Editor's note: A few weeks ago Richard outlined a new mobile project bringing together the social web and live events that the A&Mi team would be testing out at Radio 1's Big Weekend. Here's the promised update on how things went - PM.

'...If you're taking someone who's not your boyfriend or girlfriend and you haven't told them that you have tickets, then don't check in...'
Radio 1 DJ Scott Mills on his show the day before the event.

The concept was to see if the audience at a live broadcast event would want to share their experience of what was happening on the stage in front of them with their social network. To make it even more interesting we'd be doing it in the technically challenging location of an airfield on the outskirts of Carlisle.

The challenge I was set was to find an engaging model for those at the event to link up with those who weren't and in essence to create a conversation around a piece of BBC content, in this case the Radio 1 Big Weekend festival.

As I arrived in Carlisle, my blood pressure rose on finding out that we had no connectivity via 3G at our hotel at all...even when standing on one leg with my phone in the air. Thankfully the coverage on site was much better due to the installation of three mobile operator's 3G boosters.

I then remembered that we had another location quirk to overcome. Temporary 3G boosters do not have any lat/long coordinates associated with them. As we had developed the prototype to detect a user's location firstly via WiFi, then 3G cell triangulation and finally a device's own GPS. I discovered that using 3G placed me over a mile away from my actual location.

As WiFi was not an option due to its limitations of concurrent users, it was down to my device GPS only. From conversations with users later on we realised that many people do not have GPS enabled all of the time due to its high power consumption.

After running some tests on the Friday and Saturday morning I realised that the page load time was a little slow due to the limited connectivity.

On some of the pages the key feature buttons were displaying before the whole page had finished loading which meant that people were pressing the 'check in here' button before all of the background location and sign in checks had been done. This then resulted in an error displaying even though a user had successfully checked in.

One way round this would have been to offer some bespoke content to get the audience to go to the prototype site prior to the event, so that the site could be cached on their phone thus reducing the load time when they got onsite...

The prototype was a 'mash-up' of BBC content feeds from our artist pages and Facebook as the publishing tool which resulted in a more complex technical design than we had originally hoped. The number of background checks to Facebook and the phones location caused some problems with the prototype such as the number of calls to the 'Places' API.

The success of the product early on the Saturday meant that the Facebook system thought we were spamming it. We were innovating with a live service which often has its unexpected challenges. Luckily we had support from Future Platforms and Facebook during the weekend so we did some live hacks, sorry 'updates', to iron out the issues we faced.

After a tense few hours working through some complex issues with the product and Facebook, we were back up and running smoothly. By around 5pm we saw the number of errors reduced and the check ins were on the up.

Thankfully, we had a different audience every day so we could start afresh. This is one reason why we used Radio 1's Big Weekend as a testing ground.

The next challenge was to find out what the audience thought about the product and the check in prototype as a whole. Did they get it? Was the reward of saying "I'm watching Lady Gaga" a good enough reason and could they see the difference in what we were doing to what other location based services did?

A research company carried out some qualitative research on the Sunday and some of the audience used a video diary to feedback what they thought.

Editor's note: Brett was previously the interactive editor of 5 live before becoming the managing editor at Three Counties Radio. I asked him for his thoughts on the role of social networks in local radio. (PM)

Last July I left BBC Radio 5 live after six years and drove north to Luton. I hadn't worked in local radio since the early nineties, but the chance to run my nearest radio station was too good an opportunity to pass up.

The 5 Live newsroom I left was fully engaged with social media, with a variety of Facebook and Twitter accounts, presenters engaging with the audience and audio and video shared and distributed daily.

At BBC Three Counties Radio I quickly found that social media was not really on the agenda. So as we set about putting together a new schedule and defining how we were going to re-shape the programming, I thought it was important to get the station working in digital spaces at the same time.

Working with the brilliant Claire Wardle and Sue Llewellyn we designed two days to talk to everyone in the station about what could be achieved. Every producer and presenter spent 2 hours learning the essentials. There was a clear message: if we do this, it will increase the reach of our radio content.

But it's not just about teaching people what to do. Integrating social media into the radio station needs support from the very top. The management needs to be engaged and actively involved. It's not enough to have a lone person in the newsroom responsible for social media, it's everybody's job.

At 3CR the two news editors that cover the broadcast day now have it as part of their job description to update social media, share content and engage with the listeners. We created time in their day to do this. Just as crucially the journalists are using it as a newsgathering tool.

In just a few weeks we found on Twitter a gamer addicted to playing 18 hours a day that tied into a Panorama programme, friends of a murder victim and a local man who was designing a space mission to name just three. We uncovered local stories, new guests and shared masses of content. When we tweeted and engaged on Facebook about a local park being closed in Bushey, the callers that rang in were keen to point out that they had never listened to 3CR - and didn't know it covered their area. We found an 18 year old dancer from Hertfordshire waiting in a queue outside the Hammersmith Apollo to audition for Britain's Got Talent.

