Presented at PCMA 2010. Ideas and suggestions for using technology to improve the attendee experience and drive sponsorships at medical meetings.

1. Reinventing Your Medical
Meeting with Digital Solutions
Melinda Kendall
Vice President, Marketing Solutions

2. Agenda
• The current landscape for medical meetings
• Digital tools for medical meetings
– Major social networks
– Audience acquisition tools
– Video technologies
– Digital event platforms
– Mobile applications for events
– Virtual events
– White label social networks
• Summary and considerations

3. Regulatory Landscape
• Regulations put new restrictions on giveaways and
medical convention sponsorships
– PhRMA, AdvaMed, State, Compliance Officers
• Sponsorship budgets repurposed
• Forces innovation
– Better marketing practices
– Emphasis on education, demonstration
– Measurement
– Creativity will be rewarded

4. “The Great Recession”
The current economic landscape:
– Housing bubble/mortgage meltdown
– Consumer confidence/Jobless recovery
Results in:
– Reduced travel and training budgets
– Reduced marketing budgets
– Declining attendance and exhibitor participation

5. Challenges lead to opportunities
Incorporating digital tools can counteract today’s
climate of budget cuts, travel restrictions and
increased regulation:
– New categories of sponsorships
• PhRMA “friendly”
– Leverage emerging technology to facilitate
engagement
– Extend the reach and life of an event

7. Digital tools are gaining traction for events
Source: Survey of Associations’ Use of Digital Tools and Social Media for Events,
Champion Exposition Services, November 2009

8. Digital tools are gaining traction for events
Source: Survey of Associations’ Use of Digital Tools and Social Media for Events,
Champion Exposition Services, November 2009

9. Major social networks
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
•Empower your community to evangelize about your
event
•Harness the power of your community's friend &
colleague networks through syndication

10. How associations leverage Facebook to
maximize events’ potential
Post about event activities 74%
Leveraging group members’ broadcasts
67%
of their activities to their friends
Encouraging group members to invite 59%
their friends to become group member
56%
Creating buzz during the event
Send messages or emails to all members 52%
Post event photos 52%
48%
Host forums/discussion threads
33%
Post event videos
Source: Champion’s Survey of Association’s Use of Digital Tools and Social Media for
Events, November 2009

15. Share and syndicate
• Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter
• Extend your reach virally to your network’s network

21. Prescriptions for using social networks
• Primarily helps in audience expansion
• Build out content, photos, links back to your
page
• Create event page
• Share and syndicate content back to
members’ networks

22. How associations are leveraging Twitter to
support events
Source: Champion’s Survey of Association’s Use of Digital Tools and Social Media for Events,
November 2009

23. How associations are leveraging Twitter to
support events
Source: Champion’s Survey of Association’s Use of Digital Tools and Social Media for
Events, November 2009

24. 850 Followers
785 Following850
Followers:
Following: 785
Tweets: 3,261
Event
hashtag:
#sla2010

25. Hashtags makes it easy
Hashtags makes it easy
for people to search and
for people to search and
#ahima09 see the discussions
see the discussions
Session hashtags
Session hashtags
enable session-
enable session-
specific
specific
questions/posts to
questions/posts to
be displayed in
be displayed in
session rooms for
session rooms for
real time Q/A
real time Q/A

27. Moderating Live Feeds

28. Prescriptions for using Twitter
Onsite engagement
Audience acquisition
• Create and promote event hashtag
• Consider session-specific hashtags (start with a
keynote)
• Designating community members as official
conference reporters
• Use your subject matter experts and thought leaders
• Create a widget to scroll their tweets from the
association website.

31. Twitter for exhibitor marketing
• Broadcast exhibitor
announcements in
Twitter
• Can establish criteria
and review:
Launch must happen
at event, etc.

32. Major social networks used across the event cycle
Pre-show
speaker Post-show
Pre-show Pre-show recruitment/ engagement To engage
attendee exhibitor content Onsite at with with non-
marketing marketing development event attendees attendees
Facebook 100% 38% 0% 28% 53% 47%
Twitter 75% 43% 7% 57% 50% 46%
LinkedIn 84% 52% 4% 28% 52% 52%
Source: Champion’s Survey of Association’s Use of Digital Tools and Social Media for Events, November 2009

33. What’s new in audience acquisition?
Email Marketing 2.0:
1. Video embeds: video clips in
the body of emails
2. Viral sharing tools within the
body of the email
3. List Sharing: Send show invites to exhibitors’ internal
prospect and customer databases without requiring the
exhibitor to provide the show with the database itself

34. Video tools
Pre-event
Extends your reach
Post-event follow-up
Social video sharing platforms
easily post video of events, creating buzz and driving traffic
and attendance.
Video management platforms
Turn-key systems for integrating video, custom video
players, video category navigation, video search, user-
generated video and more into website
Streaming channel tools
Broadcast live/archived keynotes or sessions online with live
chat feedback from audience

35. Video for attendee marketing

36. Video for enhancing onsite experience

38. Video as a marketing tool for exhibitors
Thermo Fisher
Scientific produced
a series of
“Innovation
Minutes” videos
from their PittCon
2009 Exhibit to
evangelize new
products and
innovations.

