Media Tech Connection

North Coast Music Festival in Chicago on September Labor Day proved to be a huge hit in terms of attendance for a first year festival. The founders and oragnizers of the event scored an incredible lineup of electronica and hip-hop talent to help make it a hit.

The fact that the festival was founded this year in Chicago gave importance to the fact that it needed a boost in marketing efforts in order to efficiently spread the word about it. International electronica groups such as Moby and The Chemical Brothers needed promotions that they'd be putting on a few nights of incredible music for the masses.

Organizers of North Coast Music Festival turned to the social media marketing talents of one of the best in Chicago, Amy Ravit Korin, also known as "InteractiveAmy" to many. Amy gained the moniker because she runs InteractiveAmy.com, where she has performed comprehensive social media coverage for many large Fortune 500 Chicago clients. She is also a regular speaker at Social Media Club in Chicago, which focuses on the emerging Web technology for mass marketing on the Internet.

"Media Tech Connection" recently had the opportunity to interview Amy and gain an insight to her social media marketing methods. We also found out some tips for social media tools she utilized to do her comprehensive coverage that she gave the North Coast Festival.

The interview began by asking Amy how she managed to score North Coast Festival as a client. Since it had many high profile music acts, Amy responded that she was an EarlyBird ticket buyer for the festival because she saw the lineup and wanted to go. and then ended up sending an e-mail seeing if she could get press credentials.

"I contacted them, and mentioned I was into live music, and social media and concerts, and that this would be an ideal fit for me and they wanted to put me on board". So she then "connected through social media, and bloggers, and tapped into [her] network in Chicago and other midwestern cities, and made sure everyone was taken care of from a credential standpoint and worked on Facebook. The main heavy lifting was my Tweeting for the festival all weekend long".

Amy basically did all of the online coverage herself, and using just two hands to accomplish most of the social coverage during all three days of the festival which was an impressive feat. We continued to talk about where did the idea for North Coast Music Festival and who are the major founders and people involved.

H

er answer was that North Coast Music festival was the culmination of "seven local independent concerts producers". One of them being chief organizer Mike Raspatello, also of Chicago Blugrass & Blues Festical and the Silver Wrapper music community. InteractiveAmy was just involved in the social media marketing with North Coast Music Festival from a client standpoint, she said.

Since the readers of "Media Tech Connection" will be interested in finding out what social media technology was used for this massive undertaking, I asked Amy what types of Twitter apps, iPhone apps she used for rapid updating, Tweeting and other tasks and found out that Amy uses HootSuite predominantly 99% of the time. The Social Media dashboard platform allows updates to be shared on both Twitter and Facebook at the same time.  This turned out to be very useful for Amy since she "churned out 650 Tweets over the weekend". That's a lot to keep track of, so she and TweetStats to track results of how many Tweets and messages she has relayed to her audience and festival fans. She also has "Echofon set up only for InteractiveAmy.com".

To keep things as organized as possible, Amy "scheduled in advance all the lineups of the stages and shows" so that it would be possible to be able to run from stage to stage and make live updates while trying to keep her phone charged and keep a phone reception, along with other challenges of live concert reporting on the move.

Despite the planning, it was inevitable that some challenges would present themselves to Amy during the challenge of singularly capturing and reporting all the different updates from North Coast. Though only one really limited the next step of online social sharing, in that she was doing some filming of video but didn't have enough battery to upload it all live.

Related to online video, InteractiveAmy was then asked if she was allowed by the festival producers to jump into that technology and upload recorded video clips as live updates for North Coast Festival video updates. She responded by saying that she was, but put more focus on written updates this time around.

Amyhad full press credentials, an artist pass, she was allowed to go anywhere she wanted for the most part: onstage and backstage. While she took some video with her iPhone and with an HD camera, she focused more on updating text comments she did not get the time to use much official video through updates.

"I was doing some videos for InteractiveAmy YouTube channel and "got up close and personal with some members of Damien Marley band, like this guy named Sky High from Damien Marley band and the flag waver from Damien Marley". Though these didn't count as official coverage for North Coast, she's put her snippets of interviews to them about the festival and Chicago on her YouTube channel here.

