sharypic official blog

Event of the Week: Reims à Toutes Jambes

Our Event of the Week is Reims à Toutes Jambes, a road running event in the town of Reims. This means the organisers have won a free Large Event plan for their next event!

Reims à Toutes Jambes began in 1984 and comprises of a marathon, a half marathon and a 10km race. This year, thousands of people turned out on Sunday the 21st October to see Mariko Kipchumba from Kenya win the marathon, with a time of 2:06:05.

Runners go past historic sites such as the gothic cathedral Notre-Dame de Reims and the renaissance-style Place de l’Hôtel de Ville. Check out the photos to see runners in their moment of glory, along with some interesting costumes!

To be in with a chance of winning a Large Event plan and enjoying premium features such as the PhotoWall, post your sharypic event on our Facebook page. The event with the most likes becomes our Event of the Week, simple!

Event of the Week: Friday Night Live, Royal Ontario Museum

Fancy a drink with T-Rex? The Royal Ontario Museum’s autumn season of Friday Night Live events kicked off with Harvest, a night of dancing, local brews, and delicious food. Guests enjoyed an eclectic mix of cupcakes and dinosaurs as they had their fill of entertainment and education! The event featured sharypic’s interactive PhotoWall, so guests were able to see their own and others’ photos broadcast live on screens around the museum. You can see all the photos on sharypic, including one of the dinos enjoying a sneaky drink.

Here’s what Ryan Dodge, the Social Media Coordinator at the museum had to say about using sharypic:

Feature Update: Geolocation

By the end of a party it’s very likely that hashtags will not be your guests’ top priority. But that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on their photos! 

Sharypic is happy to announce that it is now possible to collect photos using geolocation. This means that you will never miss a photo taken at your event, even if guests do not use a hashtag with their image.

You can find geotagged photos taken within a certain range of your venue. By choosing your own size of area, from 10m up to 1km, you can be as precise as you like!

Check out photos from the Grand Palais in Paris for a glipse into the Chanel fashion show and the Edward Hopper exhibition. We set the geolocation for 200m around the venue and collected Instagram photos from the 7th-18th October 2012.

Photos are collected in real-time during your event. You can also find photos if your event has already happened - it is possible to create a sharypic event retrospectively.

We’re busy working on other awesome new features, so stay tuned for further updates!

Event of the Week: JSConf, Berlin

JSConf, the conference for the JavaScript community in Europe, is sharypic’s Event of the Week!

The event took place over the 6th and 7th November in Berlin, featuring talks, coding and parties….the usual mix for a great weekend! If you couldn’t make it there in person, and want to see exactly what a huge inflatable bubble filled with people looks like, take a look at the photos on sharypic.

Event of the Week: Cannstatter Volksfest

Sharypic’s first ever Event of the Week goes to the Cannstatter Volksfest, an annual festival in Stuttgart, Germany, considered by many to be the second largest beer festival in the world after Oktoberfest in Munich (sharypic has photos from there too!).

The festival features many attractions other than beer including a parade, fireworks, an alpine village, not the mention the world’s biggest mobile Ferris wheel at 60 meters wide. It looks like great fun - the photos speak for themselves!  

sharypic 1.1 on your iPhones

Latest sharypic update is now available on your Apple devices! Here is the changelog: 

• Event creation screen has been redesigned and is now much more simple!
• You can also update any setting on your event (no longer need to do it from the website)
• We added the possibility to setup email real-time aggregation from the app (see this post for more info)
• Get more details on your events on the redesigned info panel
• And of course, various bug fixes including a very annoying bug which prevented the app to be used properly offline

Wish you good events with sharypic

… and stay tuned, exciting new features are planned for 1.2!

New settings interface

We just released a new interface to manage settings of your sharypic event. Right now you can use it to set general information about your event or to manage privacy of your event.

In the following weeks we will add more options to this space.

See you on sharypic!

Simply send your photos by email

You no longer have an excuse for not sharing your photos of events, it’s now as easy as sending an email!

In any of your sharypic event, you can now setup an email adress (weekend-amsterdam@sharypic.com for instance) which will be available during the full event duration. You and your friends will then be able to send photos by email to this address in order to enjoy them together on sharypic!

