Updates from PR Meets Marketing

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For nearly 3 years, I’ve been writing about PR, marketing, social media, and most recently virtual events. At times, I’ve been very prolific and other times I’ve gone weeks without a post. As a commitment to myself and to you, my readers, I wanted to share some updates for the site in a short video message that I hope will make the blog more useful for you.

Briefly, I am enacting an editorial calendar to help develop a schedule of posts and expectations. My writing schedule will be Mondays (virtual events), Wednesdays (pr, marketing, social media), and Fridays (PRMM interviews with industry experts).

I also want to invite you to submit your ideas for potential blog topics and interview subjects (email or video). Here are some high-level bullet points on what I’m looking for in guest posts, interviewees and/or blog ideas, such as surveys highlighting key trends, case studies that demonstrate ROI, interesting case uses of technology, someone who is truly visionary, etc. 

But, most importantly, read my past posts first before connecting with me.

If you’re interested, please drop me a note either in the comments or via email. I look forward to hearing from you and watch here for future announcements.

Top Three Tools for Twitter Conversations

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I recently worked with the Virtual Edge Summit to help get the word out about the summit. Social media was an important strategy for reaching target audiences and driving a conversation before, during and after the event. Of all the social media channels, Twitter was an integral part of the strategy. Here are three tools that I recommend if you’re seeking to drive engagement around any event, such as press conference, webinar, conference, product launch, etc.

CoTweet – Schedule Your Tweets

For this particular instance, I knew I would be busy throughout the conference and unable to tweet updates regularly. As such, I used CoTweet to schedule tweets in advance.  And as Guy Kawasaki points out, the tweet stream moves so quickly, only a portion of your audience will view your tweet at any particular time.

By using CoTweet, I could schedule advanced tweets about exhibitor promotions during the show, space out reminders to register for the event, and retweet relevant news at specific times to have a rolling set of activity throughout the day.

The other benefit is you can have more than one account and users to manage tweeting responsibilities. This is useful when you have  large team of PR professionals, marketers, and/or event staff overseeing the event.

What the Hashtag – Trend and Track Your Hashtag

If you plan to use a hashtag, the challenge is creating a simple, visual way to capture the overall activity for the hashtag. What the Hashtag is a tool that allows you to do this.  Once you’ve registered your hashtag and added a description, you can view a chart of the number of tweets, top users tweeting out the hashtag and other high-level statistics.

This is a great way to identify top twitterers for that hashtag or your brand. By reaching out to these individuals, you can develop a relationship for future announcements and events.

The only detraction is that the stats are available for only 7 days. So you will want to designate a day to go back and capture the data from the past week, such as first thing Monday morning or end of day Fridays.

Twapper Keeper: A History of Your Tweets

While Twitter is great for publicizing a brand and generating conversation around a community and topics, tweets are not archived. This provides a challenge when you want to create a history or search for specific tweets. One site that may help is Twapper Keeper, which seeks to save tweets related to a particular hashtag.

I created the archive for the Virtual Edge Summit at: http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/VES11. While the user interface is inelegant (which is why I decided not to include an image) and service can be a bit slow (at times doesn’t load), the idea is interesting and valuable for evaluating the conversations around a specific hashtag or even keyword. I’m curious to hear of any other similar service as Twapper Keeper has a great idea, but needs to make significant improvements to gain traction.

What do you think? What other Twitter tools would you recommend?

Virtual Edge Summit 2011 – Mobile Comes to Hybrid and Virtual Events

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Photo courtesy of Altus

NOTE: I am providing pr/marketing services to the Virtual Edge Summit. This post reflects my personal opinions and is not representative of the Virtual Edge Institute or Virtual Edge Summit.  

I previously wrote about some of the efforts we undertook to promote the Virtual Edge Summit. I would like to highlight some of the buzz coming out of the Summit and what this means for marketers. Interestingly, I anticipated hearing some innovations from the key players in the US virtual events market – INXPO (Note: I was previously employed here), 6Connex, and Unisfair.    

