Events With Social Media

Organise with social media tools

Skype: Use Skype for conference calls and chats about event planning. Bouncing ideas back and forth via video or audio can make the brainstorming process move much faster. Gchat and Tokbox are also fast and easy ways to engage audio and video conversations.

REGIS and the Social Media app for event organisers: An ideal platform for planning events – it's easy to add notes, edit information, and organise content. A favourite of organisers because of its business features, better document-sharing features, and RSS notifications.
Assign tasks, meetings and work together on your event information.

 

Promotion and distribution

Promotion is the key to any successful gathering. Without it, you will not attract the interesting people that you're looking to bring in. There are several levels of promotion and dozens of social media tools available, enough to write another full article about, but we will only highlight some of the most important details.

First, be sure to have as many distribution channels available as possible. Your potential guests or attendees must be able to easily find you on Facebook, , Flickr, YouTube, and for business events, LinkedIn.

Twitter and Facebook should be your primary promotional tools – they are built for spreading a message. On Facebook, be sure to set up a Facebook Page – they are better than groups because you can appear in News Feeds every time you update the Page's status. Creating a Facebook Event is also key, as well as having guests and members update their own status with links to the shindig. Twitter's key is retweeting and hashtags: be sure to have an event hashtag and promote it, and ask for retweets of the most important information.

If possible, all of these accounts need to link to one central blog, PBworks, or event page. If you're using an REGIS or Facebook event as your main distribution method, be sure that's where every one of these social media websites links to.

Here are some more advanced promotional tools to consider:

Ning: Some organizers create their own social networks to build up hype and to keep connections even after the event has occurred.

 

Organising and inviting

Once you have the basic plan in the pipeline, it's time to get your ducks in a row and start inviting some people. This is different than promotion – you're making sure to invite key guests, speakers, family, and whoever else is important to the success of your gathering, conference, or part

Setting up a blog: Creating and posting.

For inviting and organising guests lists, always be sure to set up a Facebook event – this will be one of the first places your guests will look for event information. You can go beyond a simple Facebook invite for added emphasis: REGIS is a solution for inviting guests with full delegate management.

 

Optimise the event for social media sharing

When the day comes and everyone is arriving, be sure that you keep people happy and that you've optimized your event to create additional buzz. You didn't do all of this work just to have people complain over Twitter, did you?

Have high-speed wireless available – this allows people to tweet and converse more easily. Promote following the event's Twitter account for event updates. Don't forget to have a unique hashtag for the event. Have a web page or even a giant whiteboard where people can share their social media contact information too.

For people who cannot attend the event, consider setting up a live stream. Live video services like Ustream and Mogulus make it possible to stream out key portions of events. You don't have to stream everything – just the good stuff. If you can't stream, upload videos to YouTube afterwards.

Finally, and most importantly, listen to your audience – do they complain about a specific speaker, the food, a lack of responsiveness? Address their needs by tracking the Twitter conversation for a large event. For small events, simply ask them for their feedback or have an online survey guests can fill out.

 

Post-event social media communication

Contrary to popular belief, the event is not done when everyone leaves. There's still more to do to make sure the event leaves a lasting impression, especially if you intend to have future events or even an annual one. The Social Media application for event organizers

First, be sure to continue communication with all the attendees. The web page where users can add their social media contact information is vital towards this end, as are the emails you probably have access to. Send them thank yous, updates, and information. Be sure to promote friending or following your social media accounts.

Next, do not forget to share all the media generated by the event. Upload photos to the Flickr account and post videos on YouTube (Vimeo and Viddler are also good alternatives). Post recordings of your live video streams as well (you did have a live video stream or two, right?).

 

Keep communicating

Good communication is central to the success of any gathering. Even if it's just a one-time event, keeping in contact with everyone who attended could result in invaluable contacts or lifelong friendships. Promote social media and good communication whenever you're planning and executing an event and your extravaganza will turn out to be more engaging and more popular than you may have ever realized possible.

How to Increase Technology Adoption at Events

1. Show Attendees the WIIFM (what's in it for me)

Most events are packed with activities. If you are going to ask attendees to use (or try) a new technology tool, be sure that they (A) know about it and (B) understand how they will benefit from it. Otherwise, with so much going on, they may overlook the new tool

2. Show Attendees How To Use the Tech Tools

Attendees start from different points on the technology learning curve. Some will arrive as power-tweeters, while others will still be struggling with email. Also, they have different learning styles. If you want attendees to use the tools, you need to provide various forms of support. Below are suggestions:

> Attendees receive a small instruction card with some of the "how to" basics at registration

> A short 5 minute "how to" presentation at the beginning of the event

> Provide personalized demonstrations of the tools (for those that want it)

> Provide a help desk where attendees can get personalized demonstrations and answers to individual questions

> Provide Just-in-Time instructions as required. This was very effective for voting, speaker Q&A or other tools that were not used in every session

3. Keep the Tech Tools Simple

Since events are so short, you only have a few minutes to teach attendees how to use your tech tools and help them become proficient at it. The easier it is for attendees to learn how to use the tools on site – the more they will use it.  When considering different options – look for simple, easy to use interfaces

4. Consider How Attendees will Participate

Not all attendees will use the technology equally – even after they know how to use the tools. That's ok. We don't all like to do the same things. You can increase your chances of success by learning about your attendee's social media engagement preferences. Do they like to create content, critique it, etc?

