Seriously...

Ever wonder where all your time goes?

Social Media: just another kind of experiential marketing

Wisdom begins in wonder.
- Socrates

Nice post (though 6 months old) on the Jack Morton blog about social media as experiential marketing. Sad that I just found it. :-)

SeatGuru for Hotels

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
- Oscar Wilde

Find the best hotel room in the building using TripKick, a SeatGuru-style site for hotels (and if you haven't used SeatGuru to pick you airplane seats, you should start!). According to Springwise, "coverage of each hotel includes detailed information on which rooms to request: which rooms are oversized (rooms ending in 03 and 04, for example), which have great bathrooms or are quieter than others. TripKick, which spent a year gathering all of this information, also points out which floors are better, and which to avoid. Guests are encouraged to add their own reviews and upload photos of rooms they've stayed in."

Blog Roll, please

"The road to success is always under construction"
- Anonymous

Let's get this community-building underway. I've got my social media all set up...
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lizlathan
Twitter: http://twitter.com/lizlathan
FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/lizlathan
Ping.fm: lizlathan
Flickr & YouTube channels to share pics & vids of the family

Now let's start finding some friends!

I posted to the CMP forum on LinkedIn requesting that people send me links to their meeting industry blogs and will list them here for all to share, as well as adding them to my blog roll. Enjoy!

http://associationmeetings.org/
http://www.meetingspodcast.com/
http://blog.meetingsnet.com/face2face/
http://krysslovacek.wordpress.com/
http://event-planning.alltop.com/
http://www.justforplanners.com

Events and Social Media

Accept the challenges so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory.
- Gen. George Patton

I just read an article in Corporate Event magazine about an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that was played at the CEMA conference in 2006 (unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an online version of this article). Funny thing is that I was at that conference and I participated in the ARG, but I only made it a little way down the path. The parts that I made it through were way cool, though, and showcase how my buddy jmacofearth keeps referring to events as "the ultimate social media."

Basically, CEMA used nTag electronic name tags and planted a mole among the attendees who, when "zapped" as a connection, tagged the attendee as having moved to the next level of the game. The next morning, those tagged attendees received a token under their hotel room door for a free coffee in the hotel coffee shop. When redeemed, those attendees were given coffee wraps around the cups that congratulated them and gave them a URL to move to the next level. Attendees could use the AOL cybercafe to go to the URL and answer a few short questions like their favorite vacation spot (beach, snow), favorite flavor (vanilla, chocolate, strawberry), and a couple of others. Certain partipants were chosen to go even further and were given new clues, and eventually one was deemed the winner and given a set of luxury luggage on the last day of the conference.

It was a social media and live interaction scavenger hunt that got the whole conference buzzing. I love this idea and I hope more conferences come up with really cool new ways for sponsors to participate in fresh marketing opportunities like this!

New Year's Resolution: Dive into Social Media

Never tell your resolution beforehand, or it's twice as onerous a duty.
- John Selden

Yeah, but that's the point this time.

1. I resolve to keep up this blog, if only to ensure that I continue to locate cool and innovative event ideas from other industry professionals.
2. I resolve to keep up my other new blog to share my fun gift-locating skills with friends.
3. I resolve to create a social media strategy (and attempt to maintain it) for the Humane Society of Williamson County in order to learn more about social media and aid my favorite cause.
4. I resolve to create an interactive online event engagement portal for my company's customers to find out what events we are participating in and where they can find us.
5. And, finally, I resolve to decorate for the fun holidays this year (Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Easter, 4th of July, My birthday, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas). Any other holiday's I left off?

Delayed Update

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
- Ferris Bueller

The sad truth is that when you work at a large corporation, you find yourself doing email and working during all that time that used to be "spare." So between September and now, I have spent evenings with the baby, put him to bed and then gone back online to work.

But to update the last couple of months, meeting with the European event team was FANTASTIC. They have some great experience and ideas that we can learn from, and we have some great tools and resources that will help them. I'm so excited to be working on a project to bring our colleagues from around the world together.

And yes, the husband and the baby survived just fine without me!

So now back to posting interesting event information, and less droning about myself.

