Why Social helps remote attendees

"Events are the original Social Media."
  - Liz Lathan

It's my mantra. :-) And on days like yesterday and today, I'm really living by it! South by Southwest 2012 (know as SXSW) is taking place in Austin, Texas, and my husband is attending live and in person. I, however, am home with our 4-year-old and our dogs who just had surgery. I'll get to join in the fun tomorrow, but in the meantime, I'm keeping up with the scene via Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and the various live blogs going on.

The social pipe from SXSW is insane. Every refresh of my social tool Hootsuite brings up like 400 new posts. Every picture I see of sessions has 80% of the attendees looking down at their digital device (presumably taking notes or posting about the speakers' thoughts).

Tips that I'm picking up from being a remote attendee this weekend are:

Ensure that your hashtags are available to remote folks. I can find the hashtags of the sessions I like on the sxsw.com website, so I can filter the feeds for the sessions I want to follow. Yesterday, I spent an hour following #sxswi #whedon to keep up with the Joss Whedon session I so desperately wanted to be at.

Enlist in live blogging or live tweeting help. Thanks to the good folks at Snarkmarket, I was able to watch live blogging of the aforementioned Joss Whedon session of the conference. The blogger was a guy from NPR who did a great job of paraphrasing the fireside chat, the audience questions, and Joss's responses. Pairing that with the Twitter feed made me feel like I was there! I was privy to the floor seating outside of the session because it was so packed. And I even was privy to the high five that Joss gave an attendee on his SuperBetter quest!

Have a Pinterest board. Here's one I'm not seeing yet from SXSW. I search for SXSW and I just get a few results. I heard that some brands were doing Pinterest boards, but I haven't found them yet. From the Tweet stream, I know Pinterest is the hot topic at SXSW, so now we have to go figure out how to make it work, how to make it work for events...and how to monetize it!

Check the stats. The social pipe from SXSW is insane. I can't keep up. But the SXSW organizers must be loving it! Make sure your company has a Social Media Listening Center - doesn't have to be as sophisticated as Dell's (http://twitpic.com/8t7804), but someone should monitor the feed, the statistics, and the tone of the conversations happening at and around your event.

More posts to come after I actually get my chance to BE at SXSW tomorrow!

The complexities of your event mobile app

Please all, and you will please none.
   - Aesop

What do we want out of a mobile app for our event? 

• Feedback (surveys)
• Engagement with content or people (QR codes, connections, check-ins)
• Maps of venues
• Agendas, especially if they are personalized
• Notifications from partners or updates to agendas
• Partner content
• To work on iPhone, Android and Win 7 phones

And then there's all the random stuff we might want to add: games, rewards, etc.

I haven't found any off-the-shelf solutions to meet all of these needs, but have worked with some custom design companies to get us what we want. With mixed results.

My recommendation is: Choose your vendor well.

Vet their personality as a company - are they willing to work insane hours to meet your goals? Are they willing to partner with you to allow your event to shine? Are they willing to be onsite to help if anything goes wrong? Do they intend to work with you again, and will they support you throughout the build and implementation process to ensure you want to work with them? Have they ever gotten apps approved through the four majors marketplaces (iPhone, Android, Windows, Blackberry)? How many have they done? Can they code in such a way that even after the app is approved and in the marketplaces, a few tweaks can still be made?

Be careful as you get into mobile app development for your events to determine why you are doing and what you hope to gain. Apps are awesome and they are fun and they are cool, but usage rates are still relatively low for the majority of event participants. Some have corporate phones that prevent them downloading apps. Some are on Blackberry and can't get any cool features. Some prefer paper. Some just prefer to save their battery for more important things.

To do an app right, you need to have amazing content. If your intent is to meet the minimum requirements of app-coolness, pick an agency that will load in your agenda for you. If you actually plan to have loads of cool info in the app, ensure that you have the internal resources to gather, edit, and manage the inclusion of the killer content.

