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Join me at the Inbound Marketing Summit, September 14/15 Boston

2011-07-28T17:34:00.000-04:00

This year's 5th annual Inbound Marketing Summit is where I'll be going to see Guy Kawasaki on September 14/15 in Boston. Save 20% on your registration when you use Promo Code: IMSP2. If you're going, ping me and we can share a beverage at some point.... http://t.co/NgAvGLt

How to Build a Target Persona

2010-10-07T13:20:00.004-04:00

Here is a quick tip and one of the 5 steps to long term success in social media at which I will be speaking on during the Marketing Challenges Workshop at the MTO Summit in DC on November 9th:

Step Number Two: Learn how to Build a Target Persona to Reach Your Buyer Audience

In order to be successful with social media, you are going to need to build an audience to whom you’ll target your content efforts. These ‘straw men’ are called ‘target personas’. And what exactly is a target persona and how do you develop them?

A target persona is a model of an ideal customer which incorporates primary research and data, such as income and gender, with personality traits, such as goals, attitudes, behaviors and interests. All of this is put together in a short statement which describes the ideal customer’s personality as it relates to your business.

Let’s get started on how to develop your target personas:

• Start with three types of customers who you’d like to develop into target personas;

• Go into your customer data. Once you have chosen three types of customer, answer as many questions about them as you can, using the information you already have. Look at averages and aggregate data to get some of the basic information about your personas—age, income, shopping habits, average spend and frequency of visits to your site. If you don’t have all of the information, use what you know to fill in the blanks. Make sure you update this information as you learn more about your customer segments;

• Write a summary for each target persona. Aggregate what you’ve learned from your customer data and what you have observed or instinctually know and use this information to write a summary which describes this “perfect customer.” Include his/her likes and interests, goals and motivations, interactions with your site and other relevant information. Keep the summary interesting and brief and write it as if you’re describing someone you know. Give your personas names as well as pictures to make them real;

Creating your target personas will help you better understand your customers and what influences their interactions with you. You can improve your customer’s online and offline experiences much more easily, and help people throughout the company have a uniform understanding of your customers, their needs and wants. Your target personas allow you to develop more tailored marketing strategies meant to reach people, not data. Continually updating, modifying and adding to your personas as you learn more about your customers and your target audience will keep your marketing fresh, relevant, personal and effective.

Remember to do this both for current and future customers as they may be different.

For more information on the MTO Summit in DC, go here: www.mtosummit.com

Hey I'm speaking at the MTO Summit!

2010-09-23T10:51:00.001-04:00

Tarsus Advon’s MTO Summit, scheduled Nov. 9-10 at the Hilton Alexandria Hotel in Alexandria, Va., has announced a stellar lineup of industry thought leaders as speakers and sessions designed to engage show organizers and suppliers in the event industry.

“We are excited with the content, speakers and sponsor participation for the upcoming MTO Summit” said Stephen Nold, founder of the MTO Summit and president of Tarsus Advon. “With the theme ‘Technology: It’s Time to Execute’ our audience will be told to quit thinking about strategic technology design and challenged to start implementing.”

Nold said attendees will not find any “social media basics” sessions since “we are beyond teaching how to create a Facebook account.”

The day before the MTO Summit kicks off, the Marketing Challenges Workshop will be led by Warwick Davies - Principal of The Event Mechanic!, who was responsible for internationally recognizable event brands such as the Macworld Conference and Expo, LinuxWorld Conference and Expo and the Customer Relationship Management Conference and Exposition worldwide.

According to Davies, the session was born from the idea that there are challenges of marketing given the economy and the plethora of technology options available to optimize, automate and streamline many event business functions, including marketing.

He added that what’s missing in event marketing is engagement. “The days of pressing a button and sending hundreds of thousands of e-mails blindly to a database that may not know or care about you are if not gone, will soon be past as open rates plummet,” Davies said. “Given that event marketers have more work and pressure to deliver quality relevant audiences than ever, would it possible to boil down the biggest marketing event challenges into understandable and actionable solutions in a half a day? I think it can.”

The following day will be packed with informative sessions, including an opening keynote by Dax Callner, vice president of Innovation Team of Momentum Worldwide. Callner will discuss how to effectively implement digital media strategies and discuss the realities of ROI of social marketing. He'll be sharing case studies from Dell, American Express and other top brands.

There are even more sessions on tap:

* “Disruption and the Evolution of Meetings” - will explore dynamic architecture for face-to-face meetings that harnesses the power of the community, supports the technologies that make collaboration possible, and disrupts traditional thinking. Panelists include Shawn O’Keefe, Interactive Festival Producer at South by Southwest, and Toby Daniels, co-founder and CEO at Crowdcentric.

* “Executing With Technology” – will look at how companies have integrated technology effectively into their events as part of the Show Manager Track. Panelists include Steve Lazarus, lead strategist for IBM, Mark Fissell, director of new product development for Gartner Events and Jaime Romero, vice president of AxialMarket.

* “Key Tools to Developing Trade Show and Marketing Communications Strategies” – will discuss what technology framework exhibitors should consider in the design of their trade show floor technology as part of the Exhibitor Track. The session will be led by Chris Justice, CEO of Sparksight.

* “What Do We Sell” – will be led by trade show industry experts Chris Brown, who oversees The NAB Show, and Shawn Pierce, who leads the housing and reg division for Experient. The session will address - should our industry start questioning many of the foundation principles upon which the exhibition business models have been built?

After a full day of sessions, the evening will feature the launch of the first-ever TSNN Event Excellence Awards at which five awards will be given for three growing shows, an industry icon and a technology innovation award.

To register or for more information on the MTO Summit or TSNN Event Excellence Awards please visit www.mtosummit.com.

For sponsorship possibilities, contact Chris Anderson – TSNN manager of business development, at canderson@tsnn.com or 512-992-6297.

MTO Summit

In 2008, Tarsus Advon launched MTO Summit, a series of executive level conferences which bring together the buyers and supplies of technology in the events industry. The goal of MTO Summit is to bring an extension of MeetingTechOnline website into reality with a face-to-face networking event. These nationwide conferences educate association executives, show producers and management on technology in the events industry, and introduce technology suppliers who are changing the way technology is used. For more information and to register for the MTO Summit go to: www.mtosummit.com

About Tarsus Advon

Based in Austin, Tarsus Advon oversees online publications and community portals that provide technology information and education for the event and tradeshow industry. Tarsus Advon also conducts research with show organizers, technology suppliers, and industry experts. Qualitative and quantitative data are respectively gathered though primary sources and survey analysis. Events are designed to educate event and exhibition professionals about the latest trends and developments in technology. Tarsus Group acquired Tarsus Advon in 2010

TSNN Press Contact:
Arlene Shows
ashows(at)tarsus(dot)com
603-925-1160

###

Open sourcing your event

2010-09-15T11:10:00.000-04:00

Love this article as a concept from: Eventmanagerblog.com

Open sourcing your event. A featured interview with Harrison Owen
December 12, 2007 By Julius Solaris

It is a great honor for this blog to host Harrison Owen as a part of the featured interviews section.

Harrison has worked on virtually every continent with organizations ranging from small villages to large corporations and NGOs. His major concern has been to assist organizations as they negotiate a transforming world. In some cases his role has been little more than holding the hands of the anxious. In other situations his function was more overt, assisting organizations in the sometimes painful process of self-understanding and renewal. In all situations the organizational mythology and culture was the focal point, and the power of self-organization the ultimate driver.

For what concerns events Harrison Owen is the voice of Open Space Technology which he has theorized and discussed in his masterpiece Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide which I invite you to read if you approaching the world of Barcamps, Unconferences or simply if you want to add a flare of Open Source concepts to your event.

Let’s see what Harrison has told us.

- What is the role (if there is one) of event coordinators in Open Space Technology (OST) events?

Pretty much the same as in all other events – taking care of space, logistics, and meals. But it is a lot simpler because the meeting basically runs itself (self-organization) and the participants take responsibility for their needs and actions. Even with very large gatherings (1000-2000+) this is true. In a curious way, the real trick is NOT to do stuff.

- What are the first steps we should take to integrate OST practices in our next event?

The very first step is to really make sure that you actually want to use Open Space. Open Space is marvelous when you have highly complex issues and a great diversity of participants. It is absolutely the wrong thing if the sponsor wants to remain in control of what is going on, both in terms of the happenings during the gathering and the final results. Control resides with the participants who will decide what they want to talk about, how they want to do that – and the conclusions that result will be theirs. This may sound like total chaos and pandemonium but the experience is that the people will take charge of what they care about and the results can be almost mind-blowing. For example a group of engineers at Boeing re-designed the manufacturing process for making doors on their airplanes. They did this in two days when everybody “knew” that doing something like this could take several years. Not every Open Space produces results like that, but after 20 years and several 100,000 iterations in 134 countries it has become quite clear that the Boeing experience is not unique.

- Three attributes of the perfect OST event

I hate to say it, but every Open Space is perfect J And the common attributes are 1) High Learning – folks regularly think impossible thoughts and come up with unthinkable solutions. 2) High Play – everything takes place in a playful, albeit respectful environment. Even when the central issue is deadly serious (as with Palestinians and Israelis working on the issues of war and peace) – it is quite common to hear laughter breaking out followed by hugs. 3) Appropriate structure and control – the level of structure and control in the typical Open Space event is so complex that no planning committee would even dare suggest it, but that structure and control is all emergent. It comes from the people themselves. In a gathering of 2108 German Psychiatrists, the participants created 236 concurrent sessions which all ran over the course of a single day and each session produced a written report. That is complex structure and control! 4) Genuine Community – One of the curious things about Open Space is that even mortal enemies (literally people who have been killing each other) will treat each other with respect, and most often end up liking each other (hugs).

- Why a sponsor would like to support an OST event?

The predisposing conditions for an Open Space are as follows: 1) A real business issue, however you might define “business – that people really care about. 2) Enormous complexity in terms of that issue such that no single person or even a very smart group could possibly get their arms around it. 3) Great diversity of the participants in terms of points of view, disciplines, economic status, education etc. 4) Lot of passion and conflict. 5) A Decision time of yesterday – in short this is an issue that needs to be dealt with NOW!

- What is the role of volunteers in OST?

If by “volunteers” you mean people that help out, but don’t participate – that role is minimal to non-existent. Everybody there should care to be there – and if they don’t care about the issue, no reason for them to come. And if they are there, and do care – the will take care of just about everything. Seems to work every time.

How to organize a Tweet up

2010-06-29T20:13:00.001-04:00

Great article from Best events.....

___________________________________________________

Twitter meet-ups, or Tweetups as they’re commonly called, are pretty much ubiquitous these days. Despite the random awkward conversations that can result when you have more than 140 characters to express yourself, Tweetups take an otherwise great service like Twitter and turn it into something much bigger.

Why? Because you are able to gather with online friends, meet new contacts to enhance your career and have a few drinks. So here are a few quick tips for organizing and managing the event.

Organizing the Tweetup

Do utilize your Twitter network as a way to drum up support, help and ideas. The number of p.r. and marketing people on Twitter now is astounding. Use their collective wisdom and networks to create buzz and support for your event.

Do actually visit the venue. Seems incredibly simple right? But not everyone takes the time and effort to actually visit the bar, conference room or park where the Tweetup will happen. I’ve never heard of anyone making a great business connection at a dark dive bar.

Do plan for more people to show up than you think. It’s Twitter. These people do know how to spread the word better than anyone. Everyone should be welcome and thus you should plan to accommodate them.

Do ensure a few core people/speakers are at the event. Trust me, if @ChrisBrogan or @GregVerdino (or a few well-known personalities in your industry) are at an event, it will draw a lot more buzz than @stuartcfoster.

Do use email. Even though it supposedly has fallen out of favor, having the contact information for a variety of individuals is beneficial for all involved. You can keep this core group informed of developments.

Do use a service like Eventbrite, Amiando or meetup.com to organize your guests, collect donations and otherwise provide shareable content. It takes all the legwork out of the administrative work that a large Tweetup entails. If you’re planning on a smaller gathering, this may not be necessary and you can use Facebook or your blog to organize.

Don’t secure a venue with limited or no WiFi. At a minimum, the CrackBerry/ iPhone users should have good service. People like technology. But they won’t like YOU if they can’t use their tech at your event.

Don’t have an event in an inappropriate place. If you’re having 200 people and you decide to squeeze them into a 20 by 20 room, it may not be a good idea. If you have a dj at a networking event, it may not be a good idea. If you have an event where it’s difficult to communicate in any way, it might be a bad idea. You get the idea?

Don’t have a vague premise for the Tweetup. Most people want to know what they’re here for so they can dress or plan accordingly. No one wants to be the guy who shows up in jeans to the black tie event. So ensure this doesn’t happen by having a clearly defined cause or purpose for the Tweetup.

Don’t forget to plan ahead. If you spend the time, money and energy into putting together a Tweetup, don’t pull it together at the last minute. Plan accordingly and do your homework.

At the Tweetup

Do get to the event early. Simple manners. As the organizer, you should arrive early to make sure people feel welcomed as they arrive, the refreshments are there and all of the materials are ready to go.

Do collect business cards. Most folks will be card-carrying members of your industry and will be at the Tweetup to network. If you have an electronic scanner or electronic business card technology, this is even better. You can send a list of attendees to your email list, providing additional value.

Do provide food. If you schedule a Tweetup around meal-time, provide food. If you don’t plan on providing food, let your attendees know. Sometimes at these events I think my stomach does more networking than my mouth.

Don’t fade into the background. If it’s your event, you’d better be front and center to handle and address any concerns or problems that may arise.

Don’t forget name tags. If I can’t see your Twitter name, I won’t know who you are. The same is true for all people at your event.

Don’t blow people off. Trust me. Nothing is worse than being snubbed. So if you want to have a great Tweetup, you have to talk to the 21-year-old with the same respect that you would show Seth Godin. Just good business sense and karma.

Don’t go open bar. Unless you want complete shenanigans (and to be broke), you don’t want @JoeBusinessGuy to be completely tanked. Also it weeds out people just after the free booze.

Tweetups are fun, productive, and great for walking away with a lot of contacts and leads. So if you’re feeling adventurous and don’t mind doing a bit of hustling, you can host your own Tweetup. I’m looking forward to attending it. —Stuart Foster

Sixteen Reasons Why Your Social Media Isn’t Working

2010-06-10T10:55:00.001-04:00

Great article and a good reminder to get back to basics on social media...

http://biznik.com/articles/sixteen-reasons-why-your-social-media-isnt-working?utm_source=articles&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2010-06-09

LinkedIn Is Lead Gen Leader in Customer Conversion

2010-06-09T10:23:00.002-04:00

from min B2B

As more consumers engage with social media, two trends within the b2b arena
are becoming clear: b2b marketers are expanding their social media footprint,
and the resultant value of these efforts— including lead generation and customer
conversion—are crystallizing.

This year there are an estimated 127 million users of social networks. That
number is expected to increase to 140 million users in 2011, according to the
new “B2B Social Media Marketing Heats Up” report from eMarketer. And, by 2014, eMarketer predicts that figure will come close to 165 million users, or two-thirds of all Internet users.

B2b marketers are striving to maintain their efforts amid this massive expansion.
According to the eMarketer report, the number of b2b marketers using social
media was 57% in 2009, up from 15% just two years earlier. And data shows that interactive marketing budgets within b2b now comprise 40% of total spend.
As marketers delve in, they are becoming better acquainted with lead generation
and conversion tactics in this new realm.

When it comes to acquiring customers, social networking site LinkedIn takes top
honors (see chart, below right). Nearly half (45%) of b2b companies responding
to an inbound marketing survey reported that efforts on LinkedIn directly resulted
in a new customer.

The second most effective social media tool for converting customers is a company
blog, through which 43% of responding companies gained a customer. Third in the b2b realm is Twitter (38%), and Facebook is the fourth most effective channel, with one-third of companies claiming a conversion.

These conversion rates match the expectations of b2b marketers. According to a separate study from DemandGen that is contained within the eMarketer report, b2b marketers ranked social media channels in the following order as most effective at generating leads: LinkedIn (58%), company blog (35%), Twitter (31%) and
Facebook (17%).

Tips to Supercharge Your Home Based Business with Your Blog

2010-05-13T13:16:00.001-04:00

Great article I found on one of my LinkedIn groups by Dan Lambeth:

If you don’t have a blog for your home based business you are leaving a lot of money on the table. You also need to have a self hosted blog because the only blogs that work effectively are the ones that are updated regularly. You don’t want to put a lot of work into one only to have it taken away. If you don’t have a Wordpress blog you need to get one because Google loves them and you make your own rules.

These tips will help you with your blog but they are really mistakes you need to avoid in the development of your blog.

1. Content is king: Don’t put up a few posts and stop. You need to post regularly because when someone starts following your blog they will expect to see new content and without it they will stop visiting. There are many different ways to come up with new content and all of your posts don’t have to be articles, some of them can be reviews of other people’s articles or blog posts.

2. All dressed up and no place to go: Putting up a killer blog with great content deserves kudos but you have to drive traffic to it to be or it does you no good. Use Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites to drive traffic to it.

3. Be a friend to get a friend: You need t build a group of followers. The best way to do that is to follow other people. Visit their blog and leave a comment, Tweet their content, share it on Facebook and post a link to their blog on your blog. It won’t be long before they start commenting on your blog posts.

4. Fine Print squint: Make sure your opt-in box is easy to read. You should test the look of your blog in different browsers and make sure your sign up form doesn’t look like a legal document. If people can’t read it they will never sign up on it. This is important because some people will even be looking at your site on a cell phone.

5. Double naught spy: If you have a great gift to give those who opt-in to your list you need to tell them about it. Some people don’t mention a valuable gift until after the sign up happens and that is a good way to cut down on your numbers.

6. Penny Pincher: Some people pay for a template for their blog and that is a good idea but don’t stop there. Get a professionally designed banner for your blog so you will look like a leader. It isn’t that expensive and will boost your credibility.

7. GPS: Make it easy to get around on your site. Your posts can be made easy to find by using pages as categories like recruiting, copywriting, traffic generation, etc… This is called Silo Pages and really boosts your SEO as well as making it easier for visitors to find your content.

8. Shout-Outs: Everyone could spend a little more time writing their headlines. You should always write several headlines and never settle on the first one that comes out. Visit http://www.Copyblogger.com for ideas for your headlines.

9. Lost Label chance: Putting pictures that are relevant is a very good idea but you should always label them with your main keyword. If you leave the label or caption blank you are missing a perfect opportunity to boost your SEO.

10. Gangsta Photo: It is great to put a photo of yourself on your blog but make it one with a friendly smile and not one that may scare someone away. Its one thing to show your personality but you could show yourself having some fun and wearing something better than a T-shirt and tattoos.

Of course these are just a few mistakes some people make and there are plenty of people who are doing just fine with their blogs even though they may have some of these mistakes on their site. However, it is never too late or a bad idea to fix your mistakes and even to laugh about them. You could even write an article telling how you fixed them.

Dan Lambeth
919-876-1799
Get your Attraction Marketing System With Free Training Including How To Set Up A Wordpress Blog =>
http://www.SponsorRepsOnline.com

Or visit my blog for YOUR marketing newsletter=>
http://DanLambeth.com

Making the Most of Social Media Marketing – Links

2010-04-30T09:40:00.000-04:00

Thought this was a good compendium for many things social media:

http://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/free-resources/social-media-marketing-links/

Tradeshow Week Vacuum Filled by TSNN — New Editorial Staff and Industry Event Announced

2010-04-29T11:21:00.000-04:00

My buddy Steven Nold is always working hard....

Peterborough, NH (APRIL 29, 2010) – Less than two weeks after the closing of Tradeshow Week, the U.S. exhibition industry’s only weekly print publication, Peterborough-based Tarsus Online Media, a division of Tarsus Group plc, announced plans to redesign its Trade Show News Network (TSNN) website to fill the vacuum for Tradeshow Week’s former subscribers. The new site will include a stable of well-known industry writers and bloggers contracted by TSNN to provide news and develop online content.

Tradeshow Week’s closure also permanently suspended production of Tradeshow Week’s “Fastest 50” event recognizing the fastest growing exhibitions in the U.S. and Canada. Tarsus will launch a similar event to complement its MTO Summit scheduled for November 9-10, 2010 at the Hilton Alexandria Hotel in Alexandria, VA. The inaugural award event, the “TSNN Event Excellence Awards,” will conclude the conference on November 10.

In his former role as publisher of Tradeshow Week, Adam Schaffer launched the Fastest 50 event and successfully grew it. “I am thrilled to see that the spirit of innovation and service to our industry continues with TSNN and Tarsus stepping into these important shoes. Their commitment and dedication is clear, even at this early stage, by engaging important industry thinkers and writers and also by setting a date for the awards event this November,” he stated, observing the community endorsement of this conference.

“TSNN has the world’s most comprehensive database of events, a loyal following of subscribers and a virtual community of industry professionals. It is poised to grow its online and offline community via the insight of leading bloggers and an event that recognizes the entrepreneurial spirit of the industry,” said R.D. Whitney, CEO of Tarsus Online Media (USA).

TSNN’s list of bloggers will include:

Chris Brogan, author of “Trust Agents” (with Julien Smith), and “Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to Develop your Business Online.” Brogan is president of the media marketing agency New Marketing Labs, and founder of the Inbound Marketing Summit conferences and Inbound Marketing Boot Camp educational events.

Stephen Nold, President, Tarsus Advon and founder of the MeetingTechOnline web site and the MTO Summit technology conference. Nold serves as a consultant and speaker on event industry innovations.

Rachel Wimberly, Special Reports Writer, Variety magazine and former writer for Tradeshow Week, The New York Times regional newspapers and CNN Business News. Wimberly has a Masters Degree in Journalism from New York University.

Dave Lutz, Managing Director, Velvet Chainsaw, a business improvement consultancy specializing in the meeting and conference industry. Lutz blogs at Midcourse Corrections (with Jeff Hurt) and has a regular column on performance excellence in Convene magazine. He is a member of the education committee for the technology track at the Annual Meeting of the International Association for Exhibitions and Events (IAEE).

Michelle Bruno, President, Bruno Group Signature Events, an event marketing and management firm. Bruno is a freelance industry journalist and a certified meetings and exhibition management professional. She writes about event industry technology and social media at Fork in the Road blog.

“TSNN is committed and excited to fill the information gap that has been created by the closure of Tradeshow Week. We could not think of a better ‘all-star’ list of thinkers to offer compelling content and the same positive message and integrity that Tradeshow Week was known and respected for,” said Stephen Nold, President, Tarsus Advon, the Austin, TX-based division of Tarsus Group that will oversee the redesign of TSNN.com.

About TSNN
Tarsus Group plc acquired TSNN.com in 2000 and added the site to its online media portfolio. The Trade Show News Network (TSNN) has been the world’s leading online resource for the trade show, exhibition and event industry since 1996. TSNN owns and operates the most widely consulted event database on the internet, containing data on more than 15,000 global trade shows, exhibitions, public events and conferences. The newsletter is distributed to over 120,000 readers. TSNN features an expanding Industry News and Thought Leader blog with contributions from industry leaders and analysts.

About Tarsus Advon
Based in Austin, Tarsus Advon properties include MeetingTechOnline and MTO Summits. MeetingTechOnline is a team-driven online publication and community portal that provides technology information and education for the meetings industry. The team conducts research with show organizers, technology suppliers, and industry experts. Qualitative and quantitative data are respectively gathered though primary sources and survey analysis.
Twice-annual MTO Summits are designed to educate event and exhibition professionals about the latest trends and developments in technology in a face-to-face event. Tarsus Group acquired MeetingTechOnline and MTO Summits in 2010 creating Tarsus Advon. To learn more visit www.mtosummit.com.

About Tarsus Group plc
Tarsus Group is an international B2B media company creating industry-leading events, publications and online media since 1998. Tarsus Group’s portfolio of exhibitions, conferences, publications and online media spans across the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. With its head office in Dublin, and offices in London, Paris, Milwaukee and Boca Raton, Shanghai and Dubai, Tarsus extends global reach for business professionals with more than 80 properties in a diverse range of industries including medical, aviation, manufacturing, finance, talent management, IT, marketing, and a growing portfolio focused on the events industry.

Contact:

Stephen Nold, President, Tarsus Advon
Tel: 512.310.0628
Stephen@advontech.com

How to build a social network which benefits your business

2010-04-22T19:02:00.002-04:00

I am occasionally asked about how to get started in social media during the course of my travels. Here I have to assume that you have already followed the guidelines in The Five Steps for Long Term Social Media Success(one of my past columns). I figured I might outline the resources you need to get going, therefore. You’ll need(in no particular order):

1) Some money

Although many of the tools in social media are free, you may want to budget some money for either consulting and/or backend technology which might help you monitor the traffic you get through your web(among other things) and be able to be actionable. How much will depend on what you want to do.

2) Approval from the top

This is probably the most important, as to allocate resources you need an OK from the boss(es). This assumes that you have proved the ROI or the ROO case. What ROI/ROO case you ask?

Here are some things you’ll want to know to prove this case:
• What are the outcomes we want?
• Why are we doing this?
• Why have we selected the method we’ve chosen?
• Why have we chosen the strategy we have?
• What technology will we use and why?

Some particular elements of measurement of results may include:
• Members of a LinkedIn or Facebook group
• Followers on Twitter
• Google ranking for your top 30 key words
• Number of inbound links to your content pages
• Number of average comments per blog post

And the ROI driven ones:
• Amount of revenue generated by new customers
• Number of new customers

3) Good web design

I shouldn’t have to mention that in order to do a first class marketing job, your own website needs to be first class, offering visitors a rich experience. This after all, is likely to be their first impression of you, so make it a good one.

4) The right people on the project

Believe it or not, you can do everything above right and still not do well. If you don’t put the right people who are both knowledgeable about your products, social media savvy and a good communicators, you’ll be hampering yourself. I’ll be controversial and say the younger the person is, the more likely you are to find the right person(or people) here. Next make sure they have the right empowerment from above.

In a perfect world you are trying to expand your influence in your marketplace. To do this you need as many influential people in your ‘network’(the one you are building) to amplify the content you will produce.

According to the authors of the book Groundswell, (Charlene Li and Josh Berner) there are various kind of ‘users’ of content. They are:

• Creators- create content
• Collectors-Tag, RSS and Bookmark
• Critics- review and comment
• Joiners-visit and join networks
• Spectators-read, watch & listen
• Inactives- none of the above

In moving forward with your strategy, you’ll need to have a plan for each one of these groups, to engage, keep happy and eventually convert into regular content consumers and then customers.

In summary what should you do to ensure success?

• Set up an advisory group to help with progress
• Keep making refinements to your plan
• Keep in touch with senior management
• Focus on your objectives

Finally observe the rules of social networking(repeated from The Five Steps to Long Term Social Media Success) which are:

1) you want to connect people(not just to you);
2) you want to know more about your customers, their customers and what they need the marketplace to provide;
3) you need to be in this for the long term;
4) you need to be consistent in your content provision( every day, three days a week, etc.);
5) you have to provide valuable content for free without hope for immediate return;
6) everyone is invited, you might treat certain people in your sphere, but everyone is welcome to join;
7) you have to interact if your audience actually engages with you;
8) you must be authentic in your goals.

Good luck and let me know how you do!

Ecommerce Know-How: Use Twitter to Build a Community of Loyal Customers

2010-04-22T15:10:00.000-04:00

Thought this was a good quickie to get more twitter traffic:

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1136-Ecommerce-Know-How-Use-Twitter-to-Build-a-Community-of-Loyal-Customers

Another guy who gets it

2010-04-21T14:20:00.004-04:00

Recently, I spoke with Brian Slawin of BusyEvent who has some neat technology and understands the events business. If you have an event between 1000-10000 people, you should check on the technology which underpins increased attendee value delivery. Here's some more information, check it out!

http://www.busyevent.com/blog/?p=95

9 Social Media Topics that Need To Die

2010-04-06T17:42:00.000-04:00

Not that I agree with everything here, but it is interesting...

http://www.newmediahire.com/profiles/blogs/9-social-media-topics-that

The Strategy of The Strategy of Social Media

2010-04-05T12:28:00.001-04:00

Seems complicatedly simple:

http://veryofficialblog.com/2010/02/14/the-missing-ingredient-in-most-social-media-strategies/

Cut costs Now

2010-04-02T13:39:00.001-04:00

from Expo Magazine, I couldn't say item #1 better myself....

Although the worst of the recession may be behind us, many organizers are still challenged with delivering quality shows on reduced budgets. It’s more important than ever these days to find ways to produce meetings more cost effectively. Here are a few cost-savings tips to try at your next show.

1. Outsource. Take stock of the things you personally need to stay involved with and outsource everything else. Look for areas where your time can make the most impact on the program or the budget. Focus energy on those activities only, and leverage suppliers and outside resources to accomplish everything else.

2. Get accurate. Employ a more detailed registration system and get more details on meals. Reducing headcount on breakfasts for people who only want coffee and skipping meals for walk-in attendees translates to big savings.

3. Shop locally. Local sales representatives for a hotel or venue will often work harder and may provide significant savings over a national rep or broker. They have the pulse of the local market and can offer incentives unique to their property. Don’t have time to call 50 hotels? Consider outsourcing the process to an outside meeting planner on an hourly or fee basis. You’ll also have someone to help with rooming lists and contracts.

4. Consolidate. If budgets are tight, place as much as you can with one or two vendors. Your project will look bigger, garner more attention and you’ll save time and money in the process. Every vendor you add creates a profit center for that vendor and adds at least 10 to 20 hours of management time for you. When the program changes or you need to revise your budget, you’re fighting each vendor for their profit and spending significant amounts of time to accomplish small reductions.

5. Be creative. Find something that doesn’t really cost the hotel or vendor and leverage it. For example, airport transfers can sometimes be provided at no charge if a hotel has buses. It’s a relatively low-cost item to the hotel, but can save tens of thousands in transfers or cabs. Also think about asking for free printing from the hotel’s business center. Free prints mean saving on printing and even more savings on shipping.

6. Rely on your suppliers. Everyone is reinventing themselves in today’s economy and suppliers are open to new ideas and hungry for additional work. They want to be a resource and are willing to take on additional responsibility to get there. Think of a supplier as an assistant and ask them for small tasks and expertise. An extra body for a registration desk may only be a phone call away.

7. Buy in bulk. It’s amazing how simple this concept is, but how little it’s applied. Hotels and vendors want repeat business and they’re willing to discount to get it. Use that to your advantage. Can’t sign a three-year contract? Don’t worry. Negotiate rebates that kick in retroactively once you reach a certain level. There’s no need for a commitment because if you don’t deliver the business, they don’t have to deliver the discount.

8. Go dutch. Sharing meeting and production expenses with another organizer is novel, but effective. For a savvy buyer, splitting costs with another group is an easy way to get your numbers down. Brokering the deal can be challenging and you have to be somewhat flexible. Need a match? Oftentimes your hotel, venue or even a supplier can find the right match.

9. Don’t cram. The only “don’t” on this list addresses the temptation to pack 12 hours of meetings into an eight-hour day. Packing in content will drain your attendees. Sure, if you get a three-day meeting done in one day, you’ll save plenty, but no one will remember. The effectiveness of the meeting is a primary goal. If attendees are engaged, the meeting generates business results. Don’t lose sight of the purpose. Maintaining that learning environment is the key to a successful meeting.

Steve Auer, CEO of Cadence, Inc. (www.cadence-inc.com), is a 20-year veteran of the live event and meeting production industry. Cadence provides creative services, venue sourcing, meeting planning and logistical support for meetings and trade shows.

This blog has moved

2010-04-01T19:33:00.001-04:00

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A guy who gets it

2010-03-31T15:57:00.001-04:00

http://www.tradeshowsandevents.blogspot.com

I am going to start writing again shortly on some mind blowing content until then, take a look at Jim's blog.

Social Media: The Five Steps for Long Term Success: The Event Mechanic! Maturity Model

2010-01-12T10:34:00.004-05:00

I have been doing a lot of research in the past year on social media. In that time, I have been trying to figure out how to separate the ‘sizzle from the steak’ and come up with a clear road map to help people who are starting out in social media, or perhaps those who are floundering and don’t know how to rescue their effort.

1) Philosophy

In order for social media to work, you’re going to want to subscribe to the following:

1)you want to connect people(not just to you);
2)you want to know more about your customers, their customers and what they need the marketplace to provide;
3)you need to be in this for the long term;
4)you need to be consistent in your content provision( every day, three days a week, etc.);
5)you have to provide valuable content for free without hope for immediate return;
6)everyone is invited, you might treat certain people in your sphere, but everyone is welcome to join;
7)you have to interact if your audience actually engages with you;
8)you must be authentic in your goals.

Hopefully the main tenets of your corporate mission and values meet some or all of the above. If none do, social media will not work for you.

Take some time to evaluate the above before proceeding to the next step.

If you don’t know your customer base intimately(come on by honest with this one), do detailed market research on what information the customers in your marketplace need and how(and when) they want to receive it.

2) Knowledge of Customer

Next you are going to need to build an audience to whom you’ll target your content efforts. These ‘straw men’ are called ‘target personas’. And what exactly is a target persona and how do you develop them? Part of this is a repeat of a past article I wrote earlier, but it’s worth saying again:

A target persona is a model of an ideal customer which incorporates primary research and data, such as income and gender, with personality traits, such as goals, attitudes, behaviors and interests. All of this is put together in a short statement which describes the ideal customer’s personality as it relates to your business.

Let’s get started on how to develop your target personas:
• Start with three types of customers who you’d like to develop into target personas;
• Go into your customer data. Once you have chosen three types of customer, answer as many questions about them as you can, using the information you already have. Look at averages and aggregate data to get some of the basic information about your personas—age, income, shopping habits, average spend and frequency of visits to your site. If you don’t have all of the information, use what you know to fill in the blanks. Make sure you update this information as you learn more about your customer segments;
• Write a summary for each target persona. Aggregate what you’ve learned from your customer data and what you have observed or instinctually know and use this information to write a summary which describes this “perfect customer.” Include his/her likes and interests, goals and motivations, interactions with your site and other relevant information. Keep the summary interesting and brief and write it as if you’re describing someone you know. Give your personas names as well as pictures to make them real;

Creating your target personas will help you better understand your customers and what influences their interactions with you. You can improve your customer’s online and offline experiences much more easily, and help people throughout the company have a uniform understanding of your customers, their needs and wants. Your target personas allow you to develop more tailored marketing strategies meant to reach people, not data. Continually updating, modifying and adding to your personas as you learn more about your customers and your target audience will keep your marketing fresh, relevant, personal and effective.
Remember to do this both for current and future customers as they may be different.

3)Strategy to meet Philosophy

Assuming you have found out what your customers want, now is the time to build the strategy. It should be assumed that to ‘reach the dark corners’, that you will need to show evidence of your expertise in the market which is not product centric. You’ll therefore need to become a content producer through blogs, e-books, articles, have experts contribute to industry publications, etc.

OK, the next stage is to pick the tactics of how you are going to do this. Here are the four major elements:

Content strategy

Here is where is points I made above come together. You’ll now need to establish a blog which linked to your website(or series of blogs if you are expansive). If you have identified the pain points of the your key personas, then you will want to find an expert within your company who can write intelligently about these subjects. You’ll want to do this daily if possible, but at least three times a week as you build your audience. Remember you need to keep up this consistency week after week, so three times a week is all you can do, please keep to that.

You have already assembled the key words that you associate your product or service with, so make sure the ‘tags’ of each post include at least one key word and make sure the title of every post includes a key word.

As you post more frequently and keep a focus on your key words, you’ll start to see yourself rise in the search rankings- this is called having ‘Google Juice’. Frequency of posts and newness of the posts contribute to a higher search ranking.

In addition, your content person should check out www.technorati.com or LinkedIn and comment on other articles(with links to your own blog), to start to stimulate discussion on topics relevant to your keywords, and to create further traffic to your website.