Rather, for me, I was intrigued by the number of mobile developments by other providers at the show, Altus, Digitell Inc. and Social27. While this was surprising, it fits into my overall predictions about the industry, that newcomers will help push the innovation for virtual and hybrid events. Here’s a quick summary of the announcements. I also had the opportunity to speak briefly with Altus and Social27. Here is a quick overview of the Altus and Social27 news, and I plan to post the videos once I get those completed. 

Altus Brings Conferences to the Palm of Your Hand

Altus highlighted their announcement as an extension of physical to provide a “hybrid” experience. The mobile application allows conference organizers to put the conference agenda, sponsor information and even presentations on your mobile device. 

Why you should take a look? Since attendees proactively download the app to their device (supports many operating systems), conference organizers can continue pushing updates to attendees long after the conference has ended. If you leverage this as an opportunity to continue a conversation, you can keep members engaged while driving interest for the following conference, as well as open up possible revenue opportunities via sponsorships.    

Taking Social Interaction to the Next Level with Social27

Photo via Social27 Website

Social27 originally started as a service to bring social collaboration to enterprises. Seeing an opportunity, Social27 is moving into events and conferences. The company has a philosophy of “Social, Mobile and Local”, which Ike Singh Kehal, CEO of Social27, explains in his video (coming soon). Like the main U.S. players in the market, Social27 provides an environment with 2D locations for networking, exhibitors and sessions. Since the company comes from the social collaboration space, Social27 provides a simple integration with the key social networks. 

Why you should take a look? Social27 does the social collaboration and networking well. I would venture to say that it provides the simplest and most intuitive interface to date. Furthermore, the company leverages the wealth of your social graph to provide “matches” to assist with networking. Currently available on Windows mobile phones, expect Social27 to expand the services to additional mobile OS. By adding the geographic aspect as well, Social27 provides marketers with the ability to search, seek and network with prospects – virtually or in the real world. 

 Conclusion

The Virtual Edge Summit provided great insight into how marketers can leverage virtual and hybrid events as part of the marketing mix. And an integral part of the experience is extending the event to mobile devices. Do you agree or disagree?

Virtual Edge Institute – An Inside Look at Event PR and Marketing

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Courtesy of Virtual Edge Summit

From January 12-13, 2011, hundreds of people will gather in Las Vegas and online to attend the Virtual Edge Summit 2011. I have had the pleasure of assisting the Summit in their public relations and marketing efforts. While I have done PR and marketing activities as a vendor exhibiting or speaking at an event, this was an interesting opportunity to help drive awareness, conversation and ultimately registrations for a conference of this sidze (not including corporate webinars and virtual events).

With the conference a week away, we will not have a full sense of the results until after it has concluded. With that said, I wanted to highlight three strategies and tactics we used (are using). While this doesn’t encompass everything we did/are doing for the Summit, it does provide a look under the covers:

Key Objectives

1. Drive Brand Awareness: This year, the Virtual Edge Summit expanded its program beyond virtual events, meetings and conferences to incorporate virtual learning and training. This opened up the Summit a potential new pool of attendees within the elearning and training spaces. Our goal was to continue driving awareness within the meeting and events industry, while introducing the Summit to this new space.

2. Increase Engagement: We wanted to build on the 2010 efforts to further involve our audience – both virtual and physical – with the Summit. This would help generate word of mouth amongst our key audiences and hopefully reach new target audiences.

3. Grow Registrations for In-Person and Virtual Attendance:  And of course, part of the success would be measured by the number of registration for the in-person and virtual versions of the event.

Key Tactics

1. Focus on Public Relations: My foundation is in public relations, so this was a natural area to focus our efforts.  In addition to the general press releases about keynote speakers, new sponsors and the program, we looked at how we can generate discussion in the industry, while promoting the Summit. For example, we decided to develop an infographic that summarized the key virtual events industrystats from 2010. The purpose was to provide the industry with a visual way to synthesize the progress that virtual had made over the past 12 months. In addition to posting to the Summit blog, we contacted key reporters, industry bloggers, and sponsors. The resulting blog posts and discussion around the infographic keeps the Summit and Virtual Edge Institute front and center.

