9 Steps To Use Twitter For Marketing And Engaging Others About Your Event

A Twitter Conference Primer: Part 2 – Marketing And Engagement

Published on Sep 17, 2010 by Jeff Hurt in Social Media

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Image by joelaz.

You’ve decided to jump into the world of social technologies and use Twitter for your event.

You’ve done the first six steps to prepare to use Twitter for your event.

1. Ensure wireless Internet connections onsite.

2. Create a hashtag for your event.

3. Register your event hashtag.

4. Market and promote your hashtag.

5. Use same hashtag for Flickr.

6. Included participants’ Twitter name on their name badges.

So what’s next?

Now it’s time to think seriously about your Twitter engagement and marketing goals.

9 Steps To Use Twitter For Marketing And Engaging Others About Your Event

1. Create a Twitter Engagement Marketing Plan

How do you want to use Twitter for your event? Twitter is more than just a broadcast marketing tool. If you are using it to broadcast your own stuff more than 25% of the time, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Your conference stakeholders expect you to use it in a variety of ways. Consider the five Cs of engagement when using Twitter:

• Co-Creation- how can your attendees help you co-create content, experiences and programming?
• Collaboration – how can your participants collaborate with you, your exhibitors and speakers for a more engaging experience?
• Communication – what information about the conference can you easily share via Twitter? You’ll want to use URL shorteners to share long html addresses.
• Connections – how can you help likeminded conference participants connect with each other?
• Content – what content (announcements, articles, blog posts, photos, slidedecks, webinars, videos, etc.) can you share?

2. Create and train a HERO Team

Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler’s book Empowered talks about creating HEROs for your organization. HEROs are highly empowered and resourceful operatives. Your HEROs can be a combination of volunteers and staff. You’ll want to train your conference HERO team on how to listen, follow and respond to tweets with the hashtag before, during and after the event.

This is where many meeting professionals drop the ball. They follow the hashtag stream before and after the event but forget about onsite. It’s imperative that you empower your HERO team and provide great service to your participants. Think of your onsite hashtag listening as a personal concierge for your participants. You’ll want to respond to real time feedback immediately when you can and not after the event.

3. Create a short Twitter “how to” video explaining the use of Twitter for your event.

Post these on your conference YouTube page.

http://jeffhurtblog.com/2010/09/17/twitter-conference-primer-part-2-marketing-engagement/

6 Steps To Prepare To Use Twitter For Your Event

A Twitter Conference Primer: Part 1 – Preparing For The Event

Published on Sep 16, 2010 by Jeff Hurt in Social Media

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Image by Rosaura Ochoa

It’s like the sound of fingernails scraping on a chalkboard. It’s unpleasant. And annoying.

It similar to a primate’s warning cry striking fear in the tribe that a predator is near. Few of us can avoid cringing in agony when we hear that sound. We respond with adverse reactions.

That’s exactly how I feel when I hear meeting professionals say the following sentence:

“My attendees are not using Twitter or social media so I don’t need to be concerned about it.”

A-r-g-h-h-h! Just hold me down and scrape rocks on my teeth.

When I respond to that question with current data that illustrates the opposite, these meeting professionals look at me and say, “Do you really believe that data? Come on. I know my attendees better than that data. They are not using social media at my event.”

How Many Of Your Conference Participants Have Smartphones?

How many of your attendees carry a smartphone with them? I suspect you would say 90%-95% do.

And guess what, they are using their smartphone to access the Internet, update their social networks and talk about your event!

So are you even listening and observing if they are talking about your event? Have you created a common hashtag for your event so that you can see online conference conversations?

Here are six steps to help you use Twitter when preparing for your event.

6 Steps To Prepare To Use Twitter For Your Event

1. Provide wireless Internet connections

Before you consider using Twitter or other social media at your event, ensure that your attendees have free wifi access when onsite. Did you include wireless internet access as part of your venue negotiations? If not, how’s the cell phone reception in the venue? Tell your venue that they have a vested interest in being part of the online conversations.

