Elon’s senior Joseph Bruno, junior Brandon Joyner and assistant professor Vanessa Bravo reached about 174,000 persons with live tweeting and two videos
Among those 400 CEOs, presidents, directors and researchers were also two Elon students and one Elon assistant professor who provided media coverage for this international gathering, as part of a team that also involved journalists and editors from the Diplomatic Courier, a global affairs magazine.
Elon senior Joseph Bruno, junior Brandon Joyner and assistant professor Vanessa Bravo worked previous to and during the conference to disseminate information about the goals of the Global South Summit: to find solutions, through innovation and the use of technology, to world problems such as food availability and healthcare.
Bruno and Joyner produced two videos during the conference: one with interviews with the six finalists of the Global Food and Health Innovation Challenge (one of those finalists received $1 Million as winner of the challenge), and one video with different moments from the second annual Global South Summit. Please find one of these videos at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOCECBLrDE8
About the winner of the Global Food and Health Innovation Challenge, US Biologic, Elon student Brandon Joyner said: “I think that the winner team has a really good chance to change the world if its innovation becomes a success. That can be a game changer. “
While Bruno and Joyner produced the videos, Bravo live-tweeted from different sessions of the Summit, especially from the sessions dealing with health. At the same time, other summit fellows live-tweeted from the tracks dealing with food and prosperity.
Once the videos were ready, Bruno and Joyner joined Bravo in live tweeting from the different sessions, promoting the use of the hashtags #GAP13, #GAPfood, #GAPhealth, and #GAPprosperity. You can check the coverage at https://twitter.com/gapaction
The Elon team also tweeted from the sessions with the keynote speakers: Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the xPrize Foundation and author of Abundance, and journalist and analyst Fareed Zakaria, CNN host of the news show GPS and editor at large for Time magazine.
According to a TweetReach report obtained for the hashtag #GAP13, the Elon team tweeted 373 times before and during the conference. This promotion of the hashtag #GAP13 brought the following results: 142 persons used the #GAP13 hashtag during the Summit, tweeting 1,395 times and reaching 173,895 Twitter users. In total, the #GAP13 hashtag had an exposure of almost 3 million impressions.
For the tweets that were written the days before the conference and scheduled in advance to be released during the conference, using the application Hootsuite, Bravo, Joyner and Bruno had support from Elon business student Taylor Caldwell.
About his experience, senior Joseph Bruno said: “The Global South Summit allowed me to expand my documentation reporting skills while learning about food policy, health and prosperity. I was able to network with policy makers and explore topics that interest me, like genetically modified food and artificial intelligence.
Bravo said: “Besides being among so many world leaders and having the opportunity to be in the same room with Peter Diamandis and Fareed Zakaria, the experience for the students and for me was very valuable because we were able to report, to shoot video, to edit, to write, to use applications such as Hootsuite, and to monitor results through TweetReach.”
Bravo added: “It was very educational, and we were working for a real ‘client.’ For those reasons, personally and professionally, the experience was very relevant for the three of us.”
Bruno summarized the value of attending the summit: “Covering the Global South Summit was a rewarding challenge. The conference kept me on my feet and there was never a dull moment.“