Virtual Event Platforms

Make it easier to experience

Most virtual event platforms are easy to use – on a first-time visit, users tend to grasp the overall user experience and can figure out where to go (and how).  That being said, for wide scale adoption, virtual events need to be as easy as Facebook.  That is, our grandmothers need to be able to access the site and figure things out.  On Facebook, grandmothers can update their profile, read their "friends" posts and write updates to their Walls.  Can a grandmother login to a virtual event, update her profile and participate in a group chat?  We're not so sure.  Similarly, navigation and interactions need to be easier.  Most virtual events are intuitive to navigate (e.g. Lobby, Auditorium,  Lounge, etc.) – but may not be so intuitive with regard to message boards, chat, blogging, rating, etc.

Along with a simplification of interfaces and the use of usability and navigation conventions, many customers and users seem to be demanding more immersive environments. While presenting a brand and hosting an interactive experience in a convention centre, it seems an interesting field to add some real-time rendered environments using engines like papervision3D or Unity3D. This said, it is unlikely that avatar-based real time rendered environments will make it to a mainstream audience. Key considerations (or obstacles) are plugins or applets downloads, system performance and learning curve barriers.

Make it easier to find

The typical "location" of a virtual event is quickly becoming outdated – microsite with registration page, with no ability to experience the event prior to completing all mandatory registration fields. The registration page serves as a "wall" not only to potential attendees, but to search engines as well.  Virtual event platforms need to move "outside the wall" and expose their technology on Facebook, on blogs and on publisher web sites.  Platforms should widen their distribution via widgets, embed code and application programming interfaces (API's).  Facebook is not limited to Facebook.com – it has Facebook Connect, Facebook Open Graph and much more.  Virtual events platforms, on the other hand, seem to be restricted to "VirtualEventPlatform.com"

Make it easier to access

The most relevant virtual event platforms will introduce, or already have, Facebook Connect and Twitter API, and they will need to move to even wider standards like OpenID.  For public events, ease of registration is a must.  Using open methods for registering and/or connecting social networks have three-fold benefits:

1. Registration is faster because basic information can be provided by services like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.  Shorter registration forms increase completion, period.
   
2. Intelligence gathered by the platform about the user's existing social graph can enhance the experience within the event by automatically creating connections with other attendees based on that user's connection outside the platform.  This will lead to more networking and awareness of actual people within the environment.
   
3. Users opting into connections at the point of registration allows platforms to create publishable actions that can be spit out to twitter and facebook news feeds that can increase viral awareness of the event.  Marketing automation at its best.
   

On the other hand, desktop or mobile widgets to control your stand usage, statistics and reporting will be a must. Lastly, the platforms will have extensive APIs to manage their integration with various social networks, corporate databases, physical event managing software, etc.

Make the experience available on more devices

Most virtual event platforms support Windows, Mac and Linux.  They need to support more platforms, especially mobile.  On the mobile front, it's important to consider iPhone/iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows 7 Phone and WebOS (listed in our order of importance).  To start, we don't believe the entire virrual event experience needs to be "ported" to mobile devices -rather, vendors should determine the most critical features for attendees and exhibitors – and prioritize based on importance.  For instance, chat is an important element of virtual events, so why not make a mobile app that allows exhibitors to staff their booth via their smartphone.

The entire 3D environment does not need to be supported on a mobile device, but the networking tools (visit card managing, real time conversation, etc) and the reporting tools certainly do. On the other hand, it will be interesting to see what happens with Flash and Apple, and see which vendors will try to develop their platforms using HTML5.

One of the key areas where mobile can play a huge role is the "reminder" needs that come from tons of scheduled activities within virtual events.  If attendees have the ability to build out a personalized agenda before the event and opt-in to either SMS reminders or download some kind of app that will push notifications at them throughout the day, it would be much easier to create a flexible agenda.  Currently we're cramming so much into the shortest amount of time because we're afraid of losing people.  If only we had better planning and reminding tools, driven by devices that never leave our pocket!

Make the platform more adaptable and flexible

Related to our point about mobile support, platform vendors have important decisions to make regarding the development platforms.  Virtual event platforms today are based on Flash, Flex, Silverlight, Java and JavaFX.  Are those the "right" platform technologies for the future – or, should platforms move in the direction of HTML5?  Does a combination off HTML5, Javascript and Ajax create a more adaptable and flexible platform?  What do we "lose" by shifting away from Flash, Silverlight, etc.?  And what are the mobile implications with the chosen direction?  All good questions for the platform vendors to consider.

Make the platform more adaptable for different customer needs and different usage

There are so many different kind of virtual events: trade shows, conferences, job fairs, corporate events, webinars, congresses… that vendors should decide in which market niche they are going to play. We will see generic platforms and other vendors delivering a tailored solution for one or many of the previous choices. It will become more and more complex to provide physical event managers with the features they need to handle their hybrid events at the same time as the platform is able to cope with the extensive data handling of the virtual job fair, or the networking tools of a professional tradeshow.

Take a hint from Apple and FaceTime

Video chat will, without a doubt, increase the effectiveness of networking.  It is the one key element that can be introduced that will get critics to come around to the idea that networking in an online environment can be as effective as the cocktail hour of a physical event.