The point of this post is to let you know what’s happening behind the scenes of being media partners at WordCamp Europe and why you should try taking part too – at least once in your life.
WCEU Media Partners for the first time
Being a media partner is not that easy because, once you get on board, you need to deliver. After all, you take full responsibility for creating content that promotes the event.
From the moment we entered this adventure, we kept in touch with the PR team weekly, if not more often. We tried to keep pace with all the important news and announcements by sharing them with our audience on social media.
Social media and the ThemeIsle blog were our main sources of promotion. We committed to writing several WCEU-related pieces of content from February until June. I dare to say that, for me personally, this was the main project in the first part of 2018. And, as you can see, we’re doing it again now. Why? More on that later.
With this focus in mind, we had the opportunity to create some interesting and diverse content.
I had the chance to take the pulse of the community right before the event and see how they felt about arriving in Belgrade in the summer. In the same context, I created my first infographic ever, which was really fun. I certainly spent way more time than a designer would, but I enjoyed it so that’s what matters at the end of the day. For this infographic, I worked closely with the PR team at WCEU that provided me with all the stats and information I needed. Those people were really nice and responsive to my requests.
I also collaborated with Christian Mirra for a bunch of comics, after brainstorming ideas with our own marketing team.
Also, check out a few samples of our WCEU content (roundup, infographic, guide, and review):
Plus a few interviews and a roundup with people’s key takeaways after the event right here on this blog. Ionut Neagu, our CEO, also shared a few thoughts in this regard via his monthly Transparency Report.
The live interviews
Another first for us was the live interviews that we did with five speakers.
As a media partner, your duty is to cover the event in many ways, and you can get creative if you wish.
So, apart from doing the writing and visual part from behind a computer, our job was to also interview a few interesting people in person. Chris Fitzgerald and I were in charge of this task, so we planned accordingly with the Public Relations team that helped us big time before and during the conference. Thanks again guys, especially Tess for being so receptive to our needs and questions!
When you are a media partner, you have a room inside the conference venue designated to you (and other partners). You could go there and relax, prepare your work, or whatever you wanted to do. People were friendly as always – both the staff and the other WCEU media partners that were wandering around the place.
It’s just that everyone had to keep it very quiet since many interviews were being recorded at the same time, almost every minute. Now that I think about it, it’s possible that this room might have been the quietest one in the whole venue. The introverts area might be a competitor but I haven’t been there, so I can’t tell for sure.
To be quite frank, I was really nervous before our very first interview and so was Chris. Morten Rand-Hendriksen was the first speaker on our list and we chatted about ethics in web design, a quite interesting topic. Our colleague Radu joined us taking pictures and stalking Morten (just joking) whom he looks up to.
After Morten, Hajj Flemings followed, with whom we talked about his bold goals of bringing 10k businesses online with the help of WordPress. A great and inspiring chat that was! It’s great to learn about the ambitions of other people, it motivates you.
After these two interviews, we kind of started to feel at home in the Media Partners room and our minds relaxed a bit. During the next interviews, we felt more like having another day at the office, leaving apart the slight discomfort that was dragging us back a little at the beginning.