Have a plan for the future. The first thing I do after an event is usually remove the app from my phone. That's 3MB-6MB my phone doesn't need on it! So if you expect me to keep your app on my phone, tell me why and then make sure it's something I want to keep. Just about all the conferences I've been to in the last 2 years have changed app vendors year over year, making me download the new app anyway.

Perhaps there are other methods you could pursue - like leveraging LinkedIn or Facebook. Or perhaps going with an event social network like a Vivastream or  SocialGo.

So when it comes to signing up for an event mobile app: think before you ink! :-)

CEMA Forum: Austin - 9/19 Roundup

Everyone has a 'risk muscle.' You keep it in shape by trying new things. If you don't, it atrophies. Make a point of using it at least once a day.

  - Roger Von Oech quotes
 
I was thrilled to have the opportunity to host the Corporate Event Marketing Association's first regional event with content in Austin, Texas on September 19th. CEMA is a California-based industry association for corporate event marketers, primarily in the high tech sector, but expanding to other corporate areas as well. The majority of our regional events have been social in nature, so we tried an experiment with a half day of content at the W Austin Hotel. Nearly 50 attendees from all over the country joined us!


Our day began with a roundtable lunch with table topics that attendees selected when they registered. Gathered together by a common interest, conversation could flow freely at the table. By all accounts, few tables actively pursued their table topics, but having a common interest to seat attendees together was a great start to the day.

I kicked off the meeting with my favorite reminder of corporate life: Dave Grady's The Conference Call.

THANK YOU
Carlson Marketing was our underwriter for the event, and they shared a great video about their services. Opus Solutions managed registration for our event. PSAV supported us spectacularly with their A/V set and personnel. Love those guys! And we can’t forget Vivastream – a new social network and mobile app that let our attendees connect with the people who match their interests. Anyone who didn’t attend in person can still sign up for a Vivastream account and join in the networking!

Opening Keynote
After lunch, the content began with Michael Gale of PulsePoint Group. He is a recognized industry expert in integrated technology marketing, having founded Strategic Oxygen in 2001, which is widely seen as one of the technology industry’s primary data toolset for marketers. The company was sold to Forrester Research in 2009.

Michael shared industry insights into how executive engage at face to face and virtual events. Notably:

• 65% of C suite go to vendor events based on a personalized sales invite
• 30% of Tech influencers who have gone to one physical event will go to another
• 25% of the follow up from an event involves a hook type of marketing
• Virtual event only (and not physical event as well) is three times more likely than physical event only
• Physical and virtual events work equally well (or badly) at each of the awareness – consideration and purchase stages
• Over 40% of occasions C suite are looking for customer and industry based insights at these events
• Social and events link extremely well through what we call the Social engagement quadrant
• C suite and IT only share about 38% of the physical event experience but some 65% of the virtual experience
• Do not extrapolate from the US to the rest of the world – Asia, EMEA and LATAM - Events

Case Studies

Rinse and Repeat: How Dell prioritized the globalization of event content
The first was by Denise Michaels, event content strategist for Dell’s Small & Medium Business division who has been driving the global rollout of their content consolidation program. They began their content journey in March 2010 with events managed and executed locally, with no centralized view or standardization.

As they audited the presentations that were being given to customers, they labeled them “Frankenstein Presentations;” local sales teams were building their own slides with content pulled from various (not always current) sources.

Event managers were also on their own for events in their region. The regions were disconnected from each other and they were each reinventing the wheel for every event.

To tackle the problem, they broke the plan into four areas:

• Listen & Learn
• Connect to customers and providers
• Recognize pains/needs
• Solve & Simplify
• Create reusable, relevant content
• Make easily accessible
• Socialize and Market
• Network, network, network
• Communicate value constantly
• Rinse & Repeat
• Listen, improve
• Communicate

About a year and a half later, they have now completed the creation of standard invitation, event leave-behinds, standards for room dress, event content, and have begun the roll-out of speaker training. Next stop: the online content portal and event measurement consolidation.

