself was covered by CNN because of the social media angle) we now have our sights set on Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. We hope to build upon the idea of a social media greenroom by making this next one a social media focused event rather than a bolt-on to a regular Newsmaker. This in part is thanks the success of our last SM greenroom event with Bob Zoellick, President of the World Bank, when he was in London for the G20.

Whether its working with movie stars or politicians they (or their handlers) can be very wary of new media or indeed anything that strays too far from the familiar. Describing our set up in old media terms seems to work best. So explaining that sourcing questions via Twitter and answering them live via webcam is simply another way to do a traditional greenroom interview works pretty well.

With all this in mind the Sleepydog developers have been working hard on something called Newsdeck that offers a fully integrated producer hub to help coordinate and amplify an event such as a Newsmaker. So far we’ve been asked to show it to Microsoft (which we did last week) and are still tweaking the features for use by Reuters in the near future.

For myself and Sleepydog this is all a good way to explore how the media landscape will look some time ahead. It’s a little like exploratory drilling, but rather than hoping to strike a rich stream from the past we’re actually tapping into the future.

Thanks to smart people like @ilicco, @MarkJones and @chris_parker we get to do some very cool stuff here and have a few more things up our collective sleeves. Watch this space or follow us on Twitter to keep in the loop.

LifeCast Gets A Boost

We were delighted that our iPhone app, LifeCast got top billing on Apple’s recent ‘Thanks a billion‘ campaign. Great to see our favourite blue icon was larger than all the other apps featured – who says size doesn’t matter?