Thursday, August 25, 2011

Social listening

To listen well, is as powerful a means of influence as to talk well, and is as essential to all true conversation.
  - Chinese Proverb

Social media is good and fun... but what are you doing with the conversations you're having? Jeff Hurt's post on "why your event needs to increase social media monitoring" is dead right!

If you used social media during your last similar event, the data to be mined is almost limitless. You can see trending topics, audience segments, gaps in engagement, and most importantly: tone of the conversation.

If your events are put on for the benefit of your customers or users (like training or advisory events), creating a listening channel to gather feedback and input for the agenda is a highly valuable and appreciated way to engage with your constituents.

If your event is marketing/sales-driven and you aren't seeking input from attendees, having conversations with them during and after the event is very important to shape your future experiences. If you actually do not care what your customers think at all about your event or your content, well then you probably won't have a whole lot of them next year. :-)

Onsite, there are a number of innovative ways to connect with your attendees via social media. You can create and publicize a specific hashtag for event help and have a group of event volunteers monitoring the feed and working to answer questions or solve customer dilemmas. If you have a customized mobile app, you can add a virtual helpdesk or other mechanism for requesting assistance. In your app, you can push real-time feedback surveys to ask about specific event elements, as well as get session feedback through the app. If you just want to pretend you're high tech, but don't really have the money to BE high tech, you can set up QR codes throughout your event which link to a simple form or survey. When scanned with a smartphone's QR reader, the form would open allowing the attendee to put in a question or answer a question (depending on what you are trying to accomplish).

Customers are more and more annoyed at companies that don't listen. If you're inviting them to attend your event, they expect that you will care about their needs. Show it through social media.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Where did the Twittersphere go?

The people drawn to Twitter are people on the cutting edge, the real nerds who are resentful of the fact that the general population have found and taken over Facebook.
  -  Steve Dotto, host of Dotto Tech (Source)

Merely five years old, Twitter has had a skyrocketing rate of adoption. The statics still show that its use is on the rise, and events like Obama's town hall have made it a completely mainstream way of adding conversation and engagement to live and virtual events.

There are fantastic How-To's like this one out on the web about aggregation and management of information.

But why are so few high tech event marketers using it? There is a vibrant #eventprofs community composed of a huge variety of event managers from associations to vendors to wedding planners to event management agencies. Great content, great sharing, great conversation, and even an organized event chat on regular occasions.

Organizations like #MPI, #TSEA, #PCMA all have conversations, but tweets generally include the #eventprofs in their conversations so the messages are virtually indistiguishable except to say they are members of these industry associations.

But in following #cemaonline, the Corporate Event Marketing Association's hashtag and #hitechevents, the hashtag for marketers working in the high tech industry, I find absolutely no engagement. Why would the set of event marketers MOST likely to be on Twitter not be anywhere near it?

Just too busy? I know our group in high tech events manages more than 1,000 events a year with just 9 event managers, so busy is an understatement. Or is it that event managers in high tech are at companies that have entire groups devoted to social media (like we do at my company), so the event managers do not feel the need to engage. Or is it because high tech event managers don't understand the value of networking beyond their doors with other high tech event managers?

Personally, I find Twitter to be highly valuable when seeking out new ideas and technologies. I use it for research on competitive events. I use it to search hashtags for conversations about certain topics that will be at my event. I don't spend a ton of time idly staring at and reading random things, but when my Outlook is frozen as a 13MB file comes in, or while I'm on a conference call waiting for my moment to speak, I peruse the feeds and click on some links and bookmark great articles to go back to later.

I find the engagement of the people on Twitter exciting, and I want to know why there aren't more high tech event managers out there with me!

Thursday, August 18, 2011

What I learned from the first-ever, global eTouches User Conference, Aug 16-17, Norwalk, CT

At the point of commitment, the universe conspires to support you.
  - Anonymous

I have been an eTouches user and advocate for going on three years now. My company has implemented the tool globally as the standard, registration system for the majority of customer and internal events. Having taken the plunge three years ago with a relatively unproven company (in the mind of corporate America), and forming a great long-term partnership with them over the years, I had full faith and trust that spending two days at the conference would be well worth my time. I was definately going to go.