Search Engine Optimization strategy

This is probably one of the more understood parts of social media, that is, making sure your key words populate the website content and tags of your individual website pages. One tip I just learned at a conference was to occasionally make changes to the content or tags of individual pages as this will raise the Google rankings of those pages(per the point above).

Pay Per Click strategy

One of the ways to ‘artificially’ raise your product and service onto the first page is to pay to be seen on the right side(or top) on the search page for a specific term. This can be expensive depending upon how general a term you select, so be specific and make sure your choices relate to your key words.

Inbound Link strategy

Next to the content strategy, this is the most important aspect of your tactics. As part of your research, you want to have a list of the top 20 influencers in your marketplace. Next you want to connect with them and develop a relationship with as many of them as possible so you can get them to link to your content, website. Saying this and doing it are two different things however, as you have to make these people, pay attention to you where many are asking them to pay attention, and then have them see enough value in connecting to you.

Google also ranks you higher if you have a high number of inbound links, so this particular tactic should not be done by a junior person in your company, as the connection between an influencer is strategic and may include other elements.

4) Tactics to meet the Strategy

Lastly, we get to the tactical part which is often the first question I am asked when talking about social media. In the research portion of getting to know your customer, you should have asked which social media tools your current customers use(such as Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc). If they are high powered LinkedIn users, you should spend a lot of time building content in LinkedIn and linking back to your website for instance. Bottom-line is that you should know which social media ‘watering holes’ your target personas visit, unless you want to waste a lot of time and endure a lot of frustration.

Now an interesting caveat to this is based upon something which happened with a client of mine recently. We had a 9% twitter usership from the database, but found that more of the ‘amplifier’ types were using twitter worldwide, which helped us get our message out beyond they people we already knew, getting us a lot of attention from the ‘dark corners’. Experiment a little, and have patience.

Ultimately being successful with social media is a long term play, and one which won’t bare initial fruit for 6-12 months(or more). In doing it properly, you will be making a statement to your marketplace that you care about it, and in doing that you will reap more benefit than continuing to broadcast product messaging.

5) Measurement

In order to be able to know whether you are successful at this social media effort, you are going to need to set up some benchmarks by which to measure your progress.

Examples you might use are:

Members of a LinkedIn or Facebook group
Followers on Twitter
Google ranking for your top 30 key words
Number of inbound links to your content pages
Number of average comments per blog post

And the ROI driven ones:

Number of new customers
Amount of revenue generated by new customers

Remember that your effort may take six or months, so don’t make your measurements too severe you may fail before you start!

Also remember that the ROI case is what you will need to do to get resources for the plan above, so make sure you can argue the case in front of your boss to get money and people to help you!

Social Media Case Study

2010-01-06T17:13:00.004-05:00

Thanks to Dave Reske for pointing this out to me:

Generate Leads with Social Media Strategy: 6 Steps to Fill Up Sales Funnel
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SUMMARY: Just over a year ago, Pam O'Neal, VP Marketing, BreakingPoint, shared her team’s success using a wide-ranging social media strategy to generate leads. We’ve asked her to present an update on their tactics -- with a focus on integrating email and social media -- at our upcoming Email Summit.

In advance of this session, we're highlighting the original case study that first demonstrated how the team tested and measured activity from several social media channels. The results included 55% of all leads coming from inbound Web visits, and 75% of marketing-influenced pipeline coming from inbound Web leads.
CHALLENGE

Pam O’Neal, VP Marketing, BreakingPoint, didn’t want to adopt a typical demand generation strategy after she joined the networking-equipment testing system provider in April 2008. The startup company had a limited budget, and their target audience of security and quality assurance professionals in R&D laboratories wasn’t merely skeptical of marketing -- they hated it.

O’Neal and her team wanted to supplement traditional PR, events and demand-generation campaigns with a social media strategy that created strong relationships with hard-to-find prospects. But they wanted to make sure those efforts were reaching the right audience and turning them into leads.

"It was either going to work big or be a huge failure," says O’Neal. "We didn’t know, but we wanted more than anything to have a good solid case study and have metrics that prove social media could work in this climate and with this audience."

They took six steps to develop their social media strategy and measure its impact.

CAMPAIGN

O’Neal and her team tested several social media channels while revamping their public relations tactics to drive visitors to the company’s website. They tracked growth and engagement metrics from those initiatives. They then correlated those results to traditional metrics, such as unique visitors, leads, and pipeline activity.

The six steps they took:

Step #1. Create blog to start and join online conversations

O’Neal’s team began its foray into social media by launching a company blog. They didn’t wait to finalize a blog strategy before launch, however. Their blogging approach evolved over time, based on observation of online conversations related to their network equipment testing niche.

- First, the team set up an online monitoring system that scanned the Web, the blogosphere, online forums and communities to find conversations relevant to their industry and their technical audience. The results were consolidated into an RSS feed that a team member could review each morning.

Scanning tools included:
o TweetScan, for Twitter posts
o Google Alerts for industry terms, such as "security threats" and "equipment testing"
o Boardtracker.com, which monitors technology forums and message boards

- When the scanning tools found a relevant conversation, such as a blog post about cost of network equipment-testing tools, a team member would join that conversation. They would comment on the blog post and point readers to content on the same topic at the BreakingPoint blog.

- The team also used their blog to break stories with the potential to go viral. For example, the company’s security research team published tests and research related to clickjacking -- a recently discovered security flaw within websites that takes clickers from a legitimate-appearing button to an illegitimate site.

Those stories generated links from other industry blogs and articles in major trade publications.

Step #2. Establish a Twitter account

The team supplemented their blog with a company Twitter account. It allowed them to post shorter, more frequent updates to their niche audience.

Company "tweets" included:
- Notices of new blog posts, webinars
- Fun entries (e.g., trivia questions, quizzes)
- Informal focus group questions (a poll of Twitter followers about potential names for the company newsletter)

As they did with the blog, the team used their scanning tools to find and participate in Twitter conversations relevant to their industry. They were particularly interested in community members asking for advice about equipment testing, so they set up alerts to find key terms, such as:
o "Bake off," an industry term for a head-to-head equipment test
o "Test methodology"
o Competitors’ names (along with the word "sucks")

"People are complaining a lot more on Twitter than in the blogosphere," says O’Neal. "It’s a place people go to vent, as well as search for solutions."

They also re-tweeted relevant information found through their scans, such as reports about equipment testing results or interesting industry news. "It gives us a reason to stay in front of our followers and stimulate conversations."

Step #3. Create LinkedIn group

To explore an array of social media channels, the team created BreakingPoint groups on LinkedIn and Facebook. They quickly realized that their target audience wasn’t well represented on Facebook. But the LinkedIn group began attracting members with the right professional backgrounds.

The team established the group as an open forum to discuss issues related to network test equipment and security -- not to the company or its products.

Group members took the lead in starting conversations among themselves. Typical topics included:
o Advice on vendors
o Reviews/suggestions for industry events
o Feedback on new testing approaches or programs

O’Neal’s team acted as hosts, joining discussions when they had a pertinent point to contribute, or sharing relevant industry news, blog posts or other content to keep members engaged.

Step #4. Modify press release strategy for blogger coverage

The team revamped its press release strategy to encourage more online coverage for the company. Actions they took:

- Release at least one new press release each week.
- To encourage inbound links, press releases were shorter and contained more links to sections of the company website.
- Shift their release time from 8 a.m. Eastern time to late morning/early afternoon, when West Coast bloggers were most likely to begin scanning for news.
- Publish press releases using a service called PitchEngine, and post releases to social media channels, such as their Twitter feed and LinkedIn group.

