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.

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!

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!

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. 

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?

I am quite awesome, thankyouverymuch

I actually look forward to performance reviews. I did the youth beauty pageant circuit. And I enjoyed that quite a bit. I really enjoy being judged. I believe I hold up very well to even severe scrutiny. 

  - Angela, The Office

Great post on Harvard Business Review about eliminating the self assessment part of annual reviews.

The point of the post is that it turns the review into a negotiation, as most A-ranked employees are afraid of being Bs. Most Bs are scared they’ll get a C, and most Cs believe they are As.

I recall my husband helpfully advising me when I was trying to write my own self appraisal many years ago, “Why would you ever rate yourself a B or a C? Always put A! Even if your boss doesn’t agree with it, you have on record a positive spin on all the great things you’ve accomplished.”

As a recovering manager of a rather large team, I love the HBR suggestion to avoid asking employees to actually rate themselves, and instead ask them to send you their top 10 accomplishments for the year. This way, you as a manager can evaluate the value provided to the organization and/or the personal growth each team member achieved during the year.

Now to find some advice on writing a performance plan that is actually not a waste of time...

Is it worth the risk?

No power in the 'verse can stop me.
  - Kaylee (Firefly) 

Life is about choices. Do I want to fight my 3-year-old to get dressed faster, or do I want to play with him and have a really fun morning, but be 10 minutes late to work? Do I want to take that new job, or stay comfortably where I am? Do I want to be a keynote speaker at a conference, or say no and attend like my peers?

This Harvard Business Review blog post got me thinking about risk... and I don't think I take enough of them. I have definately taken a few, and they have all worked out perfectly. Some ended in massive failure, but what I learned from that failure prepared me for another task later.

My first big risk was college. Upon graduating high school, I left my home state of Georgia and moved over to Texas, finding a roommate from the university's off-campus housing department (because all the dorms were full). Best risk ever.

About a year out of college, I quit my high tech marketing job to work at a high tech recruiting firm. It was a blast! Then the economy tanked and there weren't any jobs to recruit for. So they asked if I would like to spend a week in Boca Raton getting trained on how to become an account executive and recruit jobs (instead of people). I'm no salesman. I couldn't sell girl scout cookies to my own mother. But I figured it would be interesting to take the class, so I did. I made sales calls for about a month after that, to no avail. The company closed about 3 months later. FAIL. But what did I learn? Well, I definately reinforced to myself that I'm no salesman. :-) I also learned that I enjoy solving problems. When the problem was no jobs to recruit for, I decided to try and solve it by learning how to get more jobs for the company to help with. I learned that as a salesperson, marketing is vitally important. Even the basics! If I didn't have any collateral to give my prospect, there was no way they'd ever think of me when they needed to hire someone. Actually spending a couple months in sales was really the best marketing experience I could have gotten.

I've been at my current company for more than 6 years now, and have taken relatively few risks, but have been fortunate to have opportunity find me. I did take a professional presenting course through our Executive Briefing Center, and was encouraged to go take an improv comedy class. That was a spectacular risk! Standing in a class with 15 other people being spontaneous for 2 hours a week, enouraged to fail. We were taught that "there is no such thing as failure, just unexpected results." Most fun I've had in the last 5 years!

Recently, I was asked to keynote at a user conference. It's only 50-75 people, but it will be my first time truly in the spotlight telling a story. It's a risk. I'm SUPER excited about it... but this time, failure is not an option!

As the article I referenced above mentions, the key to risk is preparation. So I've hired my professional presentation instructor to help me prepare for my keynote, and my improv training will undoubtedly prove very valuable. In this instance, there should be minimal risk of failure. I'm ready!

Giving for the greater good

True charity is the desire to be useful to others without thought of recompense.

  - Emanuel Swedenborg

I love my company! Last November, we instituted  a meeting points donation plan through our Dell YouthConnect program. We do not use meeting planning points from our events for personal gain, but instead capture them throughout the year and donate them to charities through the Dell YouthConnect network. 

Just for fun, I checked our account balance. Without much effort, and just with a few folks remembering to put our points number on contracts, here's our current point amount:
41,000 points on Starwood
56,000 points on Marriott
7,000 points on Hyatt
Unsure on Hilton, as all points go directly to the Boys & Girls Club of America

Our next step is to ensure that all of our suppliers are aware of our program so they can begin sharing the account numbers as they book events. How awesome will it be to say that our events gave more than a month's worth of hotel stays to organizations with recipients in need.

If your company is interested in setting up a charitable points program, I'm happy to share our best practices. Just comment here or tweet me @lizlathan.

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.

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.

How to not work

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
  - George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

I love the book The Four-Hour Workweek. I love The Energy Project. And I love this Harvard Business Review blog post.

The gist of these grand tales is that we should stop working so much, and start prioritizing our lives to be what we want them to be. The risk inherent in this, of course, is that a) we fail to meet deadlines, b) we fail to look like we're working as hard as other people, c) we fail to get as much stuff done. So I think we're seeing that it's a fear of failure here (at least it is in my world).

