using social media to make your event successful

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Produced by RDZ Media Group, LLC. - Copyright 2010 all rights reserved 1/11/2010 - RDZ Media Group, LLC. www.rdzmedia.com 1 “Leading Media Experts – New Media- Social Media – Traditional Media” Using Social Media to Make Your Event Successful A free report produced by: Stephen Jackson; General Manager RDZ Media Group, LLC. Please feel free to give this report to associates, friends, family and coworkers as long as it remains intact. © 2010, RDZ Media Group, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies.

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16 page report on developing a Social Media plan that will make your next event a success. The report discusses the stages of planning and goal setting and which social media tools to use.

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Page 1: Using Social Media To Make Your Event Successful

Produced by RDZ Media Group, LLC. - Copyright 2010 all rights reserved

1/11/2010 - RDZ Media Group, LLC. www.rdzmedia.com 1

“Leading Media Experts – New Media- Social Media – Traditional Media”

Using Social Media to Make Your Event Successful

A free report produced by: Stephen Jackson; General Manager RDZ Media Group, LLC. Please feel free to give this report to associates, friends, family and coworkers as long as it remains intact. © 2010, RDZ Media Group, LLC. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies.

Page 2: Using Social Media To Make Your Event Successful

Produced by RDZ Media Group, LLC. - Copyright 2010 all rights reserved

1/11/2010 - RDZ Media Group, LLC. www.rdzmedia.com 2

“Eighty-three percent of associations currently are using one or more digital tools to market and execute their events, although most are not yet using those tools to their full potential,” according to a new survey from Champion Exposition Services, a San Francisco-based event and tradeshow marketing firm. Adding social media to your marketing mix will assist your organization in turning around the current problems associated with our current economic climate, escalating travel costs, reduced headcount, and businesses cutting back on conference attendance. This report will assist you with successfully implementing social media tools for your next event. Successful implementation and utilization of social media strategies can provide your next event with the following:

• More paid attendees at a lower marketing cost. • Increased opportunities for sponsors to engage your audience. • Real time data gathering of attendees’ opinions • Opportunities to extend the branding of your event before and after the event.

According to the Champion Survey, social networks—Facebook (67 percent), Twitter (54 percent) and LinkedIn (48 percent)—are the most common digital tools employed by associations, 69 percent of which cited shifting attendee behavior as the reason they're incorporating digital tools into their events. Despite their increasing use of social media, however, associations aren't using digital tools to their full potential, Champion said, because while 100 percent are using Facebook for pre-show attendee marketing, less than half are using Facebook's video (33 percent) and discussion forum (48 percent) features. Similarly, 82 percent of associations are using Twitter to create pre-show buzz, but only 36 percent are using it to communicate directly with attendees and only 23 percent to follow attendees' conversations.

Social Media is a Conversation between actual HUMANS! Using social media successfully requires that you create two way communications with your attendees. It’s not enough to just build and implement social media tools to communicate without providing strategies to listen and respond to people.

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Why Use Social Media in Your Event Marketing Campaign

People are discussing your brand. Don’t you want to know what the conversation is about? Social Media provides the tools for you to interact with people who discuss your brand, introduce your brand to key influencers and have them talk about your brand.

Nielsen released these digital media factoids on the strength of the Internet and Social Media. Internet: There are:

• 195M active U.S. internet users and 160.3M people who accessed the internet via a broadband connection: (that's 82.2% penetration up 16% from 2008)

• 138.4M Unique viewers of video (up 11.4% from 2008) • 11.2B Total online video streams viewed monthly (up 17% from 2008) • 200.1 minutes Average time spent viewing online video per viewer monthly (up 12.5%

from 2008)

Social Networking

• Facebook reaches 56% of the active U.S. internet universe with an average usage of 6 hrs a month per user

• Facebook is the #3 site visited by users 65 and older • Twitter grew 500% year-over-year • Time spent on social networking sites in the U.S. increased 277% • The average U.S. worker spends 5 hrs/month visiting social networks at the office • 32% of all mobile web users visited a social network

Top Social Networking Sites Year-over-Year Trend (Unique Audience)

Site Nov. '07 Nov. '08 Nov. '09 Facebook 21.97m 47.54m 109.7m

MySpace 57.39m 59.12m 50.92m Twitter n/a 3.17m 19.07m

Classmates 11.46m 14.6m 12.13m LinkedIn 5.44m 11.64m 12.13m

Source: the Nielsen Co., Nov. 2009

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The Cost of Social Media Marketing

The upfront financial cost to use social media for marketing is smaller than the average traditional marketing media cost. That means that there is a cost to social media. It is not free as touted by several marketers. The cost to use many of the social media tools are free but there are backend costs to use these tools effectively.

