Social Media for Meeting Professionals
Who's Online
Written by Farrah Pirkle Tuesday, 23 February 2010 15:13
Are you engaging with your meeting attendees to your fullest potential? Do you feel that your meeting attendance is as high as you want it to be? If you answered no to either of these questions and you have a desire to increase registrations, measure learning outcomes, and increase your overall ROI, you are ready to join the social media revolution. Your members and attendees desire something more than the traditional meeting or training session. They are not just looking to attend a meeting, get their handouts, and leave. They want an experience that allows them to network, earn CEU's, or increase their own ROI, but they also have a desire to share and be active participants in this valuable experience. Traditional marketing campaigns are costly and not considered environmentally friendly, and traditional meetings offer little interaction or reflection for participants. Social media offers you an economical alternative to traditional marketing and allows you to engage attendees before, during, and after your meeting or conference.
There are many ways to use Social Media, Twitter specifically, before, during, and after your meeting to engage your participants. Before your meetings you can use it to engage potential exhibitors, presenters, and attendees to increase registration and improve meeting quality. Using your conference website to highlight your Twitter feed increases traffic and search engine optimization when potential participants use key words to search for your website. During your event you can use Twitter and Facebook to schedule on-site meetings and social events, allow attendees to check out what is happening at other educational sessions, and to engage participants during actual educational sessions. Conference planners can create a key phrase for their conference attendees to use throughout the conference. For instance, according to the Meetings Podcast (http://tinyurl.com/yh6qlbm), the Blogworld conference from 2008 told their attendees to use the twitter tag #bwe08 after every tweet they tweeted about the conference. This allowed all participants to follow this tag throughout for news, changes, and items of interest. Another great way for conference organizers to use Twitter is to review tweets for real time feedback. If participants are complaining about the temperature in all of the rooms, for instance, organizers can work to change that. One of the most interesting ways to use Twitter during educational sessions is to have a feed for a certian tag phrase chosen by the facilitator on the powerpoint presentation throughout the session. This way people can submit feedback and interact in real time via Twitter, allowing the speaker to use that feedback to guide the session. Lastly, many planners have used Twitter to get a head start on promoting their meeting or conference for the following year and have even had success with getting on-site registrations via Twitter for future meetings.
Social media is an affordable and easy tool that all planners and meeting professionals can use to improve their experience. By listening to your audience and interacting with them you build energy and even momentum and excitement for registration for the following year's meeting. With 75% of Americans maintaining an account on Twitter or Facebook, it is clear that social media is a tool that can work for you if used consistently and correctly. Twitter logs more than three million tweets every day, while Facebook clocks over five billion minutes of usage time in a twenty-four hour period. Sound intimidating and time consuming? You may not have the knowledge or the time to tweet or blog on a daily or weekly basis but we do. Let Marketing Mud design a social media experience that fits your needs and goals. Whether you need us to just get the ball rolling for you or you need us to do daily research and engage with potential customers and attendees we have a package that will work for you. Find us on Twitter atwww.Twitter.com/marketingmud or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/marketingmud!
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