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!

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.

Virtual gatherings

Internet:  absolute communication, absolute isolation.  

  - Paul Carvel

When I saw Botox, Skype, and face-to-face meetings in the title of this post, it was a must-read. Then when I read it, it was a must-respond. 

It takes me right over to my little soapbox about virtual event environments with their little static fake people standing around. Some looking like they’re talking to each other, some standing alone, even some illustrated holding a cell phone to their ear. Really? This is how I’m supposed to engage and experience a virtual event? By pretending I’m there in person, when I'm really alone at my cube or in my home office? 

I think we’re all mentally stable enough to know that we’re not physically there. I also think that we go to virtual events for a specific purpose, not to create a cartoon avatar to show up in our profile. At least for me, I attend a virtual event to either watch presentations I couldn’t get to in person, or download content that will help me on my quest to solve a problem. If I engage with other people in the environment, it was to ask a question about a product or solution from a vendor. Sitting in a chat room with 3 professionals and one kid who snuck in and randomly types profanities is not my idea of a good use of time. 

So why do we continue to see virtual event platforms that try to mimic in-person events? They are a different kind of engagement and should be included in the customer journey planning for virtual audiences as a parallel path to the in-person experience. 

Online should be viewed as a content channel. If you’re going to have breakouts online, then plan for it and use something like Skype or Google+ to have a 5 to 8-person web breakout. The virtual event can no longer be project managed as separate entity. It must be folded into the entire customer journey and experience strategy so attendees, whether in-person or online, leave your event happy that they acquired the knowledge they hoped to gain and satisfied with the connections they made.

In other news, Why Virtual Events Fail.