How do you L.I.K.E a company?
Ryan Lewis, social media strategist with The Ferren Agency shared some tips and case studies on social media in live events. He used the acronym L.I.K.E. to showcase his points:

• Linkable: Content and Understanding/Sharing Ease
• Using a URL shortener like bit.ly, you can make links usable in social media. But by customizing your URLs, you can give people a clue as to what you’re about to link them out to see (check out this cool short How To video here).
• Incentivized: Making Tasks Fun
• The gamification of event content makes engaging with content rewarding! “Game the mundane!” Earn points or baubles that you can redeem for prizes through various interactions like downloading content, checking in to a location, etc.
• Knowledgeable: Is Learning Easy? Complex Theories?
• Making difficult concepts simple with infographics and analogies makes attendees more likely to share with others.
• Exclusive: What Is The Reward For Action?
• Attendees like to feel like they’re getting something exclusive. Offer things just to them for attending, or offer to them first and let them share with friends and colleagues. Feeling like they are “in the know” is a great way to bring exclusivity to the masses.

Virtually Perfect: Putting Content when and where attendees want it with hybrid events

Chris Meyer, COO of INXPO, shared some great industry insights on virtual and hybrid events. Some snippets:

• Virtual events are rated as more influential than many social media marketing tactics
• Hybrid meetings are not a threat to face-to-face, but an opportunity to raise the bar
• Getting content to attendees who can’t travel is a vital part of a marketing campaign
• Cisco saved $19m by making their global sales conference hybrid
• 42% of virtual event attendees are international
• Data from SAP Sapphire and Cisco Live! shows face-to-face attendee growth driven year over year by offering the content virtually

After our case studies, we tried a fun Town Hall format. Tom Booker and Asaf Ronen from The Institution Theatre led us in some great audience discussion on the topics of:

• Tradeshow Property: Rent or Buy?
• Event Apps: Custom build or buy off-the shelf?
• Roadshows: Dead or Alive?

While there were no definitive answers from the crowd, most prefer the idea of a custom rental for large tradeshow property, they agree that event apps are mostly overrated and don’t provide very much useful engagement beyond the agenda and some feedback mechanisms, and roadshows only work when actively planned and managed by a consistent program leader.

Closing Keynote
We closed the day with GasPedal CEO Andy Sernovitz. With his bag of tricks (ranging from chocolate to Facebook and Twitter earrings to fake mustaches to autographed copies of his book Word of Mouth Marketing, Andy closed out our day with a bang. He shared stories about how to harness the power of the buzz to keep event attendees talking about your event and telling others why they should go.

Some pointers from Andy:

1. Give people a reason to talk about your stuff
2. Make it easy for that conversation to take place

Before your event:

Find Big Talkers

• Get your VIPs in early – celebrity bloggers in your industry
• Other stakeholders in your event – sponsors/partners

Give them reasons to talk

• GasPedal gives attendees a welcome box mailed to them including signed copies of books by presenters at the conference
• GasPedal gives speakers customer shirts with a custom URL – speakers video themselves wearing the shirt and put it online
• Give sponsors extra passes to share
• Do audio previews of each speaker and share them online

Give them tools to share

• Tell-A-Friend campaigns for attendees, speakers, sponsors, VIPs
• Tweet interesting things that can be retweeted

Give them status

• Discount code campaigns where you tell people they have “the inside deal” to a discount and let them share it with the people they think should get it
• Passes to share

During your event:

Social media support

• Live blog it – so people can just re-blog/re-tweet instead of trying to write while they try to listen
• Twitter: Hashtags, constant reinforcement, have staff tweet easily retweetable content

Reasons to Talk

• Surprise your attendees constantly… but not with bad things (like a naked lady covered in sushi as a centerpiece)
• Half-time show: every heard of BlendTech? What if they did a demo in the middle of your event? Blend a cell phone! Now THAT would get people talking.
• And, of course, always have great content

Buzzworthy Swag

• Make sure you are giving away stuff that people will keep like:
• A genuinely good bag
• Signed copies of speakers’ books
• All swag must be travel friendly

Plant post-show conversations

• Book signing with author + photos shared online
• Photo booth, other sharable memory-makers

After the event:

The conversation is just starting when the event is over. Capture as much buzz after the show as you capture at the show to build demand for next time.