Step #5. Promote social media channels on company website and in email signatures

To encourage customers and prospects to participate in their social media channels, the team included links to different accounts from the company’s website and in their email signatures.

The news section of the website, for instance, included links to the company’s Twitter feed and LinkedIn group under a "join us" headline. They also included updates from the company Twitter account in the right-hand column of the company blog.

Employees’ email signatures could include links to the blog, Twitter account or LinkedIn group, along with name, email address and phone number.

Step #6. Measure growth of social media accounts and Web traffic

O’Neal was determined to measure the contribution social media efforts made to the company’s marketing and sales activity. So, they tracked metrics to determine the growth of their various social media channels, such as:
o Unique blog page views
o Twitter followers
o LinkedIn group members

At the same time, they tracked a series of marketing metrics, such as:
o Unique website visitors
o Traffic generated by SEO
o Leads
o Leads by source (inbound Web, email, trade shows, seminars)
o Marketing-influenced pipeline activity, by source

When comparing the metrics side-by-side, they looked for correlations between activity in social media outlets and an increase in leads and sales pipeline activity.

RESULTS

"After six months, we saw some amazing results," says O’Neal.

The team’s analysis showed a dramatic correlation between the use of social media channels and the growth of the company’s Web traffic and leads. (See creative samples link below for a chart illustrating growth trends.)

By the end of Q3 2008, their social media campaign resulted in:
o 10,230 unique blog page views in Q3
o 280 Twitter followers
o 141 members of their LinkedIn Group
o 155% increase in unique Web visitors

Most important, that Web traffic is now contributing the majority of the team’s leads and pipeline activity.

- Leads by source:
o 55% inbound Web
o 23% trade shows
o 20.5% email
o 1.5% seminars

- Marketing-influenced pipeline by source:
o 75% inbound Web
o 17% email
o 4% seminars
o 4% trade shows

The amount of leads and pipeline activity generated from Web traffic demonstrates to O’Neal that their social media strategy is reaching their marketing-averse audience.

"In my prior position, I felt like I was on a treadmill when every quarter I had to come up with more and more clever campaigns to drive demand generation," says O’Neal. "I’m not saying that there isn’t a lot of work that goes into social media, but I’m not constantly having to do these elaborate demand gen campaigns anymore."

The team’s social media efforts also support their ongoing search-engine optimization strategy. By engaging in conversations about industry issues, they’re generating more links on non-brand search terms that help boost their search engine results positions. Non-brand search terms are typically those used by prospects when searching for testing equipment.

When O’Neal joined the company, the ratio of Web traffic from brand terms to non-brand terms was 2.5 to 1. "That’s really bad. It means more than twice as many people were searching for our company name versus their own pain point."

Now, the ratio of brand to non-brand search traffic is 0.6 to 1.

Useful links related to this story

Hear Pam O'Neal's update on integrating social media and email for lead generation at MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Summit in Miami, January 20-22:
http://www.sherpastore.com/EmailSummit2010.html

Creative samples from BreakingPoint’s social media campaign
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/breakingpoint/study.h
ml

BoardTracker
http://www.boardtracker.com/

Facebook
http://www.facebook.com

LinkedIn
http://www.linkedin.com

PitchEngine
http://www.pitchengine.com

TweetScan
http://www.tweetscan.com

Twitter
http://www.twitter.com

BreakingPoint
http://www.breakingpoint.com

I still think they need to figure out the philosophy piece, but results speak for themselves....

Social Media Plan in 2010

2010-01-06T10:48:00.002-05:00

I promise you I will shortly be rolling out my Social Media Maturity Model shortly for all to see. In the meantime, I was interested in this post focused on the wholly grail of social media(ROI) and their soon to come Benchmark report. Enjoy...

http://www.marketingexperiments.com/blog/general/social-media-marketing-using-data-and-metrics.html

How to Engage your Conference Audience

2009-12-22T10:27:00.004-05:00

I like Dave Lutz of Velvet Chainsaw, and I see him all over the country(IAEE, Expo! Expo!, etc). He's teaming up with Jeff Hurt of Midcourse Corrections, and I love this article to shale up the format of the average everyday conferences.

Enjoy his article:

If you wanted to create a conference environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like today’s conferences, meetings and workshops. If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you would design a full day of lectures in general sessions and breakouts. (Just like today’s learning institutions).

What if associations tore down old traditional conference models and started over?

Here are four brain-friendly principles from brain scientists that association leaders and meeting organizers should consider when planning their next annual meeting. (There are many more!)

Passive Listening Versus Movement And Interactivity
1. Your brain is not designed to sit passively for eight hours a day listening to lectures.

In the evolutionary process, our brains developed while working out and walking. The brain still craves that experience. Movement boosts brainpower. Physical activity is cognitive candy.

Suggestion: Conference organizers should encourage presentations that get people up, moving around and require interactivity, not sitting in chairs all day.

Your Short Term Memory
2. Your brain is not designed like a recording device—push record to learn new information and push playback to remember it.

German psychologist and memory researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus is best known for one of the most depressing facts in education: people usually forget 90% of what they learn in a class within 30 days. The majority of this memory loss occurs within the first few hours after the presentation. Wow, normal conference attendees only recall 10% of what they learn at the annual meeting. That’s low ROI.

The moment of encoding, or learning, is mysterious and complex. We do know that the process is similar to a blender running without a lid. The information enters the blender, is sliced into pieces and splattered all over the insides of our mind. Content and context are stored separately. Recalling that information requires more elaborate encoding in the initial moments of learning.

Suggestion: Conference organizers need to structure and provide emotional arousal, context and meaning which lead to more elaborate encoding and thus better recall.

Adult White Space
3. The brain is not an open vessel that you can constantly pour content into during an eight-hour day and expect it to recall the information at will.

Have you seen the film Mondo Cane? The Italian shockumentary consists of vignettes intended to raise Westerner’s eyebrows. One memorable and disgusting scene shows farmers force-feeding geese to make Pâté de foie gras. They stuff food down the throats of these animals and then fasten a brass ring around their throats, trapping the food inside the digestive tract. Repeatedly jamming them with an oversupply of food eventually creates a stuffed liver pleasing to the world’s chefs. The geese are sacrificed in the name of expediency.

Most conferences try to overstuff their attendees with several days of eight to ten hours of presentations. Subject matter experts shovel data dumps into attendees’ minds thinking more is best. Pushing too much information, without enough time devoted to context, meaning, connecting the dots and digestion, does not nourish the brain. The attendee’s learning is sacrificed in the name of expediency. The brain needs breaks.

Suggestion: Conference organizers need to schedule adult white space: time for attendees to discuss new learnings with each other. They should plan for moderated chats where attendees re-expose each other to the information and share detailed elaborations of their impressions. When attendees spend time in these gabfests sharing their new learnings, retention increases. Brains recall information that is repeated out loud. The more the experience is retold, the more the brain encodes it and the more likely it will be remembered.

Attention Spans And Boring Things
4. The brain does not pay attention to boring things. (I know, you’re saying, “Duh!”)

Research shows that presenters have 30 seconds to grab someone’s attention and only 10 minutes to keep it. Most conference presentations are 60 to 90 minutes long. If keeping someone’s interest in a presentation were a business, it would have an 80%-90% failure rate.