Time is a major cost to using social media effectively for a marketing campaign. It takes time to learn, setup and maintain and effective social media campaign. The actual time it takes is different for each organization depending on the skillset of those involved. Some organizations may choose to hire outside consultants to build and maintain their social media campaign. Adding a real cost to your social media campaign.

People is another cost of social media which has to be considered. How much time can your staff divert to effectively maintain your social media campaign after they have been trained? Spending too little time and you may not reach your desired goals, spending too much time and other core company work may suffer. Finding the correct balance is crucial to the success of your social media marketing campaign. One way to augment your staff is by hiring college interns who

already understand the intricasies of social media.

Social media works beyond the computer. Effectively monitoring and responding to social media may require the use of smartphones by your staff. Additionally the IT departement will have to determine how the accesses and bandwith use for staff members to use social media tools will affect the organization’s operations.

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Establish Social Media Goals

Here are some of the goals you can use social media to achieve:

1. Increase Brand Awareness. Content can be created and spread through social media to improve public perception of your brand by evoking specific qualities which make it distinct from others. For new websites or businesses, this pervasive visibility generates brand familiarity. Social media channels can rapidly generate word of mouth and buzz for most brands.

2. Reputation Management. The goal here is to positively influence the way a potential and existing customer/audience perceives your brand. Work of this nature is less push-orientated and may involve the creation of social media profiles and wikis that rank well on search engines for your brand name.

This also includes monitoring public forums and feedback channels to track and address what is said about your brand. Some view this as social media optimization, although I would classify it as pull-marketing.

3. Improved Search Engine Rankings. When considered within a larger SEO and link building framework, content can be creatively developed and promoted for the purpose of obtaining links from the members of the social news websites.

This means you should primarily target social sites with the highest potential to give you links, instead of smaller-sized communities which only offer interested traffic. While important, your site’s profile need not be entirely relevant to the social media website in question; content can be created specifically to appeal to different audiences.

4. Increased Relevant Visitor Traffic. If you are only interested in getting interested visitors or users for your website, you should invest more time on social communities which have a high topical relevance.

The social site’s topical focus should be inline with what your site covers/offers. For example, instead of promoting your internet marketing articles through wide platform like Digg, try pushing it on more appropriate communities like Sphinn, because it will get you people who are more likely to follow your site.

5. Improve Sales for a Product or Service. To effectively increase your product sales, you should release your offer through an influencer who is respected in the community or work through a sponsorship model (contests etc.). Hard selling a social media audience through an overtly commercial profile is not advisable because it will come across as marketing spam.

One solution is to segment the market and focus on being the number one solution for specific user problems. Naturally, you should mostly target communities which are highly relevant to your niche focus because this increases the likelihood for traffic to convert.

Establishing distinctive goals allows you to embark on mini-campaigns which target specific communities to fulfill individual goals. For instance, you can run a link building campaign through Digg while simultaneously building brand awareness by leveraging social video communities like Youtube or Daily Motion.

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Splitting up your campaigns will allow you to examine the general ROI (returns on investment) for each community. Plotting and analyzing your achievements over time will allow you understand which social media channel fulfills your goals the best. This allows you to plan for future marketing initiatives.

What Else You Need to Know

Questions your team should answer before you begin your social marketing campaign:

1. Who is likely to be most interested in my content? 2. Who do I want to communicate with and why? 3. What kind of audience does this social community have? 4. What are people currently saying about my website or business? 5. Which type of person is likely to purchase my product or service? 6. What tools or online services do my target audience use? 7. Which websites does my target audience frequent on the net? 8. What does my target audience have in common with each other?

Your entire team should answer these questions as each individual has a unique perspective and different ways of using the web and their answers will give you a good general idea of your potential online customers and their preferences.

Before you implement your social media strategy make certain that you have a clear corporate social media policy in place. The social media policy outlines acceptable proactices on social media website. You can review over 100 corporate social media policies at thie website: http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php Design the Strategy

Stay pro-active and responsive • Keep an eye on your Alerts and respond! • Give props (with links) to vendors, volunteers and others • Promote other events and people • Keep it light and interesting

Successfully using social media to achieve your goals can be accomplished in three phases. Here are some recommendations for each aspect of your event:

• Before the event. Focus on expanding your universe of prospective attendees while attracting exhibitors, sponsors, and other types of show-related advertisers. Social media can help build interest with video, podcast, and blog interviews, as well as social communities. With

these formats, exhibitors and sponsors can share information without being directly sales-driven.

• During the event. Social media can broaden the conference's engagement for attendees and those who are unable to attend in-person through the use of community forums and Webcasts. Provide a special area during events for bloggers, videocasters, and podcasters, and allow them to use PR facilities to interview show speakers and attendees. Create a show blog to build excitement around the event and to provide a transcript. Microblogging formats like Twitter allow attendees to comment on the proceedings as they occur. Ask attendees to post to your photo galleries, either on your

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site or on public forums like Flickr. Provide Wi-Fi and public computers at the show to aid this process.

