Tapping into the social media generation
I've just come back from a fun weekend of music and dancing at BLOC Weekender at Butlins in Minehead and boy how things have changed over the past 10 years. It was in fact my first festival for a long time (my first ever being Glastonbury 1995) and it was really interesting to see how different things really are, certainly when it comes to social media and the Internet.
These days, you can take photos or videos on your iPhone of your favourite DJ and instantly upload them to Facebook, sharing the experience with family and friends. In my day - and I'm not that old - I only had a throwaway, plastic camera and had to wait a week for the film to be developed before I could see any photos.
Today, you can tweet about the festival as it happens and find other people tweeting about similar things close by, thus joining in with the conversation and enhancing your overall festival experience. Twitter is especially helpful if you want to find out what's going on at any given time. For example, one particular act - Aphex Twin - was so popular at BLOC there was a mile long queue to see him. How did I know this back in our chalet? I saw people talking about it on Twitter. Ten years ago, that would've been impossible.
What's more, thanks to social media you're no longer cut off from the outside world whilst at festivals. Back in the late '90s, you had to rely on chinese whispers if anything big was happening elsewhere. You'd overhear a rumour and that would be it. These days, you can access the Internet via your mobile phone and watch the news as it happens. It's truly amazing.
And BLOC - a festival that has been around for five years now - know only too well the power of social media. They made sure every single guest was aware of their Facebook and Twitter profiles and made very good use of them. They tweeted and updated their status on a regular basis, informing everyone of competitions or anything that might be going on. And they encouraged everyone to join in the conversation asking things like 'Who are you going to see today?' and 'What's your fancy dress outfit going to be on Sunday?'
For someone who's been going to festivals since they were 16 years old, it was fantastic to see how technology has had an impact on large events such as BLOC. Everything has become so much more interactive and social. And people want instant, fast, real-time access to everything. It's understanding this need for instant sharing and online conversation that makes BLOC's use of social media so effective and successful.
If you want to tap into the 'social media generation', BLOC is a great example of how and why you should do it. Businesses that don't communicate via the Internet will only be stuck in a time warp, missing out on potentially thousands of new customers. It's not 1995 anymore, that's for sure.
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