Before I had a chance to register, I got a call from Leonora, the eTouches CEO, asking if I would present our case study at their conference. “Of course!” I said. I was more than happy to share my story with 20 people in breakout sessions. As I think back on it now, she gave no indication that it would be just 20 people in a breakout session...

Then one day, a colleague passed me in the hall and said, “CONGRATULATIONS! I see you’re keynoting the eTouches user conference! That’s AWESOME!” I said (very eloquently, I might add), “HUH?” I ran to my computer and scrolled through my inbox to find an announcement that I would be keynoting the conference, followed by 4 more emails from other colleagues congratulating me on my keynote spot.

So I called Susanne Carawan at eTouches and said, “Yeah, hi… so what’s this about me keynoting?” She said, “I know! Surprise! Awesome, right?” Of course, it was totally awesome, and I give presentations all the time at work, speak to hundreds of people frequently by conference call and webinar format…but I had never actually spoken “for real” in front of an audience in any kind of “she’s our featured presenter” sort of way.

So the first thing I learned about eTouches at their user conference was that they were willing to show me the same level of trust that I’ve shown them. They trusted that I would come up with a story that would kick off their conference in a meaningful way. They trusted that I had some sort of ability to stand in front of people and speak coherently.

Only the survey results will truly tell how I did, but I sincerely thank eTouches for giving me the opportunity to share, learn, and grow. And I hope I didn't suck.

But about that conference… I really did learn actual useful stuff. So here’s my recap:

My first awesome moment was when I arrived at the offices. I was on a conference call about an event I have coming up, when a man entered the room - I'd never met him, but after three years of talking to him pom the phone, when I heard him say hi, I knew instantly who he was. Julian Ward!

I told the folks on the phone, "Hold on a sec - I have to put you on mute and hug someone." I know it sounds cheesey, but It was a magical moment!

A colleague of mine from Dell attended with me, and then I got the pleasant surprise of another colleague of mine from another Dell office showing up to attend – I had never met her in person, either!

eTouches CEO Leonora Valvo kicked off the conference with some great “burning questions”… and let me tell you that a crowd of 75 software users have tons of questions and ideas. The eTouches team graciously answered the questions, shared the solutions that already exist, and took in the ideas for consideration.

We learned about upcoming roadmap plans, new mobile features, and got some great demos of modules that many of us see in the tool, but have yet to use. The agenda was jam-packed minute-to-minute with great stuff.

One of the eTouches board members presented an industry perspective on content, sharing some best practices and ideas on how to generate and syndicate event content. Personally, I have no shortage of content at my events (and in fact find that we have to curate it down to the really important points before launching an event), so I would have liked to see a little more from him on the reuse of the content. I have other commentary on The Long Tail of Content, and I think his presentation could have been shaped to expand on that a bit – maybe next year!

On the evening of the first day, we attended a clam bake at the beach… but this was no ordinary clam bake… after getting some clams and clam chowder, we were each served AN ENTIRE LOBSTER. I have never seen anything like that at an event. I was blown away!

I have a mantra that when I attend conferences, the experience is whatever I make of it, so I officially designated our dinner table as “the fun table,” and hilarity ensued. Great conversations that ranged from the naming of grandparents to Facebook privacy to the death of email. We ended the evening with a surprise afterparty at a local dive with an AMAZING band call Tangled Vine. If you’re in the northeast, you must book this band. I’m from the Live Music Capitol of the World, and I was very impressed with this Greenwich, CT, group!

Our previous Death of Email conversation from was put aside the next day when we got a presentation from eWay talking about email marketing. Relevant points, great statics, and reinforcing metrics behind why email is still a viable marketing tool for events.

We had an interesting conversation about mobile apps for events… I think the topic still stumps everyone. Should we build? Should we buy? Should we ignore? No right answer has emerged.

We had an exciting and energetic conversation about social media and extending the life of an event community, led by Susanne Carawan, and the eTouches team announced their eSocial platform (replacing eConnect), and featuring a full private community portal for attendees to connect before, during, and after the event.

Finally, we ended the conference with some Meet the Experts and advisory-type sessions, which were extremely valuable and ton of fun (attendees love to provide input and ideas, and it turns out, I’m no exception!).

As a self-professed disruptor and early adopter, I was absolutely thrilled to be a part of eTouches first-ever global user conference. The people I met, the stories I heard, the experiences I shared will be with me for life.

Thank you to eTouches and to the loyal user-base for making my two days in Connecticut so very worth my while!

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Rethinking QR codes

Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted. 

  - George Kneller

In response to my recent post about my frustration with the uselessness of QR codes, a dear friend introduced me to a friend of hers who is an expert on the subject. So today I had a great chat with Andy Meadows at a company called 44Doors.

Andy's task today was to convince me that QR codes are not, in fact, useless. He began with real use-cases (albeit in a consumer setting) of nightclubs who seek to better serve their customers. In a loud, crowded place, it can be hard to get your waitstaff to come to your table, but with a QR code, and a socially enabled waitstaff, you can let them know that you need another bottle of bubbly at table 10. 

Clever. Didn't really fit into my event needs, beyond the really cool exciting thing we're planning at Dell World this October (which I will tell you all about afterwards!). 

My biggest complaints about QR codes are as follows:
  1. Less than half of attendees have a QR reader on their phone. 
  2. The half that don't have them, don't know how to get them. 
  3. The half that do have them, spend a laughable amount of time trying to get them to work at varying distances from the source QR code image. 
  4. When you do get them to work, they tend to either take you to a contact form (which most of us are highly unlikely to complete on our phones), or they take you to a generic website, that we're certainly not going to sit around and read right then and there in the middle of an expo floor. Sometimes they open a pdf... and on my Android phone, opening a .pdf is such a hassle that I give up.
  5. From an event manager perspective, I get no metrics beyond the number of hits, potentially the type of device that hit the URL, and the IP address it came from. 
So Andy had some big objections to overcome.  Here's what he said (...basically - I'm totally paraphrasing our hour-long conversation):

First of all, you're thinking about QR codes all wrong. You don't just create a code and link it to a generic, non-mobility-enabled URL. You work with a company (maybe a company like 44Doors!) to create all of the QR codes for you. 
  1. You can have a QR reader embedded into your mobile event app, so when attendees download the app for their agenda, they get the QR reader, too. 
  2. Now they have one. 
  3. By staffing your expo area with trained company folks who know the proper technique, scanning a QR code can be a conversation engagement opportunity between staff and attendees. 
  4. The QR reader from the app can be attached to their profile from the app and their registration so they never have to go to a long contact form that they would skip. At most, they would enter their email address to connect it - not a huge obstacle for smartphone users. 
  5. By using a QR code programmed into the app, you capture all of the information about every QR code scanned, what kind of device was used, timestamp, and all contact information for the person using it. You can even do timed URLs on the QR codes so that if it is scanned at noon, they get a special lunch coupon, but scanned at 5pm gets them a drink ticket. 
Touche, Andy. You have made me reconsider QR codes. Perhaps there is potential for them yet. 

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

A case of the 4 P's

That sounds like a case of the Four P's: Piss Poor Prior Planning.
  - my college roommate's grandfather

This post made me laugh out loud. We've all seen it: some element at an event that made us think, "Who did they put in charge of THAT?"

Here are a few of my favorite "Worst Of" experiences at recent conferences:

  • Shuttle bus stops that were so poorly marked that no one rode the buses. 
  • Name badges with font so small that you absolutely couldn't see the names from more than 2 feet away.
  • More than 5 hashtags for the same event, leading to absolutely no meaningful social engagement on Twitter.
  • Online engagement built purely on flash - guaranteeing that anyone with an iPad or iPhone had no way to participate.
  • No pocket guide due to pure reliance on the event app... and event app didn't work.
  • Ran out of coffee cups 30 minutes into breakfast buffet (plenty of coffee, though!)
And here are a few little brilliant nuggets that I experienced at recent conferences that made me think, "Now THAT was a brilliant event team":

  • Eggs at breakfast! THANK YOU for some protein!
  • Hashtag table tent signs in every breakout so attendees knew how to notate their Tweets.
  • A mobile app that let me complete a profile and locate people with similar interests and meet them in a lounge area.
  • Interactive way-finding digital signage so I could touch the screen to figure out where I needed to go next.
  • Name badges that were printed on both sides so when it turned around, I could still see people's names.
Got any favorites?