The sharypic team

Leverage a Twitter #hashtag for your event

In the past, we have written about Twitter and its power to help promote your event; today we want to expand on this topic and discuss hashtags.

Selecting and utilizing a killer hashtag is essential for promoting your event. With a catchy, relevant hashtag you can make sharing your event easy and memorable and jumpstart engagement. 

Hashtag’s denote classifications, categories, and topics on Twitter. They are identified by the underlying technology to aggregate content threads and, upon reaching critical mass, lead to the ubiquitous “trending” label. To a large degree, anything can be transformed into a hashtag, including your event. However, there are a few things to keep in mind to maximize their usefulness: 

1. Twitter caps posts at 140 characters. Thus, brevity is key! Keep your hashtags short, sweet, memorable, and relevant (it needs to make sense!). Abbreviations work well and attaching dates can aid distinction from year to year. A hashtag should also be aligned with your company vision and should be considered an extension of your branding and PR.For example, Le Web, one of the largest Internet conferences in the world, took place recently in Paris and took Twitter by force by creating a #leweb11 hashtag to publicize news and information. Thousands of posts took advantage #leweb11, which, in turn generated thousands more communications throughout individual social networks.

2. Once you’ve decided on your hashtag, it must be used by everyone associated with your event’s communication. This “official” hashtag then underpins all communication across social media moving forward.
    
3. Having one official hashtag ensures all messages related to your event are aggregated under one heading. Proactively creating your event hashtag simplifies communication; ensures brand consistency; and facilitates sharing, research, and archiving.
4. Hashtags must be promoted and should become part of your general communications. They need to be given clear visibility on all social media pages, event web pages, and traditional advertising. Share with attendees how to engage and diffuse discoveries.
    
5. Ten days to weeks before the event start start using the hashtag and become engaged! Direct mentions (e.g. “@sharypic, so glad you’re attending #myevent2012”) to individual’s already attending and/or general messages to followers and related topics are great ways to expand visibility.  Respond to interesting chatter and always use the hashtag! The key is to use your tweets as soon, and as much, as possible.
   It is also a good idea to have a readymade list of standby tweets before the communications phase begins so during the event you have a have great set of tweets ready to go and you can focus on all the work you should be doing.
    
6. During the event, monitoring the hashtag is a great way to get a feel for the event’s success and allows you to respond to interactions in real time: Is the food ok? Are the lines too long? How did people react to that presentation? What do people really find interesting? This is your opportunity to engage directly with your audience, react to situations that need attention, and push the conversation forward. Studies have shown that companies that respond quickly to correct mistakes generate a larger, more positive impression on customers than those who are perfect from the beginning. Thank attendees, respond to criticism, be reactive to comments and leverage the real-time power of Twitter!
   
   sharypic provides a unique opportunity to leverage hashtags along with the power and immediacy of Twitter via our PhotoWall. It engages your audience, increases your visibility, provides a one of a kind experience, and adds authenticity.
7. After the event: measure your success! Employ the various tools for analyzing Twitter activity, measuring reach, and getting a sense for the overall success of your event. Smashing magazine has put together an amazing compendium of 3^rd party Twitter tools. This is also another opportunity to reach your event’s evangelizers and sow further seeds to strengthen your community.

The ideas are simple. Keep your hashtag short, use it across social networks, reach out to your attendees, and be reactive. Twitter is a great tool, but a tool that must be used wisely.

sharypic available on iPhone

A few months after we launched the website, we are pleased to announce the launch of sharypic for iPhone: you can download it on the App Store. In our way to make sharing photos of an event as easy as taking them, attendees can now contribute on sharypic direct from their mobile phones. Sharypic liberates your photos from your phone allowing you to share these moments with your friends or the world.

In this first version, the sharypic App lets you:

• Create your event right from your phone. Public or private, you decide!
• Add your pictures as you shoot them during the event. All pictures from the camera roll are available, so you can spread your Instagram clichés as well.
• Invite your friends to contribute and to enjoy best photos of the event.

A wedding, a week-end trip with friends, a family vacation, etc… sharypic is perfect for every occasion! Even a concert, a conference or a sport competition fit. The app let you discover and enjoy the best photos of public events close-by or around the world, most recent or most popular.

Can’t attend the Superbowl or the Carnival in Rio and want to see pictures of these events? Sharypic brings them right to your phone: