How to run a social wall without social media at a conference

Why run a social wall without social media?

A classic social wall pulls posts from a network: whatever carries the event hashtag appears on the screen. That asks a lot of a professional room. Delegates have to post publicly, on a personal account, in front of their colleagues and clients, for the wall to have anything on it. Many will not, and the ones who do are rarely the full picture of the day.

It also hands the screen to a stranger. A hashtag is public, so anyone can post to it, and the wall shows what the network shows. Moderation turns into a race between a filter and a room full of people with phones.

A wall built on a shared album turns that round. Attendees give their photos to the event, not to the internet. Nothing is posted anywhere, nothing appears that has not come from someone in the room, and the people deciding what reaches the screen are yours.

How do you set up the wall for a conference?

• Create the event on the Work / Corporate template. The wording guests see suits a working day: the guestbook becomes Feedback, for takeaways in public and a private note to the organisers.
• Choose who can open the gallery. Public, protected with an access code, or private to attendees who have joined. For an internal event, protected or private is usually right. See What do the three privacy settings mean?
• Put the QR code everywhere people wait. Lanyards, the back of the programme, registration, the coffee point, and on the holding slide between sessions. The poster comes as a vector PDF, so it prints sharp from A4 to A2.
• Launch the slideshow on the machine driving the screen. From the Live tab, choose Launch 4K Slideshow, put the browser full-screen and leave it. See How do I run the live slideshow?

There is no box to hire. Any screen with a browser behind it will do: the AV team’s laptop on the HDMI lead, a stick in the back of the display, the venue’s own system. The slideshow holds an open connection to the event, so photos arrive within moments of being published and nobody refreshes anything.

Who decides what reaches the screen?

The safety check comes first: every photo is held until it has passed, and anything the check is unsure about waits for a person. After that, the call is yours. See Are photos checked before they appear?

• Require approval holds every photo until someone on your team publishes it. Use it for a client event, an awards night or anything in front of the press. See What does “Require approval” actually change?
• Moderators are colleagues you invite, each with their own sign-in. They work the queue; only the event owner changes settings, branding and billing. See What can a moderator do?
• Batch decisions. Tick up to fifty photos and approve or hide them together, or select the whole queue. Any photo the check flagged is left for a person to approve on its own. See How do I approve or hide several photos at once?
• Hide is instant. A hidden photo leaves the screen at once, even if it is the one being shown.

How do you keep the wall full through the day?

Walls go quiet in the long middle of a programme. Two things bring them back. The first is the room seeing itself: the newest photo always comes first, so a delegate who has just added one sees it arrive, and the people beside them notice.

The second is a reason to take a photo. The scavenger hunt has a ready-made Corporate Event set (Team Building Moment, Coffee Break, The Keynote Speaker, Swag Bag) and you can write your own. Reveal later holds a mission back until the time you choose, so “The panel’s best question” appears as the panel starts. Each mission scores once per attendee, and a leaderboard shows who is ahead. See How do I set up the scavenger hunt?

What can go wrong on the day?

• The screen sleeps. Turn sleep off on the machine driving it before doors open.
• The venue WiFi drops. Attendees’ photos wait on their own phones and carry on uploading when the signal returns. The laptop driving the screen needs a connection to receive them, so a hotspot beside it is good insurance.
• Photos reach the gallery but not the screen. The screen’s browser has lost its connection; reload the page and it catches up. See The slideshow is not showing new photos.

Test it the day before on the real screen: scan your own code on a phone that is not signed in, add a photo, and watch it land.

What do you have afterwards?

On an upgraded event you download every photo as one ZIP with camera metadata removed, a PDF of the feedback, and a highlight reel built from the best-liked photos, which makes a good thank-you the next morning. Attendees were never asked for an email address, so the follow-up goes out on your own list. See What is in the photo archive?

The live slideshow comes with every event. What the plans change is how many photos the event holds and what you keep afterwards: one payment per event, starting at Premium £89, with nothing recurring. For several events or client work, see corporate events on Mosaikin and pricing.