Post-event content

• Assign photo album staff and allow it to be user-generated, too. If you get everyone tagging and sharing, you can spread the buzz far!
• Summaries, trip reports, wrap-up videos that share the content make it super-easy for attendees to reuse or share
• Record sessions and share snippets to start word of mouth for next year 
• Share slides from every presentation on slideshare

Post-event community

• No one has time for a community created just for the event. We’re too busy. But if you keep the conversation where people already are, you can keep the buzz alive
• Keep it to FB and Linkedin group – often the best because 100% people are there already
• Share speaker Q&A, discussion of sessions, and networking in those areas or through smaller in-person get-togethers

Post-event experiences

• Ship the giveaways/handouts/gifts home for the attendees
• Have videos and content to share with non-attendees

Amazing thank you’s

• Send something nice to your speakers. GasPedal sends a Carnegie cheesecake!
• Thank your sponsors with something nice – food! Include the booth workers.

Remember that happy customers are your best ads!

So as you can see from my wrap-up, I was blown away by the stories shared at this event. The networking was great and the content was wonderful. Thank you to our sponsors, our attendees, and our speakers for making this a truly spectacular engagement. Please contact me if you have an interest in learning more about the Corporate Event Marketing Association, our future events, or any of the content we shared.

Does social media make you feel old?

"Facebook is for old people."
   - 14-year-old when asked if she uses Facebook

I was recently at a board of directors meeting for the Corporate Event Marketing Association and attempted to give an overview of my recommended social media plan for the association. For the most part, I was met with blank stares. As I mentioned in a previous post, it seems that many of my high tech event marketing brethren are unschooled in the ways of social engagement.  Meaning they don't know how to tweet, rarely use LinkedIn except to update their resumes, and may not even be on Facebook. Most haven't the slightest idea how or why to be on Google Plus (honestly, I'm still working that one out myself...more to come...).

Social media is no longer simply a shiny object that people use to tout their lunch plans. Social media is another vehicle in a full marketing portfolio to communicate with customers and have a two-way conversation. It's a way to share content and allow customers to generate content of their own. Social media isn't just Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. It's YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare. It's Digg, Wikipedia and Google Docs. It's Four Square, Chatter and Yammer. It's Groupon, Skype, and Yelp. Only heard of a few of those? Yeah... it's tough to keep up. Makes you feel old, doesn't it?

The thing is, if you ask "the young people," they'll tell that you they don't hang out on all of those all day long. They'd never get anything done! But here's a real-life case study of what they do:

They send a birthday party invitation through Evite, and track the potluck foods in Google Docs. They may post to Facebook and Twitter through FourSquare that they're picking up 3 dozen cupcakes from Hey Cupcake, which they bought through Groupon. They might even throw a photo of the delicious 36 cupcakes onto Flickr and post the link on Facebook and Twitter. Videos from the party are quickly uploaded to YouTube from the dozens of smartphones carried by partygoers. And finally, they might Skype their parents to get Happy Birthday greetings from 4 states away.

Even thinking about this is exhausting. But digital natives don't even bat an eye when they read that.

So how do you use this for your events?

You can use social media to drive attendance, and you might even get 2% of registrants from there. But better than just sharing registration links, you can encourage conversation on LinkedIn or Facebook groups. Put teaser videos on YouTube. Set up viral ticketing through your registration site (this encourages the event invitation to be shared by discounting registrants for every shared registration). After the event, put the full presentations on SlideShare. Edit recorded sessions down to a 5 to 8-minute clip or interview speakers to put on YouTube. Create a Flickr stream that people add their photos to and share their experience.

