I ripped a page right out of Rob Quigley’s playbook with a crowdsourcing experiment during the Houston Social Media Breakfast on Friday morning.

The backstory

Rob, who is the social media editor at the Austin American-Statesman, executed a terrific “Day in the Sun” storystream for the paper two weeks ago using Posterous, a blogging platform that allows multiple contributors to post photos/text/videos to a single stream using a single e-mail address.

In total, readers submitted 70 photos, all of which were syndicated out to a highly-trafficked Statesman.com photo gallery and some of which also wound up in the print edition.

It was a creative and thoughtful project–one of many that Rob is hatching for the Statesman these days–and so I decided to copy it!

SMB Houston storystream

The project: To create a storystream–primarily with photos–of the Houston Social Media Breakfast on Friday, September 11.

The platform: An SMB Houston Posterous blog, which I created in about two minutes.

The plan: Ask breakfast attendees to send in photos they captured during the breakfast to post@SMBHouston.Posterous.com (an unwieldy address, but it was the default setting from Posterous). I would then manually approve all submissions (I chose to keep moderation on for testing purposes, and also in case a devious Twitter spammer got wind of the plan).

The results: 24 photos were submitted and posted to the blog from five contributors, and we generated a few hundred page views.

Where’s storystreaming headed?

Our crowdsourcing work in Houston was a mere first step toward what “storystreaming” can be. Here’s Daniel Honigman’s more lofty vision:

A storystream helps bring to light, through a chronological narrative, a particular issue, process or concept over a more significant period of time than an eventstream usually covers. Used journalistically, it turns into a collaborative stream of consciousness that tells a story.

So how might I improve and beef up the storystreaming efforts at a future Social Media Breakfast or social media conference or event?

• Get out the word in advance
• Use a shorter or easier-to-remember e-mail address
• Assign an editor or moderator to review and approve submissions more quickly
• Mix in videos and text reviews
• Promote our content online during the event through Twitter

Still, this was a good start, and I’m thankful to Rob for the inspiration.

Disclosure: Rob Quigley was the moderator of a panel for the most recent Austin Social Media Breakfast, which the American-Statesman also hosted.

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