• After the event. Social media enables the event to remain connected to attendees, extend the impact of exhibitors and advertisers, and market other products including future events. Post Webcasts, videocasts, podcasts, and photos on your site to attract a broader audience for the content and to help build a house file for future events. Also, leverage other types of information, such as forums, to continue to engage attendees.

Other Event Marketing Considerations

Remember that social media doesn't exist by itself. Here are five factors that can have a big impact on your performance:

• Invite a wide range of content creators to participate. Everyone your show comes in contact with has the potential to contribute new material. This includes employees, exhibitors, sponsors, attendees, customers, speakers, and the press. Remember, they may not all share your perspective!

• Integrate your marketing efforts across channels. Expand your social media reach by promoting social media via your offline collateral and during the event. For example, some event marketers have screens showing online forums during sessions.

• Exploit social media's search friendliness. Social media can aid search results and enable you to reach a broader audience. Make sure content is optimized for the words your audience uses when they search.

• Encourage participation in a variety of formats. Since events often focus on a broad audience, invite contributors to use the media of their choice to connect with your event -- blogs, videos, podcasts, social networks, forums, photos, and microblogs.

• Allow for activity that doesn't occur on your Web site. Consider that content creators may use public forums, such as YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as their personal or company sites to distribute their content.

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Your Social Media Toolbox

Use Popular Social Media tools that match your objectives for reaching your target audience(s). While there are hundreds of social media tools in play right now, we are going to focus on the most popular and effective tools for most events.

Facebook – Facebook is the heavy weight champ among social media websites its combined members would make Facebook the 4th largest country on the planet. To get the most out of Facebook organizations should establish a Fan page. After creating your Fan page you can add photos, videos, notes, flyers, announcements, etc. Invite Bloggers, conference speakers, attendees to join your page. Create a Facebook badge that you can post on your website and let other people post it on thiers. Do not forget to list your event in the event calendar and invite people

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Twitter – Twitter is the contender to Facebook’s throne and it’s my favorite social media tool. (Read my book “Twitterworld – A non technical guide to using Twitter). Twitter is microblogging or sending short messages 140 characters or less to your followers. There are many people who think Twitter is time consuming and it can be if you don’t understand how to use all of the apps that make Twitter productive. The strengths of Twitter is that information moves incredibily fast by people re-tweeting (forwarding) message to their followers. People are conference attendees are tweeting key points from presenters live during their presentations. Twitter is one of the tools you want to use before, during and after your event. One of the key elements to get people talking about your event is to create a hashtag (#) for your event. Announce the hash tag and encourage to use the hash tag when they are tweeting about your event. This makes it easy to see who is tweeting about your event. The Twitter screenshot aboves shows a search for the Consumer Electronic Show that used the hash tag #CES. I was able to see all of the tweets that was coming from the show floor.

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LinkedIn – LinkedIn is the home for professionals to meet share best practices and network. It’s the place that 65% of hiring managers go to when looking for job candidates. LinkedIn has some key tools that can assist your marketing goals. After creating your profile, create a Group around your event. Invite your LinkedIn network and others to become a part of your group. Invite your panelists, presenters and keynote speakers to join. Start discussions around the subject matter that will be discussed during the conference to get early feedback and provide insight to the presenters. Next make certain that your event is listed in LinkedIn and once again invite people to your event page.

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Hootsuite a Social Media tool – Hootsuite puts social media on autopilot. Whether you use Hootsuite from your iPhone or embed in your web browser this service can make your social media marketing consume less time but make your efforts more productive. Hootsuite has two valuable components. First you can schedule social media messages for later delivery on your different profiles. I schedule content to either appear on Facebook and Twitter or one or the other. I set the time I want the content to appear and I’m done. I can check in later and respond to people who replied to my contnet and thank those who forwarded my content.

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Second Hootsuite can track the click throughs on the links in my content. An example is I send out a tweet and Facebook update about a newly added presenter and a link to his bio on our registration website. I can track how many people clicked on that link. Another function that makes Hootsuite valuable is that multiple people can use the same social media account with different passwords and from their own computers. You can have 4 people updating content to your social media platforms and it would like one individual is doing all of the work. Social Media Badges There are several places on the Internet where you can create social media badges that list where people can find you on social media websites. Use these badges in your email signature file, your Blog, your website and your social media websites. Make certain that the badges you design are portable and can be shared across multiple platforms.