Taking the Plan on the Road

If your imagination leads you to understand how quickly people grant your requests when those requests appeal to their self-interest, you can have practically anything you go after.
- Napoleon Hill

I begin my journey on Friday to visit with colleagues in Europe and cooperate on creating a single global technology infrastructure for the event team. We currently use more than 13 tools to manage our events across the globe (not to mention the thousands of Excel spreadsheets), and none of them communicate with any other system. So I've laid out a plan and will take it on the road to get input next week.

On a personal note, it will be the first time my husband will have to spend 6 days alone with our almost-9-month-old baby, so... we'll see how that goes! :-)

Wow, been a while.

"Employ thy time well if thou meanest to get leisure."
- Benjamin Franklin

Goodness, time flies when you're crazy busy! With the husband in another country for 3 weeks and just myself to manage the job, the laundry, the baby, and the dogs, I have neglected my blog responsbilities.

I'm working on creating a single global technology infrastucture for my company's many event departments. While we may not ever truly consolidate into one team, it makes sense to have one customer registration tool to keep all of the customer data. This is relatively easy in the US, but bringing the rest of the world onboard is tricky. Finding a registration tool and investing $100k+ blindly is a scary thing! I'm currently demo-ing all sorts of tools and hunting for the one with the right mix of aesthetics and usefulness...

Communicate More Good

“In the time honored tradition of email, just ignore the question.”
- John Dobbin

So while I love Xobni, I like this idea better.

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Remember: Events ARE Marketing

“When planning for a year, plant corn. When planning for a decade, plant trees. When planning for life, train and educate people.”
- Chinese Proverb

Seth Godin has a great post today about event/meeting planning. I think he's accurate on everything except the 30 x 80 meeting room setup - and I get his point, but I disagree with it.

They Travel in Packs

"Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean."
- Ryunosuke Satoro

And how many times do oceans need to register for something? Most of the time. I am seeing more and more instances where either I need to register an entire room block or my customers need to register multiple attendees to an event, and the technology piece does not allow for it. Does anyone really have the time to sit around and individually register 32 people? Probably not. If you are building out a reg site, make sure you consider the poor administrative assistant or event planner who is going to have to waste half a day entering everyone's names into you system one by one.

Appreciate Out Loud

“Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone.”
- G.B. Stern

Thank you notes have always been touted as the most sincere way to personally thank someone for something they did for you. Today, this is still true, but why not go above and beyond? Follow Andy's lead. I always include about $50-100 in my event budget to use for appreciation gifts. Maybe its an Edible Arrangement to the housing bureau manager who miraculously found me 5 extra rooms the day before the deadline. Maybe its a bottle of chocolate dipped wine to the hotel event manager who found me two meeting rooms even though the conference is less than a week away and the hotel truly had no space left (I still don't know how she did that)! Even a couple of restaurant.com gift certificates to the event planners on my team who have bent over backwards to deal with ambiguity and get an amazing event planned. In the grand scheme of a $120k+ event, $100 to thank some folks is so very worth it.

Chit-Chatters Unite!

Word-of-mouth is not created, it is co-created. People will only spread your virus if there’s something in it for them.
-Hugh MacLeod

The hottest (and most cost-effective?) trend in marketing is Word of Mouth marketing. Always on the hunt for inexpensive demand generation tactics, Word of Mouth programs are ideal for events. According to Andy Sernovitz's blog, the National Restaurant Association knows how to use WoM quite well to promote their show, and we should all take notes!

I Love E-mail!

"God help us, we're in the hands of engineers."
- Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

Who knew I would ever get excited about opening Outlook? Thanks to Xobni, I do. This third-party Outlook add-in is the coolest thing since sliced bread. It adds a toolbar to the right side of your Outlook that shows a profile of the person you are emailing. At a glance, you can see their phone number, schedule time with them (without looking through both of your calendars), see your conversations, see attachments you've shared, and more. It has made my e-mail life so much more efficient. And the fun part is the analytics. I can actually see, on average, how quickly I respond to emails, when I receive the most email, what time of day I send the most emails, and even how many unique people I have exchanged thoughts with. I'm enamored. Check it out - its free.