The secret to livetweeting like a totally professional brand journalist.

Livetweeting an event is a hectic haze of typo-paranoia and judgement calls. The size & seriousness of the brand you’re working for only adds to the general terror.

All done livetweeting for tonight. Missed a shot of the mayor & the typo-paranoia is exhausting—overall decent reporting though. #OverAndOut

February 22, 2012 10:51 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@EricaGlasier

Erica Glasier ♥

Lessen the pandamonium by making best friends with the event’s manager, copywriter, or speechwriter. They have access to a magical treasure that will help you not #fail spectacularly: the notes.

These might be an event program, script, stage directions, speech notes, or on a lucky day, all of the above stapled together on glorious 11x17s. Sometimes even the menu on the table tent cards will have a basic outline on it.

Peruse the structure of the event & you will have a host of capabilities you otherwise wouldn’t:

• Know when key moments are going to happen & where, so you don’t miss a critical shot of a dignitary or video of a hilarious  song.
• Get the spelling of everyone’s name, title, workplace and other credentials right.
• Plan how long you’ve got to create media for each key tweet—if this one doesn’t need a photo but the next one does, get in position for the shot now & tweet your text-based stuff from there.
• Prewrite tweets and save them as drafts, to have photos attached or details added when the action actually goes down.
• Quote accurately (& slightly after the fact, as needed) from the speech notes.