But I like the principles and I am learning from my new manager (of about 6 weeks now) that this is actually possible. If you ignore the chatter of the silly, you can focus on the challenges that matter. One more book for you: Long Fuse, Big Bang. This one has a great quote that really stuck with me - "Don't let the tyranny of the urgent stifle the pursuit of the important."

Set aside time to think. Prioritize prioritization. Calm your mind and reflect on the day behind you. Then calm your mind and prepare your head for the day in front of you.

Now, to get to that 4-hour workweek... (though I'm fairly certain I could never really just work just four hours a week as I would be bored out of my mind...)

How to write an RFP

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

  - Oscar Wilde

I have had some really great successes creating RFPs for event projects (and have received some great feedback from my partner companies responding to the RFPs), so I thought I'd share some of my guidelines.

My RFP template comes from an amalgamation of RFP templates provided to me by my industry friends including 3D Exhibits, Czarnowski, Jack Morton, Event Marketing Partners, and Derse, among others, and my learnings from the last half-dozen or so RFPs I've completed in the last year!

1. Cover page: I always name the project and provide the contact information necessary throughout the process, as well as the due date for the proposal.
2. An overview of the business issue: This is the place to describe the project in a brief paragraph. Be specific and concise in describing what the final product should look like.
3. Description of product and services: In a few paragraphs, describe what you are looking for the company to produce. I also like to put in this section the type of partnership I am looking for from the company (execution-only, strategic consulting, etc.)
4. Company information needed for proposal: In this section, I share all of the details of the project and about the company or department that would be helpful to the agency to know. Not a place to air dirty laundry, but be very upfront about the way the group likes to work and any challenges that the company may face.
5. Proposal format: Let the respondents know what you are expecting by way of response. If you want giant, bound books of designs, or if you want everything done in a pdf or Power Point, share that here. One of my best practices is creating a survey (even a short one in Survey Monkey) to gather the basic information from each respondent in an easily-comparable format.
6. Due date: Very important!
7. Timeline: Respondents understand that this may shift, but sharing the basic timeline for them is very helpful. For example:

• February 11, 2011: RFP sent out
• Week of February 14: Q&A calls with (Company Contact 1 & 2)
• Week of February 21: (optional) (Company Contact 1 & 2) available to pre-review proposals and make suggestions
• March 4, 2011: Proposals due
• Week of March 7: Internal core team reviews proposals. Core team made up of (list names here). Core team to set up calls with candidate companies to review proposals.
• March 11, 2011: Business awarded, planning calls begin

8.  Questions: On some of my RFPs, I let respondents know that we will answer questions at any time and all questions emailed to us will be shared with all respondents, unless the respondent requests the questions be kept confidential.
9. Estimated budget: This is a very debatable section - especially between myself and my procurement team! My procurement team believes that we should let the companies come back with their own proposals. I firmly believe that the respondents need parameters. I generally like to give a budget range, but ask for the proposal to be priced out in an a la carte format so I can understand the pricing structure (hourly, project-based, etc.)
10. Detailed Business Requirements: If not already covered in the sections above, I spend about a page here describing the details of the project and the outcomes we are seeking. If we are RFPing for booth design, there are a number of specific questions to ask... including what rush charges for graphics are!
11. Selection criteria: In this section, I clearly articulate what we are looking for in our partner and how we will evaluate the proposals. I also list the names of the selection committee and their roles as it relates to the project. I like to use a spreadsheet with weighted criteria for areas like account management, pricing, customer references, creativity, case study examples, previous relationship with our company, etc.
12. Performance Metrics: Here I describe the cadence of partner reviews and evaluations. I make sure the partner knows that they will be evaluating us as a client, as well. Partnerships do not work with the client just gets to evaluate and blame the partner - it's a two-way street!

I'm very happy to share my RFP templates with anyone in need. Ping me on Twitter @lizlathan, or drop me a note here!

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 long tail of content

"In world of infinite choice, context, not the content is the king."
 - Chris Anderson


My group does over a thousand events a year. Some are small 10x10s. Some are large user conferences. Some are internal events. For most of them we reinvent the wheel as though we had no idea this event was even on the radar. But this year we're getting smart and creating a true content hub. It's the only way to keep up with the speed of our event lives. Create once, execute multiple times. The "Rinse and Repeat" model.

But as Chris Anderson points out, all content all the time, anywhere you want it provides little by way of direction or usefulness to your customers.


We must take a cautious approach to our event portfolio's content. Categorize the audiences so we can categorize the content, or we risk the wrong message for the wrong audience at the wrong time. It feels good to have strategic direction again, and it will be such a lifesaver to have a hub of content to draw upon for an event anytime it's needed, and have the right content available to audiences online who missed an event or who are seeking more information. What a great feeling!  

The secret to creating a thriving Long Tail business can be summarized in two imperitives:

• Make everything available
• Help me find it.

I believe this works internally as well as externally. If we create the content and make it easy for the internal teams to find and use, we will get much more use out of it. If we get it to the attendees when and where they need it, we will have a much greater insight.