Glastonbury 2017: Much love for Foo Fighters as festival-goers arrive at Castle Cary railway station
Using Facebook Live to give a quirky kick-off to a major festival
Originally published: June 21, 2017
The first swathe of Glastonbury Festival ticket-holders arrived at Castle Cary railway station - with the Foo Fighters being the act they most want to see.
Great Western Railway has laid on additional trains this year to ensure a smooth journey for revellers coming from outside of Somerset.
Somerset Live was at the station this morning (June 21) as the first trains began bringing in festival-goers from as far afield as East Anglia and the West Midlands.
Despite a number of delays on both the lines which pass through the station - the 9.06am from London Paddington was around 45 minutes late - most passengers seemed in a buoyant mood, coping with both the disruption and the heat.Read the full story here.
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The Glastonbury Festival is one of the cornerstones of Somerset Live's digital operation, serving as both a brilliant opportunity to get our content out to a national audience and a means of providing the kind of coverage that the BBC and national sites so rarely manage on the ground. In the run-up to the 2017 festival, our office had put together a detailed content plan to ensure every base was covered when ticket-holders began to arrive. Since I was not one of the reporters attending the festival itself to report on the acts, I focused my attention on the build-up.
I turned up at Castle Cary station on the first day of the festival to document the revellers arriving on the trains, going through the security and ticket checks and then boarding the coaches that would take them to the site. I had agreed with the news desk in advance that we would Facebook Live for at least 20 minutes - this would be sufficient time to speak to as many different people as possible and allowing an audience to build as the video was widely shared. The video went out on our main Facebook page, with content editors posting updates in the comments section as they came through at my end.
Live streams are unpredictable by their very nature, and unlike my Nudefest coverage I had no panel that I could regularly bounce off. With the two trains we were expecting to cover being delayed, I had to fill in time with background information about the festival, the station itself (drawing on my passion for local transport) and picking up on all the little announcements that came over the tannoy. I benefited from the light-hearted attitude of the station staff, and managed to speak to quite a number of people as they came over the footprint - certainly enough to get enough comments for a full-blown story once the stream was over.
In all I live streamed for nearly 30 minutes, and it was only cut short by my work phone overheating, as a result of both the weather and such intensive use. Fortunately, I was able to use my personal phone to grab some additional video of people going through the security checks on the other platforms. Once the stream had finished, I retired to a nearby cafe in the town and put a piece together for the website, leading on the bands which had been mentioned; I knew this would made for a strong, SEO-friendly headline which would drive more people to our website and thereby boost our wider Glastonbury content.
This is a good example of how to get the most out of a Facebook Live when you cannot control the situation. With the Nudefest stream, the environment was largely within my control: there was time to set up, I had questions ready in advance and I knew whom I would be conversing with. This stream demonstrates my ability to improvise and adapt to changing situations without adversely affecting the quality of the content I produce. The numbers speak for themselves: the video reached nearly 138,000 people with nearly 4,500 engagements, and was viewed 12,000 times. It remains one of the most successful video-driven stories I have produced, and I remain very proud of it.
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