Summer Festivals

“Yes, yes, yes, it’s the summer festival,” sang former Orange Juice frontman Edwyn Collins, "the truly detestable summer festival"

These days, few would agree. As in previous years, over the last month we’ve had Glastonbury, T in the Park and Lovebox packed with sweltering-but-happy music lovers, ravers and A-to-Z-List scenesters. A number of major summer festivals, including the mighty Reading, are still to come. These increasingly affluent weekenders are unsurprisingly appealing for corporate sponsors. Or in the case of Glastonbury, charity sponsors – GreenPeace, Oxfam and WaterAid are the headline names attached to the legendary festival, each contributing special events, stalls, and volunteers who work at the festival in exchange for free entrance.

The charity brands can be seen to have outperformed the corporate sponsors in social media, though both WaterAid and Greenpeace were helped by the presence of Prince Charles in what looked suspiciously like high-end, old-school PR.

T in the Park’s main sponsor, music magazine survivor NME, is particularly well suited to the event, and its social media presence over the festival weekend was striking. Yet social media appearances of NME and Glastonbury together far exceeded those related to the event the magazine was actually sponsoring. In both cases, these were conversations involving, rather than instigated by, the NME.

Glastonbury itself, on the other hand, is enthusiastically embracing social technology. Friday evening brought a ‘Social Media Experiment’, in which performers incorporated social media into their acts, including stand-up based around live Chatroulette sessions. A dedicated festival Twitter list, #twisto, allows committed Glasto-heads to commune all year round, effectively serving as Glastonbury’s very own social network, one wholly true to the spirit of the event.

Glastotag is the mother of all gig photos: 70,000 people snapped from Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage, mashed with Facebook to reveal how the revelers are connected in the virtual world – and of course to encourage them to tag one another. The thousands tagged so far suggests real potential for social media marketing at such events for any sponsor, corporate or otherwise, willing to play to the technology’s strengths.