Elon students provide media support for the Global Action Summit

Four students and one professor provided video and social media coverage to this annual summit of industry leaders, entrepreneurs and researchers in Nashville. Two more Elon students and one Elon alum attended as well.

Seniors Brian Mezerski, Katherine Maraghy and Eric Halperin, junior Mia Watkins, and assistant professor Vanessa Bravo traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, from Nov.16 to 19 to provide video and social media coverage for the Global Action Summit, held Nov.17 and 18 in Nashville’s Music City Center.

These four students shot, edited, and are in the process of finalizing three videos for the Global Action Summit. The first is about the Global Action Challenge, a competition that awards $1 million to the best social entrepreneurial project, among six finalists (of more than 100 applicants around the world).

The initial videos of each of the six finalists are already available in YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=GAP14+Global+Action+challenge and at the Global Action Platform’s website (http://www.globalactionplatform.org/). The winner of the Global Action Challenge for this year, announced in the banquet dinner of Nov.18, was the project presented by Treatspace.

The other two videos that Elon students are preparing are about the highlights of the summit (first day and second day), an international activity attended by about 400 industry leaders, researchers, entrepreneurs and academics, organized by the Global Action Platform to discuss ideas and form partnerships around the topics of food security, health, and prosperity around the world.

Elon students and professor Bravo were also in charge of the Twitter coverage for the two-day event (using the Twitter handle @GapAction, with the hashtag #GAP14). They pre-scheduled tweets using Tweet Deck, live-tweeted from all the different conference sessions throughout the two days, including the plenary meetings, and analyzed the results of the social-media coverage using TweetReach.

According to the snapshot report from TweetReach, between Nov.17 and the morning of Nov. 20, 124 persons or organizations tweeted 682 times about the event. The most influential “tweeters” were MarsGlobal (the company that produces, among many other products, the chocolates M&Ms, Milky Way, Snickers, Mars, and Twix), GapAction (managed by Elon students and professor Bravo for this event), the Social Progress Imperative, and Lucian Tarnowski, founder of BraveNewTalent.

The TweetReach report also indicates that the summit’s Twitter coverage had an estimated reach of 180,975 accounts engaged, and 621,483 impressions.

Also present in the Global Action Summit, as Summit Fellows, were Elon students Jensen Roll and Alex Goeldner, co-presidents of the non-profit H.O.P.E., and Elon alum Ryan Budden.

As an added bonus, both the Elon media team and the Elon summit fellows had the opportunity to attend the keynote speaker sessions with CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria, with FedEx CEO Fred Smith, and with Lucian Tarnowski, founder of BraveNewTalent.

“I was extremely impressed by the professionalism of all these Elon students and alum. On one hand, our Communication students worked tirelessly with the video production and Twitter coverage. Also, the Summit Fellows from H.O.P.E. were networking and establishing contacts non-stop. These students are mature way beyond their age. It was great to see that,” professor Vanessa Bravo said.