2. Create a hashtag for your event.

Hashtags are the pound sign followed by a short abbreviation. They help add context, metadata and tags to your tweets. Hashtags also help users filter the Twitter noise and follow a specific stream of information.

Your job is to pick a short conference hashtag. Use as few characters as possible because Twitter limits tweets to 140 characters.

ASAE’s 2010 Annual Meeting used #asae10 as their hashtag. PNW Industry Summit used #industrysummit.

Also search Twitter to ensure that another group is not using the same hashtag.

http://jeffhurtblog.com/2010/09/16/twitter-conference-primer-part-1-preparing-for-event/

5 Findings From Twitter Use At Conferences And Events

Twitter For Events: Eye-Opening Data From Ten 2010 Events

Published on Sep 20, 2010 by Jeff Hurt in Social Media

2 Comments

Image by Rosaura Ochoa

Social media is, at its most basic sense, a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It is a fusion of sociology and technology transforming monologues (one to many) and dialogues (one to one) into polylogues (many to many). Paraphrase, Brian Solis.

How are conference participants using social media to engage in monologues, dialogues and polylogues? What type of behavior do Twitter users exhibit from conferences and events?

Here are the top findings from a recent social media study of Twitter use at ten international events by Amiando, a Germany-based online registration and ticketing company. Amiando studied and reviewed 31,422 tweets posted by 9,736 active Twitter users from ten events.

5 Findings From Twitter Use At Conferences And Events

1. The activity level of Twitter use does not depend upon the number of people attending the event.

The ratio of participants who tweet to the total number of conference participants ranges from 10% to 800% (eight times as many people tweet about the event as there are participants.) Many smaller conferences have dedicated community members and not every community member attends the event. These members continue the online conversations, retweeting and sharing content coming from the conference.

Takeaway: Consider the various communities that attend your event. Provide opportunities for face-to-face participants to share information and content with those not in attendance. Some of the online readers may be future customers so view the conference sharing as marketing.

2. Livestreamed events have substantially more tweets and online conversations reaching wider audiences than non livestreamed events.

TEDxTokyo, which was livestreamed, had eight times more active Twitter users than those that actually participated in the face-to-face experience.

Takeaway: Livestreaming your event and integrating it with a live Twitter chat extends the reach of conference messages and content.

http://jeffhurtblog.com/2010/09/20/twitter-for-events-eyeopening-data-from-ten-2010-events

http://www.eventmanagerblog.com/event-management/visualize-twitter-at-events

5 Ways to Visualize Twitter at Events

A lot of fuzz is being made about if tweets should be displayed at events or not. The answer is simple, Yes! And in a fancy way.

Here goes a collection of what Julius Solaris, your host, thinks are the best tools to display live tweets at events.

5. Twitter Search + Firefox + ReloadEvery

Twitter Search is the visualization tool for the nostalgic twitter user and/or retro tweep. In order to make the page refresh automatically, Install Firefox add on ReloadEvery. If you don’t have Firefox probably you won’t read this because your browser has crashed in the meanwhile

Goods:
- Suits large screens
- Neat and detailed

Bads:
- Hard to read
- A bit dull, not fun.

4. TwitterCamp

We talked about TwitterCamp in the past. It’s a damn cool project and the fact it was implemented for a BarCamp and on an opensource basis makes it even cooler.

Goods:
- Highly Customizable
- Fun Interface

Bads:
- Could be slow in updates from time to time
- Looks like the project is not moving on

3. Twitter Fountain

What about that! Twitter Fountain looks slick and fancy. Very design oriented and definitely relevant to image conscious events.

Goods:
- Good looking Interface
- Clear and neat
- Flickr Integration

Bads:
- Embed only, does not work as a standalone page or software.

2. Twitterfall

Great Control with Twitterfall. You can play around with settings and have fun with customizing the experience.

Goods:
- Able to opt for a good speed of refresh
- Able to display ReTweets

Bads:
- Although highly customizable it still remains a bit dull

1. Visible Tweets

Visible Tweets is simply fantastic! This is what tweets at events should look like.