B2B Presence » marketing

Keep an Eye on Periscope and Other Participant-Driven On-Site Videocasting Tools

Bill Rutledge — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 18:47:11 +0000

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.

The Big $ocial: Forrester Media Projections

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:01:15 +0000

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 study includes a useful list of marketing case studies. Try to look beyond the ridiculous memes of contests, point-earning, twitter clues, and self-made videos. How do these marketing efforts really drive user involvement? How does that deliver value to the marketer? I’m just asking.

A Universe of Free Social Media Tools

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:57:51 +0000

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):

10 Web 2.0 Tools Marketers Can Use Today

View more Microsoft Word documents from Scott Abel.

Event PR Tools: Who Cares About Your Event?

Bill Rutledge — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:29:43 +0000

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 is often an afterthought, because of the limited return for work done. These tools might make the effort more productive.

BTW: NY Tech Meetup now over 600 attendees SRO at a huge theater at FIT, growing monthly–amazing. See Meetup. Organizers apparently clueless on how to monetize this. Or maybe that’s why it’s successful.

I Doubted Twitter and Twitter Forgave Me, Part I

Bill Rutledge — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:19:41 +0000

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, organized by Phil Becker, who built the impressive Digital ID World. Also I get a lot of messages from Lauren Touby of Mediabistro, who frequently mentions that she “has a few discount tickets” available to her events.

These messages seem personal in a way that email does not. Maybe it’s because this is new. I’d be interested in hearing about other events that are leveraging Twitter. I’ve also seen some interesting ways that Twitter can be integrated into an event on-site. I’ll write about that next.

Business Event Media is Social Media

Bill Rutledge — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 16:45:01 +0000

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 for anyone developing a forum for professional networking.

First there are several brief case studies in customer “brand advocacy” wherein marketers have converters their customers into word of mouth advertising machines. These case studies are “incredible” (in the negative sense of the word: without credibility) and I’d be interested in seeing more information on how this might work. Google offers no leads. However, event organizers should consider two dimensions of this phenomenon: How do I get my clients to become my brand advocates? And: how do I get my clients to use my events to leverage their own brand advocacy?

Secondly this report emphasizes the importance of measuring social media marketing results. Key benchmarks are suggested: simple ROI, brand awareness, customer engagement, share of voice (negative vs. positive WoM), likelihood to recommend, level of influence. Word of mouth in general, and social media in particular is a diffuse and highly personal activity. However, we can measure inputs and outputs, make comparisons and draw conclusions. This would be a great “crowd sourcing” project for a small group of event organizers.

Finally a thought for Pope Benedict who, on the Vatican YouTube channel, praised digital media, but warned that obsession with certain technologies “may isolate individuals from real social interaction while also disrupting the patterns of rest, silence, and reflection that are necessary for human development.”

I say, hey event media professionals, let’s do the Pope a solid: Let’s figure out how to turn isolating technologies into community-building tools.

The Evolution of Email Promotion

Bill Rutledge — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:28:56 +0000

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. This scheme would need to be in broad use to be effective. My thought is that this might be best implemented as an open-source specification, then any number of companies could offer services that comply with the spec. Maybe this is a job for the Direct Marketing Association, or the Interactive Advertising Bureau (or maybe Google). I’m sure that someone out there has looked into implementing this in some form, and I’d be interested in hearing about anything similar.