Presenters and conference organizers can help grab attention by ensuring every 10-minute segment is rich with meaning, stories and emotional connections. Connecting each segment to previous segments also helps the brain learn and remember.

Suggestion: Conference organizers should secure speakers that change their content and raise attention every 9 minutes and 59 seconds to restart the attention clock.

These four brain-friendly principles are just some of the things association leaders and meeting professionals can do to create brain friendly conferences. What others would you add?

Here's the link to his site: http://jeffhurtblog.com/

For some reason, blogger is not letting me hyperlink right now, must fix!

Social Media: What’s all the fuss and how do I make it work for my company? Part Two

2009-12-16T20:37:00.000-05:00

This will appear next week in my CW Allen Group column:

As I mentioned in my last column, I am in the process of building a social media practice as it relates to events. For those who didn’t read part one of this article, here it is: http://www.cwallengroup.com/newsletters/sept09/social_media.pdf

In the last article, I emphasized the importance of making sure that you business philosophy aligns with the ‘rules’ of social media, those are:

• You must offer valuable content with no expectation of immediate payback;
• You must want to grow your market segment for everyone(including competitors);
• You must make a commitment to be in the social media sphere for the long term;
• Everyone must be welcome(although you can treat certain segments better than others) including potentially competitors.

Next, you need to know your customers and future customers intimately enough to be able to create ‘target personas’. For more detail on this, see my blog post here:

http://www.theeventmechanic.com/blog/2009/05/developing-target-personas-in-marketing.html

OK, the next stage is to pick the tactics of how you are going to do this. Here are the five major elements:

Content strategy

Here is where is points I made above come together. You’ll now need to establish a blog which linked to your website(or series of blogs if you are expansive). If you have identified the pain points of the your key personas, then you will want to find an expert within your company who can write intelligently about these subjects. You’ll want to do this daily if possible, but at least three times a week as you build your audience. Remember you need to keep up this consistency week after week, so three times a week is all you can do, please keep to that.

You have already assembled the key words that you associate your product or service with, so make sure the ‘tags’ of each post include at least one key word and make sure the title of every post includes a key word.

As you post more frequently and keep a focus on your key words, you’ll start to see yourself rise in the search rankings- this is called having ‘Google Juice’. Frequency of posts and newness of the posts contribute to a higher search ranking.

In addition, your content person should check out www.technorati.com or LinkedIn and comment on other articles(with links to your own blog), to start to stimulate discussion on topics relevant to your keywords, and to create further traffic to your website.

Search Engine Optimization strategy

This is probably one of the more understood parts of social media, that is, making sure your key words populate the website content and tags of your individual website pages. One tip I just learned at a conference was to occasionally make changes to the content or tags of individual pages as this will raise the Google rankings of those pages(per the point above).

Pay Per Click strategy

One of the ways to ‘artificially’ raise your product and service onto the first page is to pay to be seen on the right side(or top) on the search page for a specific term. This can be expensive depending upon how general a term you select, so be specific and make sure your choices relate to your key words.

Inbound Link strategy

Next to the content strategy, this is the most important aspect of your tactics. As part of your research, you want to have a list of the top 20 influencers in your marketplace. Next you want to connect with them and develop a relationship with as many of them as possible so you can get them to link to your content, website. Saying this and doing it are two different things however, as you have to make these people, pay attention to you where many are asking them to pay attention, and then have them see enough value in connecting to you.

Google also ranks you higher if you have a high number of inbound links, so this particular tactic should not be done by a junior person in your company, as the connection between an influencer is strategic and may include other elements.

Social Media Tool strategy

Lastly, we get to the tactical part which is often the first question I am asked when talking about social media. In the research portion of getting to know your customer, you should have asked which social media tools your current customers use(such as Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc). If they are high powered LinkedIn users, you should spend a lot of time building content in LinkedIn and linking back to your website for instance. Bottom-line is that you should know which social media ‘watering holes’ your target personas visit, unless you want to waste a lot of time and endure a lot of frustration.

Now an interesting caveat to this is based upon something which happened with a client of mine recently. We had a 9% twitter usership from the database, but found that more of the ‘amplifier’ types were using twitter worldwide, which helped us get our message out beyond they people we already knew, getting us a lot of attention from the ‘dark corners’. Experiment a little, and have patience.

Ultimately being successful with social media is a long term play, and one which won’t bare initial fruit for 6-12 months(or more). In doing it properly, you will be making a statement to your marketplace that you care about it, and in doing that you will reap more benefit than continuing to broadcast product messaging.

Good luck and let me know how it goes!

Warwick Davies is the Principal of The Event Mechanic!, a consulting company which helps event organizers realize greater revenues and profits by fixing ‘broken’ events and launch new ones both in United States and internationally . He is an up and coming guru on Inbound Marketing and Social Media for event companies. His clients include event organizers in the information technology, healthcare, biotechnology construction and design engineering and executive event markets. Previously, Warwick was responsible for internationally recognizable event brands such as Macworld Conference and Expo, LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, and the Customer Relationship Management Conference and Exposition worldwide. For more information on The Event Mechanic! and past ROI-Q The Event Mechanic! columns please visit http://www.theeventmechanic.com/resources.html . He can be reached at Warwick@theeventmechanic.com or at 781 354 0119.

Attending Expo! Expo!

2009-12-08T16:07:00.003-05:00

I am attending Expo! Expo! in Atlanta for the first time(kind of odd considering I've been in the business for 18 years).

It's kind of funny as to why I haven't. DCI(my first 11 years in the business) didn't allow any employees attend any industry events because they were afraid staff would be poached. When I was at IDG, we went to SISO but not Expo! Expo!. In the last four years, I have either been too busy to go, or I didn't want to go to the particular venue, or something else. This year I planned to go in July around the time I went to SISO.

I had been told that Expo! Expo! is a 'sea' of people and difficult to navigate. My impressions on the first day is somewhat different, as I was invited to the 'first timers' brunch where I got an opportunity to meet folks, then we broke up into groups. I had a chance to talk about my 'The Five Steps for Long Term Social Media Success" concept which went over very well within the group. Seems like people within events are struggling with putting together a long term plan which can convince their bosses that the investment is worth it.

So far, so good but I have great expectations....

The Conference is Dead!(not really)

2009-11-18T10:23:00.002-05:00

I posted this comment in response to this blog posting today:

http://ow.ly/wAXP

As someone who also makes a living helping conference and tradeshow organizers more successful, I hope the hypothesis that 'The Conference is Dead' is true is wrong! I think it is, although many of the comments above are right on the money.

For the conference organizer of the future, they have to both be part of the industry and find that running conferences makes business sense(makes profit)- while not having so many moving parts that it becomes difficult to manage. This is now harder than ever.

I see 50% of the events around two years ago will be gone 2 years from now similar to what Jeff mentioned, so there is indeed pressure to be better and more valuable.

What is my prescription for making things easier?

1) Stop having anything without a solid core audience in resort locations that take time and money to attend. As best as you can, bring the event to your audience(New York, Chicago, SF, etc):

2) Do some basic market research to find out what social media applications, pain points and format preferences and pricepoints your target audience wants;

3) Spend on quality content but make sure you give this quality audience time to meet each other;

4) Assuming you do the above, making money shouldn't be a problem, as you should easily(!) attract paying sponsors who want to interact with the attendees.

5) Make sure that you create buy-sell interaction which is valuable to both.

Sounds easy, but it is harder than ever!