9-1 Blog: Multimedia Tools

The use of multimedia when blogging or engaging in new media journalism is becoming essential to captivating an audience and holding onto readers. 

The trend of "live tweeting" is fairly common now, and one of my favorite modes of consuming information. It feeds into the new media audience's demands for the succinct, immediate delivery of information in lieu of in-depth, detailed articles or summaries. It can incorporate tweets, vines, instagram photos, facebook statuses, tumblr gifs, and blog comments. Actors will often live-tweet during their television shows, answering questions from their Twitter fanbase, or musicians will live-tweet backstage at an awards show, building the anticipation for their performance.

According to Twitter's own Development Division...

Live-tweet (v.): to engage on Twitter for a continuous period of time—anywhere from 20 minutes to a few hours—with a sequence of focused Tweets. The focus can be a big live event that everybody's paying attention to (e.g. a TV show or an award show) or it can be an event you create yourself (e.g. a Q&A session with your fans). 

One question we always hear is "how often should I Tweet when live-tweeting?" Approach it like you're at a dinner party: you don't want to dominate the conversation and you don't want to fade away. Tweeting every minute is probably too much, and tweeting only a few times an hour is probably too little. What follows are our best practices, and periodically we'll tweet out great examples from @TwitterMedia so follow that account for the latest.

My favorite example of live tweeting to date is from the airing of the episode "The Rains of Castamere" from Game of Thrones. I'm a HUGE GoT fan, and while this episode was amazing, the live-tweeted fan reactions on social media made it even better.

WARNING: THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD

The i09 article, "The 100+ Best Tweets about last night's Game of Thrones" captured the bulk of the live-tweeting reaction perfectly. Below are three of the least spoilery/least explicit in language tweets featured:

Frequently retweeted that evening was the Vine video of one of Game of Throne's own stars, Maisie Williams, who plays Arya Stark:

And within an 12 hours, there was already a Buzzfeed "Best of Tumblr Reactions" list:

The combination of gifs, memes, and memes makes an interactive, communal experience of something as typically isolating as watching a television show. Viewers are able to share in their anger, amusement, and sadness in a variety of mediums across the world. Without a doubt, multimedia's use continues to evolve with new media technology as it grows, and its exciting to be a part of it.

Sources
"Live-Tweeting Best Practices." https://dev.twitter.com/media/live-tweeting
"The 100+ Best Tweets about last night's Game of Thrones." http://io9.com/the-100-best-tweets-about-last-nights-game-of-thrones-511003444
Maisie Williams' Vine https://vine.co/v/b3XZMHmxzxh and YouTube upload of her Vine http://youtu.be/Y2uLNexesfE
"21 Best Tumblr Reactions to the Red Wedding." http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/best-tumblr-reactions-to-game-of-thrones-red-wedding