Integrating Social Media into Conferencing & Events

Last week, I gave an after-lunch talk to marketing and events professionals, hosted by the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre. The feedback was positive so I thought I'd post some of the key insights and tips on a couple of events industry blog sites. The posts have since been tweeted and re-tweeted so many times, I must have struck a positive chord with event planners. So, I've decided to post my talk highlights one more time, here... I hope you find it useful.

My talk went something like this…

I firmly believe that online marketing and communication channels such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and FlickR are enabling event planners, venues and suppliers to develop longer-term interaction with event attendees.

These online tools are allowing us to grow the conference or event beyond the physical and to keep people talking about their experiences and our event content long after the last delegate has left the building.

Social Media is nothing short of a communications revolution. It’s a means to amplify our messaging, build community, gather feedback in real time, ask questions of our audiences, research our markets and gain business referrals from our new online friends and followers.

One-way marketing messages, whereby a newsletter or piece of email marketing is sent out from an email address that says DO NOT REPLY are becoming obsolete. The communications revolution is all about Conversations, User Generated Content and Interacting with the online community.

We can no longer control what is said online by people attending our events so we need to understand how to engage with the conversations that are already happening, build loyalty amongst followers and provide good Social Media Value.

So I’m just going to give you a few tips on how to start thinking about integrating Social Media into your marketing or event strategies.

If you’re not using Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, the best way to understand their benefits is simply to start using them socially. Once you get to grips with the simple mechanics of growing online conversation, such as Hashtags, Fan Pages, Tiny URLs, TwitPics etc, you can then start to see how it can be applied to your every-day business or event planning needs.

When integrating Social Media into Event strategies, consider how it can be used to engage with delegates or attendees at an earlier stage. A lot of exhibitions now use Twitter as a free marketing tool to communicate the latest confirmed speaker, or encourage registration sign-ups. But what about creating user groups on LinkedIn or Facebook and crowd sourcing what topics delegates wish to hear about or allowing them to vote on panelists, or even something as simple as the theme of the gala dinner. By engaging your audience at an earlier stage, you will secure their buy-in and reduce the number of no-shows or drop-outs.

Every event has a website but, by creating multiple event pages across different online streams you’ll be casting your net wider and enhancing your search engine optimization at the same time. This is especially true if you then link your blog, Facebook Fan Page, YouTube Channel and LinkedIn discussion group back to your website.

In the run up to the event, launch Twitter competitions awarding free registration or tickets. A simple way to do this is just to ask people on Twitter to Re-Tweet a chosen message. A winner can be then drawn from the pile of Re-tweets that appear in your @Replies Folder. This is a good way to track the reach of your marketing messages across Twitter and to see who is willing to engage with the event. Maybe you can reward the most loyal advocates in some other way at a later date.

During the event, launch a HashTag on Twitter and encourage people to use it so that attendees and remote watchers can follow what’s happening. Putting a HashTag before a word simply creates a link to a new page. This page then shows the full conversation stream of everyone who has used that chosen HashTag – enabling a simple way to follow a particular conversation subject.

If you then stage an unofficial Tweet up (networking event for people engaged with Twitter), it’s a good way to spread the word of your chosen HashTag and get likely content creators motivated and excited.

Broadcasting the conversations that people are hash-tagging, by running a live stream on a big screen on the main stage at your event, is perhaps a risk too far. Human nature dictates that somebody at some point will publish something offensive. But, why not use smaller screens in seminar rooms to help facilitate real-time Q&A sessions whilst the speaker is presenting?

You’ll find that some audience members will be able to answer the questions before the speaker does. If this is deemed too distracting for the speaker then technology offered by companies such as Crystal Interactive allow audience members to text in questions during the presentation, which are stored and can then be shown on screen and answered during an allotted Q&A slot.

Your aim with Social Media should be, to spread as widely as possible, content generated, either for the event by those directly involved, or by participants, advocates and remote watchers.

There’s so many web-based applications available to allow you to stream video, share speaker presentations, merge all Hash-tagged Tweets into PDF documents, create graphs and charts to measure the Return on the Objective of HashTags, launch user generated photo galleries, broadcast audio and so much more.

If you’re not doing any of these things, just think how much more engaging your events could be – if only you’d invested the time in discovering what free Social Media can do for you.