Social Media to boost Event Attendance

Using social media to enhance event attendance is considered essential, but HOW to utilize the many options is a question we all face.  CVent has just released a free e-book with practical tips on integrating social media into your next event.  You can download the book of tips here:  Event e-BOOK

See you on facebook, or digg, or twitter, or stumbleupon....  

Successfully Promoting your Event Online

We all know event promotion strategies have been radically changed with the social media phenomenon. Below is an insightful guest post by Robert Grossman of Focus Creative distilling the most effective ways to utilize social media to promote your next event.  Hope you find this article as helpful as I did.

Social media strategy ideas before an event:

• Create a Facebook Event, pulling in all your event details. This creates a central location for attendees to begin to connect and share their excitement for the event.
• Create a Facebook Page. For larger events a dedicated page may be appropriate as a central location to engage with attendees and people interested in learning more about your event.
• On Twitter, create an event hashtag and promote it. Encouraging dialog with Twitter hashtags is an excellent way to build buzz around an event.  Then publicize the hashtag in advance across all channels—put it on your registration page, website, and use it in every single one of your Twitter posts.
• To encourage people to tweet - give out your hashtag and spread the word, sweeten the deal with a free pass, door prize or other giveaway for one lucky hashtag-er.
• Post the event to LinkedIn. At a bare minimum, you can create an update that includes a few words on why you are excited for the event and a link to your registration page. Send the invite out to all your LinkedIn connections.
• Seek out LinkedIn groups that are relevant to your event and let them know about it as well as sharing the event with specific contacts which LinkedIn easily lets you do.
• Build your own community. For the biggest and most complex events (typically conferences), building your own community may make sense.
• Learn where communities already are. Before the event, it’s critical to identify existing communities like those on LinkedIn, Facebook, or other forums and find out what they’re interested in. You can also use real-time search on Twitter to find out what your future attendees are talking about and hoping to gain from an event. Then use this knowledge to fine-tune the event content and make sure that it’s relevant for your audience.

Focus Creative helps fortune 500 companies and non-profits create engaging productions and presentations for sales meetings, share holder events, conferences, award shows, sales and marketing videos, training videos, post event videos and presentations. 

Technology Improves Class Reunion Communication

Planning a high-school reunion is no small feat, but luckily there are a lot of online tools that now make this big job easier. The reunion chairs often reside in multiple states, don't normally plan events and are expected to produce several days of activities for hundreds of people. A Big Job.

The first steps to planning a reunion is setting up a basic website with the dates of the reunion and a "call to action" for participants to submit their current contact information. You may have a contact submission form or you can simply provide an email address for guests to send their contact information. You'll want to be specific regarding the information needed so you receive complete and consistent data.

Go Daddy, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Web hosting or Pingg are a few very low cost/free hosting solutions.

The second step is to drive traffic to your reunion site by creating an attractive and effective email. This email should be sent to everyone you have stayed in touch with and will provide a direct link to your site. Recipients can then forward this nice work of art to others. As soon as someone new submits their contact information via your site, they too should receive this email. Facebook is also a great tool for spreading the word. Simply post your reunion site URL on your profile or create an online group for "XYZ School, Class of 1979." If this is a 5 year reunion, your entire group is on Facebook. If this is a 30 year reunion, you may just connect with a portion of the invitees, but you're getting the word out to visit the reunion website and submit current contact information.

The third step will be to post a calendar of events, registration, and officially send an invitation (paper and online) to your invitees. A follow up post will provide examples.

Pingg is a sophisticated communication solution that offers everything you need: an easy to build website, an organized method for collecting contact information, free hosting, as well as custom post cards and email invitations. This would be my first stop when looking for a simple, yet effective large group communication tool. We've had a recent requests for information regarding reunions, so you'll see more in the next few weeks on this topic. Good luck!