It's not as overwhelming as it may seem when you realize that you can use the social media content channels as they're intended to be used, and not have to assign 24/7 staff to sit around watching a Twitter feed.

Now excuse me while I locate a 14-year-old to explain Google Plus to me...

.

Building a Bridge Across the Valley of Engagement

Every season has its peaks and valleys. What you have to try to do is eliminate the Grand Canyon.
  - Andy Van Slyke 

I recently attended the first-ever user conference for eTouches and heard a fabulous presentation by Suzanne Carawan on social media and events. As this is obviously my topic du jour, I wanted to share her story and explore it in a series of posts.

This first post explores the possibilities beyond the normal social media plan of Before, During, and After an event.

An event, if used properly, is a vehicle in a comprehensive marketing plan of touchpoints with a customer or potential customer or like-minded group of individuals. The annual conference can be viewed as the Pinnacle of Engagement for most companies, as it brings together in one place a dedicated base of fans eager to learn, share, and engage with your company, product or topic. But if the annual event is the Pinnacle of Engagement, the rest of the year can be called the Valley of Engagement. What we must explore are the strategies and tactics behind building a bridge across the Valley of Engagement from Pinnacle to Pinnacle to keep your tribe active throughout the year.

Most people view social media and event engagement activities as the Trifecta Approach: “before, during, and after.” But in order to build a lasting community base, consider thinking of the plan as the Leveling of Mountains Approach - a continuous circle year over year.

The Trifecta Approach might look like this:

Before the event:

•       Event registration site and hypersite

•       E-mail blasts for audience acquisition

•       Sales enablement to drive attendance

During the event:

•       Icebreakers based on social media contests/inquiries/discussions

•       Live twitter stream

•       Meet the speakers, authors, keynotes

•       Mobile app for session updates and wayfinding

After the event:

•       Post-event survey

•       Blogs

•       Photo Galleries

•       Archived content

Now consider the Bridge Across the Mountains approach:

Climbing the mountain of engagement:

•       Grassroots conversations begin online about the coming event

•       Event registration site and hypersite

•       E-mail blasts for audience acquisition

•       Sales enablement to drive attendance

•       Event groups or advisory boards on content

•       Industry roundtables to focus the conversation on specific audience sets

•       Contests (social/viral/user-generated-content competitions)

•       Pre-event attendee directories, and allowing attendees to pre-set meetings with others before the event even begins

•       Content teaser videos, vlogs, discussions and blogs

•       Creation of pre-event communities to drive connection before attendees get onsite

•       Polls, surveys, and conversations about event features that drive attendees to share and talk to each other virtually

•       Allow attendees to build a profile, upload a photo, and use that information onsite by printing the photos on the badges, along with things like Twitter names and QR codes that connect attendees to a vCard or address book

•       Create Birds of a Feather sessions out of the community members and offer engaged attendees special access to VIP receptions or other perks

The Pinnacle of Engagement

•       Ample signage for Birds of a Feather meetup locations

•       Physical space for meetups, working groups, birds of a feather conversations

•       Special VIP parties, cocktails, rewards

•       Live twitter stream

•       Scribes per industry, topic, etc

•       Meet the speakers, authors, keynotes

•       Mobile app that encourages continued engagement at the event through QR codes, acquisition of points for engaging with content (like attending breakout sessions, or downloading white papers, or checking in at a booth or activity)

•       Live streaming keynotes

Building a bridge across the valley to make the next climb even shorter:

•       Archived content

•       Webinars to deep-dive on content sessions

•       Blogs to wrap up the event

•       Guest blogs from the speaker pool and attendee pool

•       Photo Galleries

•       Video Testimonials

•       Monthly topic discussions and calls born out of the Birds of a Feather sessions

•        “Meet the Attendee”: First Timer’s View, etc

•       Ongoing community to share perspectives on content and crowdsource topics for upcoming events

•       Package event content in an “on the road” format for sales teams to leverage with top accounts – includes videos, collateral, recorded webinars

It requires year-long dedication to keep the engagement, and very few companies have dedicated the resources to make this possible, but in order to truly provide value to customers, the journey must begin with a single step.