2. Start and Seed a Summit Blog: Our speakers are the innovators within the virtual events and learning industries. We started a blog and invited our speakers to submit 300-400 word blog postings related to their presentation or industry. With a dozen speakers taking up the offer, this provided credibility to the blog, allowed us to generate relevant content quickly, and distribute this to a wider audience through speaker promotion. At this writing, our hope is to continue the blog to drive the conversation until the next Summit.

3. Social Media: While Twitter was leveraged last year, we drafted a more formal strategy for our social media program this year.

a. The cornerstone will continue to be Twitter, assigning each room with a unique hashtag to receive questions from the audience. We also created Twitter lists of attendees, speakers and sponsors to recognize all the different audiences supporting the Summit. Finally, we reached out to speakers and sponsors to promote their participation at the conference, which generated many tweets leading up to the conference over the past few days.

b. We researched groups in learning, training, events, conferences and meetings on LinkedIn.  Following group guidelines, we posted information about the Summit, participated in appropriate discussions,  and/or started discussions.

c. With regard to Facebook, this is being leveraged as an alternative way to connect with our audiences. We cross post all blog posts and post questions to solicit engagement. While this part is nascent, we’re contemplating using Facebook as the main photo archive for the Summit and inviting virtual attendees to post photos of where they are attending the Summit to the page.

Wish Us Good Luck

While this doesn’t cover everything we’ve been doing, I’m pretty happy with what we’ve been able to accomplish so far. If you’re interested in checking out the summit, you can register at http://www.virtualedgesummit.com/registration_reader. The interesting aspect is that the Summit will have ten different technology vendors streaming the content. The idea is to provide people with a choice and way to evaluate different ways of holding a virtual event.

In the post-event summary, I’ll highlight some other unique aspects of the event, initial results and some areas of improvement.

And I’ll also be one of the virtual hosts to bring content live from the exhibit show floor to the virtual audience! (wish me luck)

Help Amy and Andrew Win a Nissan Leaf

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My husband and I are huge electric car enthusiasts, but not as much as our friends Amy and Andrew. I was curious when they asked me to vote for their video for a chance to win a Nissan Leaf (click on the image to the left to launch their video). I personally think their video is great =) and a great way for Nissan to drive interest in their first generation Leaf.

The contest rules are pretty straightforward: Schedule a time to test drive the Lead, record a video and promote it to friends and family for votes. A winner is selected from the various regions, with one winning the grand prize – a quiet car that will sneak upon you with no warning.

While this is a great way to drive people to the event, grow its list of prospective buyers, increase engagement, and spread the word, here are my recommendations to make this an event better contest.

1) You can share the video via Twitter, Facebook and email, but there was no way to embed the video to blogs and websites. Hence, why I did a screen capture and link to the video.

2) While the link takes you to a single videos, there is no video gallery to view entries from a single event. By having a centralized gallery, Nissan could leverage it’s marketing weight to segment email lists and encourage people to vote for the best video. This could also drive interest in the contest itself. Instead, the contest depends on individuals to spread the word.

3) I’m actually on the Nissan Leaf mailing list and received emails about the Nissan Test Drive tour. But I had not heard about this contest until the email from my friends, who had scheduled a test drive. My assumption is that the contest wasn’t well integrated with the other marketing channels for the Leaf – email marketing, PR (first person who received a Leaf in the Bay Area made the local news), etc. Bringing these channels together could provide Nissan with great word-of-mouth, especially as this first generation of electric cars roll out.

What do you think? And don’t forget, Vote for Amy and Andrew now! I want to be the first to ride in the car!

2011 Virtual Event Predictions

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by kevin033 via flickr

A few weeks ago, Dennis Shiao of It’s All Virtual queried me on my top predictions for virtual events in 2011. And then this same question appeared on Focus, a network for business professionals to respond and answer to critical business questions. Based on my responses to these, here is a summary of my top three predictions for the virtual events industry.

Market Consolidation Ahead

While there are several known players in the market – 6Connex, Inxpo, On24 and Unisfair – there has been a proliferation of new players and those who have gained mindshare in the industry, such as Expos2, Imaste, Stream57, VisualMente, Ubivent, and others. While this is great for the customer – more choice and usually a decrease in price – I believe this will lead to some players being bought by larger organizations, merging to bring together complimentary strengths, or even some disappearing from the industry all together. No matter how, we will begin to see some consolidation within the industry.

