Using Social Media To Make Your Event Successful

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

“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.

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

“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.


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


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.


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.


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


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.


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



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.


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.


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.


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:
stephen.jackson@rdzmedia.com Facebook – roaddoggz Twitter – roaddoggz
Friendfeed – roaddoggz Phone: 646-530-8632 ext. 2


Using Social Media To Make Your Event Successful

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