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.

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. 

Event professionals' social use stats

Quit counting fans, followers and blog subscribers like bottle caps. Think, instead, about what you’re hoping to achieve with and through the community that actually cares about what you’re doing.
  – Amber Naslund of Social Media Today

A recent Successful Meetings article announced that social media use among event professionals is on the rise, but as I dig into the statistics a bit, I find more than meets the eye. Let's dissect it a little.

71 percent of the 830 people surveyed say they use Facebook for networking or marketing purposes. There are no more detailed statistics beyond this very high-level number, but I would be interested to know the conversation density of the activities taking place on Facebook, and whether the site is being used by event marketers as event-specific communication, or as a vehicle in a larger marketing campaign program.

41 percent use Twitter regularly - close to double the number who used it last year. Twitter is an interesting beast. If you're not following a hashtag of interest or datamining for a specific hastag, it's largely just a bunch of useless drivel from a bunch of friends and random people. When used appropriately, however, Twitter provides a wealth of information. When used for an event Twitter handle, you must either have a strong following or have a limited following of strong influencers with strong followings. Without an audience for updates and interactions, Twitter serves no purpose. I think Twitter can be used better than it is currently being used and we should advocate for some training for our event professional colleagues!

69 percent of people used LinkedIn. Ah, but are they using it to keep their resume up-to-date and gather connections and recommendations, or are they cultivating the hidden communities lurking beneath the LinkedIn surface? Because, man! Some of those are great!

25 percent use YouTube. I can argue a number of perspectives on this one. Rich media content is awesome and more people should use it where appropriate. Interviews with keynote speakers and breakout session leaders, and interviews with customers and event staff can be really great! But you don't just stick that on YouTube and hope people will watch it. You actively have those ideas included in the marcom plan and feed them into your event hypersite, while simultaneously promoting them via other social channels. However, I rarely sit around watchin YouTube videos. When I do watch them, I usually found them via Twitter and they are usually under 2 minutes long. So that's my advice.

24 percent read blogs. Well, that's because there are 800 bazillion million gajillion blogs out there and no one has enough time to keep up! But that's where Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn come in. Sharing an interesting blog post encourages others to read it. No one comments on blogs anymore, so what? The idea that a blog is a two-way conversation was a facade from the beginning. It's one-way, with the chance to comment, and if you're lucky the blog author will comment back to you. What blogs really do (including this one), are provide an outlet for the author to share thoughts and opinions. If they are good ones, other people will share them, too.

16 percent use QR codes. Just as I suspected and wrote about previously... We haven't really figured out how to use those things very effectively, have we?

The biggest question I have for event marketers trying to harness the power of social media is this: Is social media an integral part of your face-to-face experience and the long tail of content afterwards, or is it an add-on vehicle that you have for your event because you feel you must? If the former, great! I love to watch the feeds from events like that and feel the buzz from the event. If the latter, I recommend not even trying to make social a part of your event and just let it happen naturally. It will happen anyway, and you'll get better results with organic social than forced social.

Are you a disruptor?

Change before you have to.
   - Jack Welch

I caught this link on a Twitter feed on the #eventprofs hashtag and identified with it immediately. Sometimes I get frustrated trying to implement and manage change at work and revert back to the easy path of "follow the rules, do what your boss says, and don't make waves." But my nature is to push the envelope. I'm no Richard Branson or Steve Jobs, but in my own little world, I'm known for making people think beyond what they are comfortable doing. I want to find efficiencies and foster creativity.

