Tuesday, January 13, 2009

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. :-)

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

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."

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

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

Sunday, January 4, 2009

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!