BreakAway Digital

More often we are seeing that live events are trying to pull the crowd into the excitement by using user generated content. It makes sense that the crowd should be included but does it add any true value to the event?

Crowdfire is trying something new. If you haven’t hear of it here is a little info:

“This weekend, as thousands of people gather and five dozen bands perform over three straight days at the Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, tech and media entrepreneur John Battelle hopes to create a different kind of performance, a mash-up of the thousands of camera-phone pictures, hand-held digital-video recordings, blog posts and Twitter “tweets” generated at the event.” via Ad Age.

Seems like a cool idea but I think that is might be missing the mark just a bit. Think about it this way, they are using camera phones and hand held digital camera for their visual content. Not sure about you but even my iPhone camera is pretty crappy for taking event shots. Some of those are going onto huge screens while at the event. So that means someone has to sit there and moderate the content and hopefully make it look like it’s not some huge blob on a massive plasma?

They say, “people are doing this” which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea. About a year ago I did pitch a similar idea to a client. The idea was to have some citizen journalism and include people that couldn’t make the show. The clients biggest concern was would people look at it? I say yes but it would have be attached to the right platform and need to make sure people are aware of it. Especially if you make it easy to send your information in via Twitter, photo/video. It has to be easy for those people there and the people looking at it online.

Getting back to the original reason for this article, was I still wonder if it adds any value to the event? I think it only does for those people not at the event. If you are there I think you want to watch the bands, not what the fans are doing.