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Doha goes Digital

01.12.09

Last week saw the first ever World Innovation Summit for Education - WISE - held in the Qatar capital, Doha. A landmark event designed to drive education forward, WISE drew a huge amount of attention from all over the world, with speakers and delegates including former German Prime Minister Gerhard Shröeder, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and Twitter founder Biz Stone.

Manifest was commissioned to fly to Doha to deliver updates directly from the conference using our unique Digital Newsroom platform - keeping journalists and educators across the globe tuned-in to events as they happened.

The WISE organisers were keen to tap into the potential of social media to bring the events at the conference to a wider audience, and Manifest's Digital Newsroom (DNR) provided the perfect platform. By synchronising the WISE newsroom with customised profiles on Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook - we were able to syndicate the news and multimedia across all platforms automatically via RSS, using the DNR as a central hub of information. The result far surpassed the pre-event expectations, with thousands of hits to www.digitalnewsroom.co.uk/wise09 and dozens of links from relevant and influential blogs using the DNR as their primary source.

The DNR provided embeddable video for bloggers to drop straight into their posts, alongside a live slideshow of images taken at the event and posted on Flickr by official sources and attendees alike. A live Twitterfeed following the official #WISE09 hash tag meant anyone visiting the DNR stories could see comments tweeted by attendees in real time. The benefits of this regular dynamic content to search engine optimisation also supported a huge amount of traffic (as high as 27%) from Google searches for the WISE event.

As well as driving online word-of-mouth (there were over 1000 mentions online during the three days of the conference) the DNR offered a hugely efficient resource for both the media attending WISE and journalists covering the news from afar. By hosting the images just moments after they had been taken, the DNR meant journalists had quick and easy access to official photography without receiving huge email attachments. Equally, broadcasters were able to view embedded video (both edited and b-roll) and make editorial judgements without having to download the large raw file from an FTP server first.

As well as delivering news in English, we were able to create Arabic versions of the DNR for the Middle East audiences at the same time as despatching the English language variations. It's safe to say that these were the first Arabic DNRs we've ever had to produce and the response from Arabic speaking journalists and bloggers alike was unanimously positive.

WISE concluded with a ten point declaration that will drive education forward across the globe for the next twelve months, with an evaluation of successes and learnings at WISE 2010 - where we hope to be delivering live news and multimedia once again.

Doha goes Digital