Additionally, and just as importantly, the presenters are connecting with the listeners in digital spaces for the first time. Social media is being used to extend the reach of the radio station and bring new ears to 3CR content. Just a couple of weeks ago, there was Melvin, a caller ranting about how much he hated the Royal Wedding. He was on air at 0920. Laura Miller, who produces the mid-morning show, had this on Audioboo and in the Twittersphere by 0935, as she continued to output the show. To date, as a result of social media, it's been played 115,000 times, that's greater than the weekly reach of some stations. Melvin may have called his local station in Luton, but the next day he could hear his call being played and talked about on WNYC in New York.

So has this strategy it worked? Well admittedly it's difficult to equate social media activity directly to gains in listeners. But last week BBC Three Counties Radio had its best Rajar for six years. I would like to think the two are connected.

Brett Spencer is currently working on social media innovation projects for BBC English Regions. Follow his personal account on Twitter @brettsr

• Follow BBC Three Counties Radio on Twitter at @bbc3cr
• Read radio and new media consultant Matt Deegan's blog post on radio and Twitter ("...Overall, Twitter is a great resource and platform to help grow audience and engagement. Remember though that the vast majority of your listeners probably don't care..."): Radio's Twitter Obsession

At Radio 1's Big Weekend 2011 we are testing a new mobile feature that allows the audience to say "I'm here now" to their friends while watching their favourite artists throughout the day. The key thing is that they have to be present at a stage to check in.

So why are we doing this? This is an experiment to help the BBC explore privacy issues around Check Ins and ask whether the technology can enhance our audiences' experience of similar events. By using the latest mobile location technology, Facebook Places and a bit of web design, we've built a prototype that let's our audience share the experience with their family and friends in a way in which they're used to. We decided to use Facebook Places because we believe most of the audience at the event will have an account.

At the BBC I run a number of social media projects and we've been wanting to do something involving the audience at festivals and listeners at home for quite a while. The challenge I set myself here was to find a new and engaging way for the BBC to encourage users to share their festival experiences, good or bad, with the wider world.

The 'Check In' experiment is my proposed solution. It was initially developed on a beer mat in December 2010 but after a late night or two and hard work from the Future Platforms team it was delivered on time. It will only be available to smartphone users with Facebook accounts, attending Radio 1's Big Weekend in Carlisle. Participants are able to share a number of things: which stage they're at, who they're listening to and what they think of the performance. This information will be shared with friends via the user's Facebook newsfeed.

Here's how it works:

The site asks users to verify their location by either checking their 3G cell or using their GPS location. Privacy has been a concern on this project from the outset. We have taken great care in making sure that this site is an example of how to be safe whilst using Check Ins. By default, our site only publishes information and comments to a user's friends via their Facebook newsfeed.

The prototypes database tells us how many people have checked into a performance and how many times they have checked in but the BBC does not hold any users' personal data. The system is completely anonymous, so while we can visualise the numbers of users we're unable to tell who they are. We also signpost that users can amend Facebook privacy settings to decide how and with whom they share this information. As Radio 1's Big Weekend is a ticketed event, we felt that this would be the perfect choice for an experiment of this kind as it reduce concerns of the audience sharing where they are. We also felt that this was a great opportunity to raise awareness with our audience of location privacy. The way we are doing this is to promote how to stay safe on-line as well as providing top tips for anyone using location based services.

From the start, allowing users to say where they were as one of our prototypes was going to be an interesting shift in what we do. We defined a set of criteria to be evaluated and we are carrying out three stages of audience research focusing on qualitative research at the event with 6 young people. They'll be given phones for the day and asked to evaluate the experiment and the promotion.

This has been a truly challenging and thrilling project to work on with some great people but there'll be no rest until the final evaluation in a few weeks. I'll be doing a further post after next weekend with details of how it went. - RM

Richard Morland - Senior Producer Social Media - A&M Interactive

NB: This is an experiment so unfortunately we cannot make it work on all mobiles. If you are attending then your handset will need to have location detection enabled and a browser that can handle HTML5 web code. For example: the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, Sony Ericsson X10, Samsung Galaxy and Galaxy S, HTC Desire, Desire HD and Nexus One, and any phones using Android 2.1 operating system and above (excluding tablets and small-screen devices such as Samsung Galaxy Mini, Sony Experia X10 Mini and HTC Wildfire).

The Royal Wedding is tied up, done and dusted... and the music was my highlight. It was emotional, it had some new music (to my ears at least) bringing together hundreds of millions of people all listening and enjoying the same moment together. Whether you attended in person outside the Abbey, Buckingham Palace or lining the route, or whether like most of us, you joined in via the TV, radio or internet it was about people coming together to celebrate a single live event.

In part the music was powerful because we all knew it the came from the personal choices that the happy couple had made and it meant something deeply to them. An intriguing insight because, if you are married, you know the music choices as with many other wedding decisions, had probably been hard fought.

