The Trendsetters: DevFest Kolkata 2019
“Guys, I want #DevFestKol to trend on Twitter,” said Shuvam. You may say that’s a little too much to ask, maybe, but that was not the reply of the outreach team of DevFest Kolkata’19. The origin of this story goes long back.
It all started when a month ago (fine, not that way back) when Shuvam, one of the organisers of the event as well as my senior, texted me, “Hey, I need you for a really important work, I want you to prepare the sponsorship pitch deck for DevFest and write an article about the DevFests in general and DevFest Kolkata’18 in particular, which will be presented before the sponsors. Up for it?” “Definitely!” I said.
I was then added to a group of like-minded people, who were all either technical mavericks or writers. And trust me, there isn’t a better combination (those who actually believed in this are all writers, right?).
Going back to the story, earlier we were responsible for creating write-ups for the event promotion and to make sure that our voice reaches all the tech enthusiasts residing in the city. Later when we were preparing the speaker cards, the real Twitter battle began. We were told to increase the social media visibility of DevFest Kolkata’19 via facebook and Twitter. Where Facebook was still quite popular between the two, the real challenge was to conquer the latter. We all started working on that. That’s when he said, “Guys, I want this hashtag to trend on Twitter.”
Everything seemed quite hazy except for the memory of our persistent desire to make this happen for real. Apart from the inhibitions, confusion, insecurities the real question was how are we going to do this? What should be the approach? Can just a bunch of noobs make #DevFestKol trend on Twitter( About that best combination thing, yeah, that was just an exaggeration)?
So, yeah, it was just 10 days to the D-Day and we had to start from somewhere. Starting with tweeting about our fields of interest and whose sessions were we as attendees the most excited about and asked all the other volunteers to do the same. Then, we changed our Twitter usernames for “X” to “X #DevFestKol.”
While the plan did work out to some extent, the buzz wasn’t exactly the need of the hour, we needed a roar(I want to show myself out because of this joke, trust me). That’s when Paresh Mayani, founder and organizer of GDG Ahmedabad jumped to the rescue. He came up with different ways and techniques to make sure that we keep up our Twitter game. Apart from this he also made sure that the entire outreach team is right there on their toes (I want to say fingertips, because tweets, get it? No? Fine. :p)
We came up with different kinds of tweets; throwbacks, shoutouts, tweets in the form of code, analogies, poetic analogies, metaphorical tweets, memes (of course) and this list just goes on. And it worked, because the foremost thing needed to pool attention is to post good content, the rest is taken care of.
Fast forward to the night before the most anticipated day of our lives. In Prajyot Mainkar Sir’s words, “A community is a knit family,” well, that night we experienced that all the communities co-exist together and work to build and help each other when the western, northern and south-western GDGs of India lent a helping hand to accomplish our plans. We were added to a social media group named NEWS which had various GDG Organisers.
Finally, it was the 4th August, for other people it was Friendship Day, for us it was DevFest (rather #DevFestKol).
We started tweeting, from the official account, giving a minute to minute live updates to the thousand of people anticipating the proceedings. Right from the volunteers getting their IDs to registration of the attendees, from setting up of the stage to capture the excitement of the place, from a speaker going up on stage to him\her making a remark worth remembering, from the first speaker Harsh Dattani to the last speaker Pawan Kumar, we tweeted it all.
And everyone was tweeting, right from the speakers to attendees to the organizers of the social media teams of different GDGs. And in no time we were trending.
In the morning itself, #DevFestKol was trending at number 2nd in Kolkata and 15th nationally.
Let’s make a checklist to see if there were we successful in our plans, Event promotion — With 2000+ registrations I can say Check.
Social media visibility — Our official handle follower count shot up like fireworks, so, Check. The trend on Twitter — I will not say much, it’s pretty clear, right? Check.
During the initial stages of event promotion, we promised that DevFest Kolkata’19 will reach unprecedented heights, and we stood true to our words. And I can assure that this will be the best DevFest that any tech-enthusiast would have seen until we come back next year with DevFest Kolkata’20, which will be even bigger and better.
