5 Tips For Enabling Social Buzz At Events
The old days of only using paper survey sheets are gone
The days of handing out survey forms after events as the only measurement to the success of an event are long since gone. Now we can get a flavor of what is trending in real time. Social Media is now an increasing aspect of most events so how can we gauge what is happening, and how can we look back at what happened?
5 tips for enabling the social buzz at an event
1) Event hashtag
2) Reliable wireless network
3) Great content
4) Use a location based service like Foursquare to create a place for people to checkin at your event.
5) Drive the back-channel conversation and display event hashtag tweets.
It goes without saying that great content is essential to achieving positive sentiment social buzz. Try and mention the back channel through the event and make sure your host makes time to review questions and insights from the back channel.
I attended the DigiPharm 2012 event in London last week. I will use this as an example of social media monitoring. DigiPharm is the Strategic digital marketing conference for the pharmaceutical industry. It was a great event to be involved with. I was a guest speaker on the second day.
(Foursquare checkin for DigiPharm 2012)
Twitter is a supper channel for creating social buzz at an event. In this case the event hashtag was #digipharm, and this was clearly communicated to the delegates. The DigiPharm event had a reliable wireless network. I entered the code once, and that was it. At other events, I recall having to enter the code multiple times a day, and at another event I attended in February this year, the network just could not handle the the task of staying up for more than 20 minutes.
On the morning of the second day of DigiPharm 2012, I created a Foursquare checkin for the event, and a tip, both of which were used by the delegates.
The DigiPharm event did include questions from the back channel. One example I recall was from Len Starnes who is based in Berlin, as one of the speakers had included the results of one of his LinkedIn polls in their slide deck.
Tracking the event hashtag
I have used many tools for tracking event tweets that are using a particular hashtag. Twitter search is one of those options. This time I used Hootsuite. I searched for the event hashtag and then kept the results page refreshed to see the new tweets coming in. Using Hootsuite makes it easy to retweet using different accounts.
The tweet volume was good during this event.
(Tweet volume tracked by tweetarchivist.com)
Tweetreach can also be used to track tweet volume, but this will typically show the most recent 50 tweets. Topsy.com is solid gold, but I am also a big fan of the tweet archivist for nice visual summaries.There are many other sites.
Some events can still have activity weeks after the event. For DigiPharm, the creation of an infographic from Oxyme boosted the use of the hashtag days after the event finished.
The most comprehensive results can be obtained by using a Social listening tool.
Skilled analysts can create the best results from these tools, or very experienced users. The tracking can cover multiple channels. For DigiPharm, some tracking was carried out by a company called Oxyme. Displaying the results in a clear sharable format contributes to viral sharing. Oxyme decided to create an Infographic, shown below. A wise move indeed. Funnily enough, I had a meeting today with Joep Arts and Rositsa Vasileva from Oxyme. A small world indeed.
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Social Networking at trade shows
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About The Author:
Clive Roach is the social media strategist for Philips Healthcare. He is active with strategy development, activation, governance, projects and educational training activities for all aspects of social media within Philips Healthcare. Clive has been working in the eMarketing area since 1997, and previously held roles in engineering, design and sales. Clive is also practical in addition to his current strategic role. In addition to this blog, he tweets daily on three Twitter accounts, has two Facebook fan pages, Google+, Pinterest, So.cl, Instagram, and participates in many other social networks.
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