I enjoyed this front-line review on the application of Periscope employed as a real-time marketing tool at an established trade show event. Periscope enables live webcasting from your smart phone. This app, now owned by Twitter, launched in March and they’ve just announced that they’ve signed up over 10 million Periscope accounts. Nipping at the heels of Periscope is Meerkat, which created a lot of buzz at South by Southwest this year. B2B events producers would be advised to keep an eye on these tools that put the power of “presence” into the hands of your clients.
This great post from Brian Solis gives a good breakdown of Forrester’s five year forecast on interactive advertising spending. While the bulk of this revenue comes from search, the highest compound annual growth rate is in social media, at 34% and increasing to over $3 billion by 2014. As we’ve argued frequently in these posts, event media is (or must become) social media. Thus we take a bit of warmth in this cold winter of our recession.
In terms of scale and innovation, B2C marketers are way out on the cutting edge of creating a social media marketing experience, and this Mashable post about the same Forrester Read more…
I’m endless fascinated by opportunities to integrate free social media tools into events. Junta42 features an excellent slide presentation on the 10 Best Kept Secrets of Social Media by Scott Abel, which was part of his presentation at Web Content 2009. Without any audio, some pages are a little opaque, but a quick scan should give you a handful of new ideas (blow it up to full screen size to read the small copy): Read more…
I saw this at last night’s New York Tech Meetup: Event press releases usually get lost in the mass of PR spam that editors have to deal with. PR MatchPoint matches your press release or story pitch to editors or bloggers who are likely to actually be interested in your information. It looks at a database of articles to try and pick out keywords that match those in your release, then it tells you which editors are closely matched. Other people at the Meetup said that this was a lot like a tool called Cision. I’m not closely familiar with either of these sites so I can’t recommend them. But event PR Read more…
We do a lot of posting to promote events and web sites. For almost a year, I’ve focused heavily on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn Groups, Facebook. (There also seem to be a lot of Ning-based industry sites popping up recently.) Twitter seemed like a lightweight entry into the category of social media, and I regarded it as a playground for tweens with a lot of free time.
This month I finally got around to making a half-hearted promo effort on Twitter. I was surprised to see the number of “followers” we were able to acquire without much effort, and after a few brief promotional “tweets” I was startled to discover that Twitter was driving almost 20% of the traffic to the web site we were promoting.
So I’m sold on the potential, and trying to develop my own brief on best practices. A couple of orgs that seem to be doing a good job touting their events: Glue Conference, Read more…
In spite of the efforts of many conference and trade show organizers, conferences and trade shows are the primary form of social media in B2B. We event organizers can proudly say that our products were the original expression of the imperative need for social media in the business marketing mix. Unfortunately, our experience traps us in a box. We have focused a lifetime of effort on space sales, sponsorship schemes, and attendance brochures. The Zen approach would be to start from zero—obliterate the memory of past projects and say, “I have the Internet and these tools, I need to bring these people together–where shall I begin?”
With a Zen-like detachment from B2B markets (because the focus is B2C), this report from Aberdeen Group on The ROI on Social Media Marketing will be of benefit to event producers. There are several essential points made here that merit strong consideration Read more…
In the early days (around the turn of the century) I experienced a temporary nirvana wherein a basic promotional email blast to a qualified list regarding a decent conference could produce a response as high as 3%. We slashed our postal mailing budgets and reaped the benefits of free electronic promotion.
As the world caught on, response rates dropped. We started producing simple newsletters, or integrating our promotion with existing newsletter email. We continued to see delivery and open rates drop, and users opt out. I currently recommend at least a targeted postal mailing as part of an event marketing effort—not because response rates are good, but because the email channel is quickly exhausted and we have to use every promotional tool to recruit additional, incremental attendance. (I’m also looking at going back to fax promo as well—when was the last time you received a decent fax promo?)
It’s silly to cut down trees just because the electronic channel is choked with spam. One of the better potential solutions is outlined here by David Kalman of Terella. Read more…