39. Video for extending the reach of event:
pre, post and onsite

40. PhRMA-friendly sponsorship ideas
• Short-form video content that runs in Exhibit halls
and hotel lobbies
• Webcast series or online broadcast of keynote
sessions
• Live “streaming” surgery broadcast or demonstration
• Virtual “field trip” to hospital, clinic or research
facility

41. Digital event platforms
• Attendee: Personalize, Plan & Connect
•personal show agendas
•personalized show floor walking maps
•meeting-setup, interest matching
• Exhibitors: Lead generation & engagement
•Capture registrant’s requests to be contacted
•Capture buying behaviors which signal buying interests
•Set up meetings

42. Digital event platforms
•Personalized floor maps
•Meeting set-up
•Virtual tote-bag (exhibitor collateral,
session material)
•Personalize schedule builder/planner
•Built-in search engines
- Recommendations engines
- Product category browse tools

43. Who’s using them? And how?

44. Mobile solutions for events
Mobile solutions allow you to
engage with attendees before,
during and after your meeting via:
•SMS/text messaging
•Mobile applications that put your event
on a smartphone

45. SMS/text messaging: how it’s used
• Pre-event
– Alert attendees to session changes/additions
• Audience engagement
– Facilitate conference Q&A
– Audience polling/results
– Sponsored contests, promotional giveaways
• Post-event
– Send thank you messages after the event

46. Mobile applications
• Mobile versions of event website
• Mobile versions of show guide
• iPhone Apps

47. Your event on your smartphone

48. Virtual event platforms
Interactive, 3-D immersive environments with content assets
focused mainly on video and PDFs
Purpose:
• Alternative or replacement for physical
event
• Complement physical event (hybrid)
• Online education

49. Where in event strategy does virtual fit?
Source: Survey of Associations’ Use of Digital Tools and Social Media for Events, Champion Exposition
Services, November 2009

50. Virtual event features using or planning to use
Source: Survey of Associations’ Use of Digital Tools and Social Media for Events, Champion Exposition
Services, November 2009

55. Virtual events: PhRMA friendly sponsorship
opportunities
• Extend the reach of event–and offer key exhibitors a
chance to extend their investment
• Accessible to people not able to attend live event
• Adds virtual content sponsorships
– Virtual labs, educational broadcasts—live and prerecorded
• CME approved

56. White label social networks
Attendee marketing
Exhibitor marketing
Year-round engagement
•A proprietary social network, branded by you
•Full social network features
• Forums, blogs, photo sharing, comments, activity streams
•Deep user involvement
• Rate content, comment on content, and contribute content
• Crowd-sourcing surfaces valuable content through activity streams like most
highly rated, most frequently viewed, most shared, etc.

59. Social Aggregation Tools
Social aggregation vendors
• Create a social mashup of registrants’
Twitter updates and intermix them into one
stream

61. Summary & considerations

62. Summary
• Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are leveraged across the
event cycle
• Twitter and SMS/Texting for facilitating QA
• Email Marketing 2.0: List-sharing/exhibitor database tools
• Video: leverage for attendee and exhibitor marketing
• Digital event platforms facilitate meeting setup between
attendees and exhibitors
• Mobile apps can put events on your cell phone; offer
additional exhibitor sponsorship opportunities
• Virtual events can extend the reach of your event
• White label social nets: association specific can extend
engagement year round

63. Considerations

64. Strategy first
• What are you trying to accomplish?
– Year-round community?
– On-site engagement?
– Audience acquisition?
• Develop a long-term plan
• But execute on one technology at a time

65. Many-to-Many, not One-to-Many
• Create a conversation
• Use features to allow attendees to communicate
with you and others
• Make sure someone is monitoring the conversation
• Cultivate super-users and influencers in your
community
– They’re 2% of your audience, but reflect 90% of the user-
generated content

66. Go beyond basic functionality
• Make use of features and applications
designed for events.
– Add applications to your Facebook page to display
keynote videos or poll your fans on hot session
topics
– Use Twitter’s Direct Messaging and hashtag
functionality to allow followers to post to and read
topic threads about your meeting and
communicate onsite with event staff

67. Digital solutions: PhRMA friendly sponsorships
• Digital event platforms
• Social networking
– Public social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter)
– White label social networks
• Video
– video streaming
• Email
– Exhibitor invites
• Mobile

68. Questions?

69. Melinda Kendall
Vice President, Marketing Solutions
350 Rhode Island Street, Suite 220N
San Francisco, CA 94103
415-655-2205
ImmersaMarketing.com