In events, this means making more meaningful engagements happen in more surprising ways. Like I mentioned in a previous post, it's important to create memorable moments throughout your engagement.
People are at your event for the session content and the networking, so taking opportunities to surprise and delight them in unexpected ways is what disrupts their view of "yet another business conference."

I'm a huge advocate of disruption for the sake of breaking status quo (not disruption without purpose). I was an early adopter of eTouches registration tools, for examples, because I believed they were truly thinking from an event marketer's perspective, with a software hat on, rather than thinking from a software perspective with an event marketer's hat on. They get events, they get social, and they get the need to customize things for each customer. They are disruptors like I am.

Innovation is the buzzword of the moment, and it's a good one. Disruption is the activity we must do to pave the way for innovation.

Social engagement at events

Social media is just a buzzword until you come up with a plan.

~ Zach Dunn

A recent blog post I read about mistakes event planners make with social media got me thinking about some of our success... and failures in the social space.

We're doing some amazing things at my company to bring social engagement to life at events. From QR codes for information (basic, and truthfully not always successful), to fully engaging mobile apps that are built in to the event strategy process.

You've often seen me type that "events are the original social media." I firmly believe this to be true. Even with social media online and in mobile, people make the most important connections face to face.

But let's look at some of the social engagements for events that I've seen succeed and fail at recent conferences:

QR Codes - We like to think these encourage interaction and engagement among our attendees. In reality, either very few people know how to scan them, or you have a bunch of people playing with their phone trying to figure out how to scan them, only to scan them and be taken to a URL that was built for a regular website and is pretty much useless on a mobile device. Bottom line: They make you look tech savvy, but I've rarely seen them offer real value.

Mobile Apps - Most of the mobile apps I've used at events act as a replacement to the traditional paper pocket guide. They have maps. They have session schedules. They have sponsor advertisements. They save trees. Bottom line: You really can't do an event without one and still look professional. If you don't have one, get one.

Gamification - pronounced "Game-if-ick-a-shun" - means offering rewards to the attendees who engage with your event in different ways. From Four Square badges to Facebook Places rewards, these activities can draw attendees toward an activity for either a physical prize or a "title" award (Mayor of booth #310!). Bottom line: Good for fun, but may not get the most qualified attendees to your booth for the right reasons. When used at your own branded event, gamification can be modified for your activity and can help you move the flow of traffic around for the attendees who are using their mobile devices to engage.

Augmented Reality - Using geolocation or the GPS in phones, you can overlay an augmented reality layer onto you event; for example, onto your show floor. This allows attendees to hold up their phone like they would using Google Street View and see content related to each area of your floor. You could put exhibitor information, cool facts, customer comments, ratings from participants, and so much more. Bottom line: Super cool to play with. Who has extra money just sitting around to throw at this? And is there anything valuable there other than the cool-factor?

I believe that the key for event marketers is to evaluate the technology for it's value to the attendees first, then its coolness factor second. If the event must showcase the latest and greatest just for the WOW effect, that's valid. If the event should be focusing on content and personal engagement, let the social engagement happen without the guided hand of the event gods.

The best social media engagements at events are the conversations about the event, not the conversations about the social media at the event.

The value of attendees and fans

What is the value of a Facebook fan? "...it may be best if marketers approached this question as if the answer is zero -- unless and until the brand does something to create value with Facebook Fans."
 - Augie Ray, Forrester

It's a true statement, and can applied to event attendees, too (especially if they are events you do not charge attendance to). If you aren't leveraging your fanbase or event attendees, then the value is zero. The value isn't just in the fans themselves, the value is in the ability to communication to the friends of those fans.

When promoting or marketing to event attendees, you must leverage the power of their social networks in order to activate any intrinsic value. The first question to address is "what is the value you are trying to achieve?"

Look at event promotion. If you are attempting to increase attendance to your event, then the value may be in each fan sharing their interest or announcement of attendence to their friends who may also be interested.

If you want the content to be shared, like through a product launch event, then the value is in the product launch content being shared with the friends and colleagues of the target audiences.

