Dragon*ConTV: The Accidental Community

What have we learned about social media over the past ten years? How did a handful of volunteers build a community around silly videos? ? Dragon*Con #1 - 1987 (estimated 1400 attendees) Dragon*Con 2012 Five Atlanta Hotels Over 52,000 attendees $25 million economic impact (2008) 2011 blood drive 2944 donors, 9000 units Dragon*Con is fan driven & runs on volunteers ... over 1800 for D*C 2012 It started with one video ... Building Dragon*ConTV Social Media & Dragon*ConTV Flashback to the Internet in 2002 ... "Social Media" was Friendster and LiveJournal ... No MySpace (2003) No YouTube (2005) No Facebook (2006) No Twitter (2006) How has social media changed Dragon*ConTV? User participation ... an intro for the 2002 Masquerade We'd love to show it to you ... ... but we can't find it :( But the con director loved it! Then he asked what we were going to do next year ... How does this become the start of a new community? 2004 - "low-tech high-tech" Which social media sites do we use? That isn't an easy question to answer. So we asked a different question ... What do we need from social media? Dragon*ConTV produces video content, so the podcasting model fit perfectly in 2005. Based on RSS feeds and iTunes ? What changed? Mobile Access Integration with WordPress Fan Pages Mobile Access Social Media Integration Video Quality Mobile Access Integration with WordPress The hotel TV as a social network Contact with guests & fans Ideas for videos Feedback before, during and after the event Social Spheres Before After During So ... what have we learned? Questions? Comments? Brian Richardson siliconchef@gmail.com http://siliconchef.com http://dragoncontv.com @dragoncontv on Twitter Dragon*ConTV on Facebook Never forget that communities are made of people ... learn what drives those people Our "silly little videos" became a big part of Dragon*Con ... they can be used for more than entertainment Drive people back to your "brand" ... event? content? website? Social media helps us gauge our audience ... size & interests You can't herd people onto a specific social media website ... Look around, find out where "your people" are being social