Only 40,000 people can attend Radio 1's Big Weekend, making their own choices on the day, which stage to wander to and which artists to see. The rest of the audience can obviously listen on the radio, watch all the stages live online or navigate through the 60+ videos available later on. Our research tells us that they are normally seeking out what they know they already like.

Personal choices in music are what make Radio 1 breathe. The expert view (i.e. our DJs' passion about a tune), combined with a populist, audience viewpoint (charts, sales, audience research and comment) - make Radio 1 in 2011, I hope, just as valuable as ever. It represents the friend (our DJ) and the family (the listeners) coming together. Interestingly, it is reported that these are still the most popular ways in which music choices are decided. Family. Friends. Radio.

Big Weekend gives our DJs a place to curate music in the digital space as well as on air. We are starting with six of our DJs at Radio 1's Big Weekend and their selection of photos, video and favourite artists that mean something to them. Our users' choices will also be reflected for the first time on the site via rankings of the 'Most Viewed' and 'Most Shared' artists.

Encouraging presenters and audiences to curate and discuss their personal choices is a really important part of what BBC Music does online. It harnesses the BBC's role as a trusted guide and helps us build deeper relationships with our audiences on the BBC and in their digital social spaces. Radio 1's Big Weekend site and projects like Music Showcase feature elements intended to make discovery of those personal music choices even easier for our audiences. Radio 1's strength in social spaces means the conversation we can have about personal choices in music is ever more meaningful - keep your eye on #BBCR1 and #r1bw on Twitter and on BBC Radio 1 on Facebook, on the weekend of 14th May.

We are also experimenting with location based services on site, building our own check-in service using Facebook. One of the motivating factors is to understand the safety and privacy issues around young people using check-in services but still allowing them the freedom to brag in a meaningful way to their friends that they are stood in front of Lady GaGa. It also allows us to begin to understand how mobile will help us in the future, what an individual's proximity to others means, whether they are famous or simply a friend at any live event.

Ben Chapman is Head of Popular Music for Audio and Music Interactive

• To find out more about the Big Weekend visit the Radio 1 website
• The Twitter hashtag is #R1BW
• Follow Radio 1 on Twitter @BBCR1
• Picture shows: Snow Patrol at Radio 1's Big Weekend 2009

Editor's note: a brand new 6 Music show that's designed from the ground up to be interactive - it's even named after a hashtag. The nerve centre for NowPlaying @6Music is the show's blog - SB

I think it's taken a while for 6 Music to find its niche but now it has really found a sound. You wouldn't find bands like Warpaint or Beach House - who have both been really big acts for us in the past year - on the A-list of any other station. We're all about alternative spirit. It can be many things; it can be an artist's sound and/or their influences. A great recent example has been the Jamie XX and Gil Scott-Heron track 'I'll Take Care of You'. It's been on the 6 Music A-list and is a fantastic example of what the network does best - it's a new act collaborating with a heritage artist both in alternative music to create something new.

I've been producing shows here for four and a half years and I'm just about to launch a brand new show with Tom Robinson on Friday nights (7-9pm) called Now Playing @6Music, which is all about the digital conversation with music. Music has never been more digital. A music fan will listen to radio but also probably look at blogs like Drowned in Sound.

They might well use a third-party music service like Hype Machine or Spotify to either play music or aggregate their tastes in recommending music, and they probably get their music news from an online source rather than a copy of NME. So the idea of this new show is to take part in this online music conversation. We're going to create a space once a week where people can share and recommend tracks related to the week's music news, and find out what's happening in the world of digital music. The show will be a weekly iteration of the activity going on 24/7.

I try to go to a couple of gigs a week to see what's out there and make my own judgement on bands who music PRs have 'plugged' to me. For example, there's a group I went to see last week called Holy Ghost who a PR had pitched to do a 6 Mix - the other show I produce. They are quite hipster and signed to DFA - which is James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem's label. On paper they look pretty good - they're on a very cool label and their music has an electro vibe about it - but, as a producer, I needed to see if they've got more legs than just a single.

To do this, I saw them play live with Cut Copy, gauged their popularity on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook and was ultimately really impressed, so commisioned them to do a mix. It's all about thinking if they're a career band and, if they're not a household name yet and I'm offered them early doors (which we are at 6 Music), it's always worth seeing them perform to get a stronger sense of their talents and where they're heading. I don't want to get really excited about someone, put them on a show or argue to put their record onto playlist and then see them live and they're rubbish. In my position I've always got to think about bands in a broader sense.

Rowan Collinson produces Now Playing @6Music.

• Listen to the first programme on BBC Radio 6 Music at 1900 tonight.
• The picture shows Warpaint, in session for Radio 1 earlier this month.
• Interact with the show on the show's blog, via 6 Music's Facebook page or the Twitter account.