We had all our guests locked in and ready. We had organised how we were going to present our material on the day. Some of us had taken the time to go and test the tech equipment and make sure that everything would run smoothly on the day. We had created several posters and pieces of content to promote and also use within the Seminar to engage our audience. We were ready.
A few days out the idea was brought up to purchase a few items from the clothing store HoMie to use as prizes within our seminar. The prizes would go to the people who sent in the most creative/interesting tweets during our seminar, to be announced at the end. As a group, we each contributed $10 of our own money to purchase the three items ($120 in total), which in turn meant that our money was going to help put clothes on someone actually dealing with homelessness in our city. This was a nice way to give back and contribute to the cause that we were promoting through our seminar, and the clothes we purchased made for awesome prizes!
On the day of the seminar, we initially had some troubles with the live twitter feed, but we managed to find a solution that succeeded in showing our tweets with the hashtag #SocialSeminar on the big screen. I personally created a poster for the purpose of alerting our audience to the process of tweeting to win the prizes, which we printed and distributed around the room during our seminar.
We had instructed our guests to arrive no later than 3:15pm, and they were all on time and very cooperative in complying with our needs and time frame. Once I had all of the guests together, we still had to load in all our gear into the seminar space and set up the technical support. I took it upon myself to remove our guests and took them for a coffee just down the hall in Building 80, so the rest of the group could focus on setting up and also so I could get to know our guests and give them a final overview of how the seminar would run. All of our guests were lovely and each was extremely helpful and knowledgable about their respective areas. I was able to talk with them easily and casually before we were ready to go live.
As I was in charge of conducting the seminar and organising the guests, I had to rely on the rest of my team to ensure that all other aspects were going according to plan. Our technical crew did a fantastic job in documenting the seminar, our event was garnished with some amazing “facebook like” cupcakes, the live twitter feed was curated in real time and the winners were sent to me to read out at the end.
The difficulties I faced as a presenter were those of time management and engaging my speakers and audience. I couldn’t have asked for better responses from the guests, and was actively engaging in what they had to say, which in turn drew in the audience. We had some great feedback and questions that were sent in and also asked aloud during the seminar, which stimulated further information and understanding of some industry-related topics. We had previously decided not to have a break in our proceedings, and just to get through all of our content in the allocated hour and a half of seminar time. This resulted in a perfectly-timed seminar, in which we allocated the same amount of speaking time to each of our guests, with ample time for questions. At the end of the seminar, I made sure to thank everyone again, and also provide the audience with the relevant social media links that they could follow to interact with any of our guests.
The pack-up of the seminar required us simply to take down all the posters within the room, and ensure that all our equipment was packed up and returned to the relevant destinations. We had borrowed some chairs from the prop room in Building 7, so these needed to be returned as well. I was very appreciative of our technical team handling the ingesting and treatment of all the footage recorded. After thanking our guests and ensuring they left safely, we could relax and enjoy the satisfaction of knowing we presented a relevant and engaging seminar with the least amount of time allocated.