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Private Label Social Media (PLSM) Private online communities that remeble the best aspects of Facebook and Myspace are now being used by companies like McDonalds, Sony, American Heart Association, Jet Blue, Readers Digest and more. We refer to these private online communities as Private Label Social Media (PLSM). PLSM is your online community where your employees, members, attendees and other can connect and share content spoecifically for and about your organization. Specifically PLSM provides your online community the power to create:

• User-Generated Content. Members can post content in a blog, edit a wiki, participate in a discussion group, share photos or videos, etc. All content in a PLSM community is managed the same way because of the PLSM Architecture.

• Social Networking. Members find each other, build friend lists, maintain online status, locate experts, participate in Groups, etc.

• Profiles. Members maintain their own profiles, which are customized for the different needs of each community, and they can change dynamically over time.

• Enterprise Security and Control. Ensure each user has the right permissions, the content meets your standards, the community integrates with your existing systems, etc.

RDZ Media Group designs, builds and maintain private online communities for organizations, businesses and schools. You can attend one of our online webinar for more information.

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Free Socilal Media Sharing Websites

Slideshare Have your presenters share their presentation on Slideshare to create buzz. Create your own presentation about your event and share on Slideshare. Slideshare presentations can be embeded in Facebook and LinkedIn.

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Listen to the Conversations

One of the most important factors to succeed within Social Media is to take time to listen to the conversations.

You have to identify various Social Media that talks about you, or topics that is related to your niche.

Add some simple Google Tools to your Social Media Listening Techniques

Google Blog Search and search your blog, name/username, topic and other info related to your

blog.

Google Reader and subscribe to blogs within your niche. Listen to what they have to say, and comment on articles that you find valuable.

Google Alerts and provide various search terms related to your niche. You can also use your blog name, Twitter username etc. Here you get alerts sent to your email every time your search term is mentioned.

Twitter Listening Tools

TweetBeep is among one of my favorite listening tools I use for Twitter. Great for online reputation management, catching all your @replies and @mentions, finding job/networking opportunities, keeping up on your favorite hobby, and more!

TweetAlarm gets you alerted when someone tweets about your company, your product or anything that interests you.

TweetAlerts sends alerts through SMS, email and IM. If you are out traveling a lot, get your alerts sent to your phone.

Twitter Search provides an abundance of quality information. Take time to learn how to use this awesome listening tool. And if you use Google Reader, then I suggest that you add the feed for your search queries to Google Reader.

Measure Social Media’s Impact

Social media can broaden your event marketing and help you reach your business objectives. To this end, the following metrics are important to track:

• People. Specifically, monitor the following:

o Prospects are potential attendees or leads for later business development. They can be further segmented by source and whether they've attended an event in the past.

o Attendees are people who actually show up at your event. If it's a paid event, track the number of paying customers.

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o Social media participants are people who create or read event-related social media content. Depending on the type of show, there may other elements to monitor to help you market future events.

o Reactivated former customers are attendees who have participated in the past but may not have been at the most recent event.

• Revenues. These are a critical factor in determining your event success. Since a number of elements may drive total sales, monitor trends in all your revenue streams. People interested in your event may not attend but can still add to your revenue. Types of revenue to track:

o Conference fees. These are the sales from ticket sales and related events, such as special dinners. Also consider fees from online events, such as a live stream or Webcast.

o Show-related advertising and sponsorships. Many conferences make money from sponsors and exhibitors. Develop revenues from added benefits delivered to sponsors through advertising and sponsorships related to social media, such as online podcasts and videos.

o Related products. These can include other products that your company produces, such as magazines or session DVDs.

• • Costs. Marketing expenses encompass the offline and online promotional costs.

Also track social media's buzz impact on your event. This includes a range of factors, such as the number of people who contribute content, the number of visitors who view or listen to this content, and its impact on search results.

Social media can extend your event's impact. Think about how you can use it to further your specific business goals. Social media can do a lot to increase your audience and your awareness. It's all about building and tapping into a community.

About RDZ Media Group, LLC RDZ Media Group is the upgrade version of RoaDDoggZ productions’ expertise in Extending Brands Beyond the Event (EB2 TM), producing effective live events and creating stunning media campaigns using traditional media, plus off the shelf and custom built new media and social media tools. We use the right blend of media tools to assist your company in reaching goals which includes combinations of:

• New Media Tools – Video Production, Podcasts, Text & SMS programs • Social Media Tools – Private Label Social Media (PLSM), Blogs, Facebook Fan Pages,

Twitter, Social Media Monitoring tools. • Traditional Media Tools – Ads in traditional outlets (newspapers, radio, TV, movie

theatre, etc.), Live Events production. We ARE the company businesses rely on to produce SERIOUS, COMPASSIONATE, ENTHUSIASTIC, MOTIVATING, PASSIONATE AND IMPACTING media campaigns Contact Stephen Jackson; General Manager of RDZ Media Group, LLC. at: [email protected] Facebook – roaddoggz Twitter – roaddoggz Friendfeed – roaddoggz Phone: 646-530-8632 ext. 2