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Get your potential attendees interacting with you early on by enabling some measure of feedback
WAYS TO USE SOCIAL MEDIA TO 7CREATE BUZZ WORTHY EVENTS
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. Engage Get your potential attendees interacting with you early on by enabling some measure of feedback or crowd sourcing on the conference programming.
An easier way to do this would be to utilize something like Crowd Campaign, which gives participants a way to suggest content, and for others to vote on it.
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. Intrigue Almost all events have an official Web site. But very few( except for the geek events) take full advantage of all the free event listing and event management opportunities. At a minimum, you should create event pages on: – Facebook Events – Eventbrite( where you can also sell tickets, if you’ re so inclined) – Upcoming – Linkedin( if it’ s a business event)
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. Invigorate As the event draws closer, you have to pull potential attendees off of the fence with content hors d’ ouerves. Start a Twitter contest. Online Marketing Summit does this well, awarding free registration to the conference for people that can correctly answer marketing trivia via their Twitter feed.
Get your speakers to produce teaser content. A simple video would be ideal.
Consider setting up a Netvibes. com page for the event, and creating a centralized repository for all blog posts by speakers. Netvibes. com is free, and all you need to do is pick a layout, and then subscribe to the RSS feeds of each speaker’ s blog.
Use Pitchengine to create multi-media enabled press releases, and send the URL for the release to any and all“ maybes” on your list.
Gather social information from all registrants. Create a Twitter list of all attendees, and update it each time a new person registers.
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. Integrate Now we’ re talking about the onsite experience, which is where social media can really add impact and get people talking.
Pick a hash tag for your event, so attendees and remote watchers can monitor on Twitter. Shorter the better, please. Then, start your conference with an unofficial Tweet-up. It gets your likely content creators motivated and excited. Create an event within the event by running contests on Twitter during the conference.
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. Inform I’ m a big fan of voting via text message, and I’ d like to see more events more toward session evaluations through that same interface. Do we really need to be killing trees for written speaker evaluation forms, not to mention the en1vironmental impact of hundreds of golf pencils.
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. Propagate Create your own media during the event. Via Ustream( and its amazing iphone app) you can stream live video of your event for free. Why wouldn’ t you?
Set up an official Flickr gallery for the event, and encourage attendees to take photos and upload them. Give prizes for Photo of the Day.
Make a daily post-show podcast, interviewing speakers, sponsors, and attendees.
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. Aggregate Take the conference content and spread it as widely as possible. Your goal is to get the doubters that didn’ t come this year to view that content and decide to go the next year.
Take every conference presentation, and instead of just putting them on your Web site or emailing links to attendees, release them on SlideShare( one per day for maximum impact)
Provide Twitter transcripts to attendees, and also post it to your various event pages.