Build Me a Better Playground

I believe the industry players remaining on the landscape will begin building out an ecosystem of services to plug-and-play on the platforms. While each provider has an “open API” the question is at what point will the providers a) begin developing apps to harvest the potential of the data and platforms. This includes connecting to Salesforce or truly automating the marketing aspect of virtual. And b) promote a developer community to build third-party apps for its customers. I envision the latter being more of an end of 2011/early 2012 development.

Simplified Web Experiences

 This may seem contradictory to point 2, but I think we’re going to see a move away from the current way we experience virtual events – a login to enter a space with different rooms, like an auditorium, lounge, etc. Rather, I think we will see a return to a “website-like” experience. Everything is on a single page with a window for live streaming video and different widgets for engagement, games and other applications can be added or deleted as needed. And with an OpenID model, I can move freely to and from these “virtual events” without re-entering my login/password. Look for someone like Facebook to move more into this space in 2011.

Do you agree or disagree? What are you top predictions?

PRMM Interview – Bob Etheridge Grows Conference via LinkedIn

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I belong to several groups in LinkedIn and came across a case study regarding the use of social media to increase membership to a LinkedIn group, which then drove conference attendance. I interviewed Bob Etheridge, social media aficionado, to learn more about his experience.

Bob Etheridge’s background has been primarily in the online recruitment and job board industry. In 1999, he co-founded JobCircle.com, a regional job board in Philadelphia and 2003,  started a physical Job Fair division for the company, thus entering the event production and  marketing world. The economic downturn and lack of hiring had a large impact on the business, so in May, they took their event production experience and created a B to B conference called Social Media Plus, capitalizing on the growth and interest in Social Media. Bob can be reached at [email protected].

1) We both belong to the same LinkedIn Group and you mentioned how you increased membership to a group you were managing for a conference. Can you provide an overview of what you did?
Yes, creating a Linkedin Group is easy enough, inviting your first degree connections to join the group is also relatively easy.  However, growing your group quickly after that becomes a challenge.

November 21, 2022 – Per Bob’s request, I have replaced the previous text with the below two paragraphs:

We utilized a service called Community Leadership offered by a company called Network Sunday. Network Sunday has virtual assistants that can help you with your Social Media marketing outreach. Network Sunday works with business development  and conference marketing professionals to leverage Linkedin to help grow communities, create awareness and build personal and professional brand.

By joining relevant, Industry specific Linkedin groups using the Advanced People Search engine on Linkedin, we created a targeted list of members who would most likely be interested in learning about Social Media and networking with other Social Media Marketing professionals. We then invited these people, through Linkedin, to join the Social Media Plus Conference group using a simple, straight forward message. The campaign lasted for approximately 2 months before the conference.

2) Besides LinkedIn, did you use any other marketing and social media tactics? If so, how did you leverage these tactics for driving attendance. 
Yes, we created a Facebook page and a Twitter account for the event. While Twitter was a great tool for communication during and after the conference with our #SMPlus hashtag, neither produced significant results in driving attendees.

3) What was the result of your efforts?
The response was phenomenal. In 2 months, our Conference group grew from 50 members to around 1800 and over 700 people attended the conference.  We did some traditional marketing such as direct mail and e-mail marketing, but Linkedin was the most effective marketing tool by far. We tracked the click through bit.ly URL’s, measuring the use of unique coupon codes that we offered and by comparing the final attendee list to our Linkedin Group members. 450 attendees had joined the Social Media Plus Linkedin group prior to the conference. (Disclaimer – Bob was so impressed with the results that Network Sunday provided, he is now the US Partner helping other conference organizers in their Marketing efforts).

4) What three tips would you provide to those seeking to use social media to promote their conference?

 1) Social Media Marketing is a two way street. Be prepared to spend time communicating directly with your audience.

2) Don’t over sell in your Marketing message. Less is more in this case. People want to explore and learn things on their own. If they have specific questions, they’ll reach out to you.

3) Don’t go it alone. Social Media Marketing can be time consuming and often companies start off with a bang, but burn out quickly. Social Media Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.