Can Event Media Be Social Media?

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Permalink Reply by Tony Karrer on July 17, 2009 at 8:27am

Bill - I hope you get some good response on this. A very interesting question. It may make sense to cross post this on Event Peeps on LinkedIn. Some quick thoughts ...

In a way, business events are inherently social. But many event organizers don't seem very good at taking advantage of existing social media as part of their events. In my mind, events that integrate use of LinkedIn as part of pre-networking, twitter for back-channel and communication are going to do much better than those who try to set up brand new social network systems for the event. However, if the social network exists beyond the event - that's a different story. That said, there are lots of simple things that can be done to make an event a much better social experience for participants. And, of course, I believe strongly that there are big time opportunities for aggregation of social media around events using things like Browse My Stuff.

But your question takes that a step further, how does that social interaction become an opportunity for marketing interaction ... it would seem like there are all kinds of connecting, lead gen that could flow from these network activities. I've really not seen this done well by event organizers, but rather by vendors who know how to work networks prior to and during the event. That's why I'm going to be curious to hear thoughts on this question. I'm more involved in on-going social media marketing and less so in event specific.

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Permalink Reply by Bill Rutledge on July 17, 2009 at 11:00am

Tony: This is all good stuff, and I think you're on to something with the question "how does social interaction become an opportunity for marketing interaction?" This is a concept that B2B event producers have been dealing with for years. So much so, I think, that we may be blind to some of the opportunities that arise from the social marketing phenomenon. In the B2C marketing, social networking is usually considered to be non-commercial (twitter), or implies consent to limited commercial interaction (FaceBook). In the B2B market, the social networking that arises out of an event reg implies not only consent, but an overt interest in commercial interaction. So there's a huge value add for any marketers that you allow into that pool. But how do you monetize that? I'm using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter on all my events. It's a great value add for everyone involved (except for me as the show producer).

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Permalink Reply by jjbaulikki on July 21, 2009 at 10:09pm

I often wonder how do you market to all the social media sites. There are so many these days, which is best? Which is best for certain industries? etc

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