Also speaking of video, I (Jay, writer of "Media Tech Connection") mentioned that I saw a video for a "Tweetup" in InteractiveAmy's Twitter postings, and so asked how it had turned out during the festival and how many people came to meet at the Chicago Reader Living Gallery on Saturday, September 3.

"We got about 35 or 40 people. Many of them were local Chicagoans, but we had people from Michigan come, some press came, somebody from Gapers Block who was covering it. It was just a fun way to meetup with other people who we've we've been Tweeting with. We hung out for about 45 minutes, departed and left with new friends, it was just fun to put faces with the Tweets, talk about leading up to the festival and rehashing it".

Amy was also able to use some of their passion to help relay the excitement about North Coast Music Festival since she's had experiences where she's met Phish fans all over the country. So she knew how to harness the unique passion that festival goers have to spread the word just naturally online, and some of them came to North Coast Fest's Tweetup.

"It was nice that we had some people that have had experience with concert-going Tweetups to come help spread the word," she said. "For every person that's from Twitter they were there with probably three people that were not". This was as an example of social media's influence to bring people together.

Since music festivals are mostly about the music that comes from them, I felt it was important to ask Amy if she could use music and audio during the festival to update fans with, and if not then if she forsees it being used in the future festivals to update fans online.

While she said it was possible since "uStream was set up, we did have iClips on site streaming". Though Amy, being one person did not have the capacity or want to infringe on any copyright issues. There was an audio recording system in place, though Amy was concerned on infringing copyrights since only 30 seconds from each live performance were allowed to be re-broadcast. She agreed that everyone keeps an eye out for the next biggest thing in technology and that North Coast 2011 may implement and grow with that. "Everyone's always got their eyes on future technologies," she concluded.

Amy did mention a great new service called Blurts.com, a service that may be used more in the future for festivals, and possible North Coast Music Fest. The new servive allows video and audio commenting system that can be implemented by publishers. So, she said "it's kind of like leaving a 30 second voice comment or voicemail".

Amy was asked if she considered herself to be the "voice" of North Coast Music Festival in a way. She responded it was not so much, though "it's all about communication. I think if you're willing to take the plunge and you're willing to use these tools then a very big piece of that is the listening component. And that is making sure that we wanted to position ourselves as a resource for news, and event, and information throughout the weekend and share the enthusiasm and excitement" of the festival.

She went out of her way to wear many hats during the festival, and listened to feedback and questions from attendees personally. It "really made the 'listenening component' resource as a voice for North Coast" for others, Amy explained.
She was "live-Tweeting leading up to the festival on Twitter and Facebook", then during it "had someone who was more on the music planning side who was [updating] more about the technical side of the music, and I was more of the promotional and conversational." Throughout the weekend she made updates through Facebook and Twitter, and was the only one doing the live-Tweeting during the Festival.

Near the end of our technical discussion, I wanted to find out more about the soul of the festival, the music. After I had seen a photo of Amy with Plug Won of DeLaSoul posted on Twitter I was curious. So I asked Amy, near the end of the besides DeLaSoul, who her favorite performances at the festival were from. She responded that there were definately the ones she was looking forward to ahead of time like DeLaSoul, and Damien Marley, but one of the best things about North Coast was that it turned her on to new bands. She got introduced to groups such as Pretty Lights, FantoGram, Future Rock. "It was just an amazing opportunity to hear local bands, big bands, national old-timers and everyone all in one place which was pretty unique from a festival perspective" she explained.

Lastly, Amy offered some final words about the festival experience:
"Really it was a labor of love first and foremost, it really was just so fun for me and it was [unique] since it was a first time event, I've always done live Tweeting and covereage and things like that from where I am [concerts and events], it was just really cool to be a voice of the Festival, and they were open to what I was doing and how I was using these tools and technologies." "One of the best Tweets I got all weekend was from someone she didn't even know that said 'Other Festivals should take note of what North Coast is doing'."

InteractiveAmy did indeed provide the enthusiasm and excitement of the North Coast Music Festival to the next level through social media. To read more about Amy Ravit Korin, visit her Web site here.

There is also currently an official North Coast Festival documentary being created by FlowReel Films to provide fans with the video coverage soon, so stay updated on this and future festival news at their official Web site at: http://www.northcoastfestival.com.