9 ways to make your next event social media friendly

I came back from a recent event here in Rochester called the Social Share Summit.  I was both attending and speaking on one of the panels discussing B2B Social Media.  It was an all day event that featured a few panels beside mine and a few keynote speakers.

Yawning yet?

Now don't get me wrong there was some flashes of great content and I thought my panel went well but there was something lacking.  By the afternoon you could see the drag of the day taking its toll(I'm glad our panel was done by around 2:15).  It got me thinking about ways to encourage more interaction from attendies at events like this since its hard to keep focus for that long, especially when its mostly listening to others speak.

Here are 9 ways to get people more socially engaged at an event:

1. Everyone gets handed a printed agenda with the following info:
1. Event hashtag for Twitter
2. QR code to scan to "Like" the event on Facebook, or auto generate a Tweet.
3. Twitter handles of everyone who is speaking.
2. Invite people to check in with plenty of visual signage in the halls and in the room(even the bathrooms).
3. Assign someone from the organization who created/organized the event to create a steady stream of content from it.  This is photos, videos, etc and make sure to get peoples names and handles so they get noticed on social channels.  Make people feel important, its goes a long way.
4. Large screen with constantly updated tweets about the event.  This could easily become a distraction but I think this encourages more people to interact to see their handles come up on the big screen.
5. Partner with a charity and offer an easy way to donate to them.  This is one for the downtime either between speakers or during a boring stretch of someones speech.  Have the option to text to donate and especially promote that donation via social.  It keeps people realizing the bigger picture and makes them feel good.  That's a great association you want to have with your event.
6. On every slide of every presentation - Twitter handle of the speaker and a QR code(or URL) that you can download the presentation from.  Make it really easy for the audience to get the speakers content, they are more likely to share it.

What have you seen that you would add to this list?

The web of One

What's the effect of all the personalization on the web?  Watch this video and see where this feature can actually deprive us of a truly "open" web experience.

Social Media and the end of the Chick Flick(finally)

Watch this video.  Johanna Blakley does a wonderful job walking us through how the rise in use of social media is killing the outdated practice of targeting media by age/gender.  Advertisers should target interests and not make assumptions about potential customers based on their age ranges.

What do you think?

B2B Social Media Strategy - 3 things to consider

Whenever I give a talk about my work in the B2B social media space I get a some consistent questions about it.  There always seems to be a perceived chasm between social media for B2C online behavior and B2B online behavior.  I say perceived because we need to remember that no matter who is interacting with social media and how they are doing it, its a person plain and simple.  The same person who can click "buy" for a $100 digital camera is the same person who can sign a $500k check on a piece of equipment for their business.  In keeping with that thinking, it would be a mistake to think that there is no place for B2B in social media.

Here are some things I have learned along my journey:

1. Don't force it on people - by "it" I mean any social channel(Twitter, Facebook, etc) and by "people" I mean executives.  While it would may be great for your company's image if the CEO jumped right into Twitter and became a star, if it hasn't happened yet, it probably never will.  Its hard work to maintain a solid presense on any social media channel.  It won't happen by accident, or by force.
   
2. Have a keyword strategy - don't think "how does SEO fit with social?"  Thats the wrong question.  Always focus all online content on your most important keywords.  I mean everything.  That should drive every tweet, video and blog post.  Think of all online content as perminant(Thanks Google!) so while that blog post that a subject matter expert wrote about how to optimize your print shop for a better printing workflow may not have brought in a ton of initial traffic, it gets indexed by Google and lives for a long time.  Even if it only gets a trickle of traffic over time since the B2B buying cycle is long this post will have more legs than almost any other outreach.
   
3. Align with others - make social media a "normal" part of the marketing/PR mix.  Condition people to include it at the beginning and not at the end as an afterthought.  This is another channel to work in with a different set of rules.  Just like you would not make a radio commercial the same as a TV one, you wouldn't create a blog post the same as a YouTube video.