Sharing your content via social media like Facebook, Twitter, blog posts and more can extend not only the viral reach of your message, but expand the life of the content and engage the fans and attendees in bringing the content to life. Even more compelling is stories of the people sharing the content and it relevance to them.

This is the integration of social and real-life that really excites me about the future of events.

What's the latest in meeting formats for 2011?

Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity - not a threat.
 - Steve Jobs

I read this article a while back from Elite Meetings on "What's Next for Meeting Formats" and have a few thoughts of my own for 2011.

While the Unconference format has been around for many years, I see it gaining strength this year. Birds of a feather learning from each other with a keynote or panel to kick off and close the day is a great way to extend the concept of user-generated content.

Hybrid meetings that extend the face-to-face to the audiences who can't be there will get more sophisticated. Take Event Camp Twin Cities as a great example. Not only was the onsite conference heralded as a great success, many online participants were able to have productive inclusion and conversations due a dedicated event manager and facilitator for the online participants.

Continuity between general sessions, breakout sessions, expo experiences, and evening events will really get beefed up in 2011. Event organizers are beginning to truly understand how integrated marketing concepts can make the attendee experience more immersive and reinforce key messages.

Social media will part of the experience, not just a promotional tool.  VMWorld 2010 was a great example of how attendees used social media to share their learnings and experiences with their friends and colleagues, making those of us who weren't there in person enjoy the experience as if we were there, too.

Low quality, almost user-generated, video clips of keynotes and breakouts will be able to extend the event experience to those who could not attend. Word of Mouth Supergenius and BlogWell do this phenomenally well and have allowed me to enjoy great learnings despite my inability to be there in person. In addition to video, these conferences - much like TED - share rich content in short bursts; usually in under 20 minutes. Gone are the days of the 1.5-hour keynote. Welcome the moments of short brilliance, followed by opportunities to discuss the concepts with your peers.

That's what I see on the horizon for this year. What do you think events and meetings will evolve into in 2011?

Interactivity at your events

Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

  - John Updike

Creatively engaging attendees is the number one way to make content valuable to your attendees. Most of our vendors are now incorporating great technology into their portfolios to accomodate this need. We have used really cool stuff like Snibbe, and started playing with e-literature to replace plain-old lead retreival systems.

This post from Applerock has a few more ideas, as well.

We'll explore QR codes in a future post - not seeing huge adoption at the present time, mostly because attendees don't have a clue what to do with those barcodes, but I think the concept has tons of merit and is worthy of another look in a few months.

Post Share: The Zen of PowerPoint, Facebook, and Twitter

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
 - Buddha

From Guy Kawasaki's blog and Open Forum:

I found a treasure chest in the back of a great book called Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations by Garr Reynolds. It is a list of ten Japanese aesthetic principles. More...

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. :-)

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!

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.

.

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.

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.

Let's give 'em something to talk about

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
- Oscar Wilde

I'm trying really hard to care about Twitter. Stories of non-events like flash-mob parties thanks to twittering are enthralling, as are stories of how people network at events via Twitter. Is Twitter the next level of Facebook/MySpace when it comes to keeping up with friends and colleagues, or will it just further crush our youths' ability to communicate in actual full paragraphs and words by encouraging one-sentence microblogging?

It's easy to label this one "passing fad" simply because it seems that only the technically savvy will truly latch on to it, where something like a blog is a little more open to the masses. But I will admit that I follow a few people on Twitter (Andy Sernovitz, Wil Wheaton, and my husband who posted once - 11 months ago). You should at least log on and check it out - you know, see what the kids are up to! Sidenote: all of the people I currently twitter are over 30! Perhaps "the kids" are not the young'uns you're imagining. For a quick reality check of how ubiquitous this is becoming, check out twittervision.

The point is, you should keep an eye out for this technology's usefulness at your next event. Can you tweet your attendees to alert them to news, session changes, or evening events?