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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 .