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.

In terms of promotion, Heather Cox, VP, PR, Events and Product Development, FierceMarkets, spoke about integrating content with event promotion on their web sites, and efforts to produce personalized emails. She also emphasized the ongoing importance of split testing their promo, and showed the basic layout for their email promotion, which is the result of much split testing. It’s good to hear that a company is taking split testing seriously in an electronic context. Fiercemarket’s email template would be a good starting point for anyone producing electronic promotion. I see a wide variety of design latitude in event email promotion, which tells me that promotion design is being left to designers: aesthetic in a design sense but clueless in a marketing sense. Fiercemarkets has also experimented with URL’s for events and found that they are most successful with a sub-URL of their media sites. Joy Puzzo, Corporate Audience Development Director, Advanstar spoke about the importance of granular list segmentation, developing a model for successful lists and then modeling those databases externally. She also indicated that list rental agencies are very willing to negotiate these days.