Archive for May, 2008

Networking like a pro

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Networking results in sales and deals and is therefore important for all businesses. Most of us are so tied up running our businesses that we hardly take the time out for professional networking. The good thing is that even a few minutes everyday for online networking can go a long way.

First of all, make a mental distinction between the two types of network groups: a- your peers, colleagues, like-minded folks, could-be partners, vendors, industry authorities etc. b- your potential clients, potential customers, potential audiences.

There are many things that you can do to network;

1- Linkedin is great for staying in touch with your professional networks and to share business advice. It’s a social networking site where you can manage your contacts and find other relevant people to connect to. I call it the massive business card holder. You can choose who to add to your network and have intellectual discussions over the platform. Just like in real life, you can meet people that your friends know (second degree connections). The power of this community is great, because you can find a lot of business opportunities there.

Make a good profile for yourself and add connections to increase your visibility. Add links to your website or blogs so that you can redirect traffic to you through your Linkedin Page.

2- Create a following online. Networking is all about being in touch with your contacts on a regular basis. If you choose to follow relevant people on their microblogs, blogs and sites; chances are that a good percentage of them will follow you in return based on internet etiquettes. So, choose your contacts wisely.

3- Correspond regularly with your business contacts through email or other online mediums. You can set up reminders for emailing or sending cards if you have a busy schedule, so that you don’t forget about one of your biggest asset, your network.

4- If you think you are too busy to manage your contacts, participate in discussions, send emails or put up status updates, you can choose to outsource this work to virtual assistants. I have some friends whose businesses depend entirely on networking but have their hands full 24/7. They’ve successfully distributed a reasonable part of this work to reliable assistants and are comfortable with the way their work is being handled. If you think you can do that as well, give it a try. Otherwise, allocate time from your weekly schedule to network.

Interact with customers - your best branding strategy

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The escalating online trends in social media, the increase in fancy new gadgets - all of these factors have paved ways for you to communicate with your market on more direct levels. This direct interaction brings you to downright human level and potentially breaks all gaps between you and your customers. You can talk to them. You can listen to them. You can communicate with them. You can build loyalty. You can build relationships of trust. You can do so much, just by leveraging different tools to form a bridge between you and your customers.

As IAB CEO Randall says, “This achievement is a testament to the continued vitality of interactive. Explosive innovation in the industry is providing marketers with new and unique ways to reach consumers. It’s a very exciting time.”

While event marketing may seem to be about meticulous planning, it also involves quite a bit of right-brain activity. Balance in creativity and structure is important in this domain and thats why we are starting a whole blog series just to talk about this. You can follow these step by step Event Launch Guidelines and share any thoughts or experiences that you think can add to its content.

Twitter away

Posted by admin

Lee Oden did it again with a great post on a microblogging survey that they conducted.

According to that survey, the maximum percentage use (almost 30% of the people who use twitter) use it to share links to items of interest. That really got me thinking…

Imagine if YOU were the item of their interest. Yes YOU! Lets suppose you’re about to launch your product and have rolled out an elaborate marketing campaign. Your launch has create a stir in the market and people interested in knowing the progress. The interest makes them start to update each other using microblogging tools, such as twitter, about whatever piece of news they can find about your launch. (“I think they’re going to launch a phone this time. imagine that. they call it the iphone or something..”). The microblogging aspect of it significantly increases the hype curve. You can launch when the timing is perfect and people are most receptive.

Now, during the launch event, keep the excitement rolling. Don’t stop there. Use their third party tools like LiveTwitting to give live updates on the event. Have competitions over these platforms if you want. Get creative. You have all the tools that you need to offer mind-blowing launches - all you have to do is find creative ways of using them.

I’d say. This is a great tool, so twitter away. Psst. Follow me?

More Twitter Insights, Opinions & Even A Nice Video Introduction To Twitter From The Blog World Around Us…….

Twitter Waffles On TOS, Treats It Like A Game of Darts - The Twitterverse was all aflutter over the past 24 hours or so as Twitter was used as a venue for online harassment. As soon as I started seeing the harassment accusations flying across my screen in Twhirl (my desktop Twitter client of …

Twitter Series B Funding: Done. Raises $15 MM - I spent most of the day digging up more information on Twitter and its Series B round of funding that I reported last night. The update is that Twitter reached an agreement with investors today to raise $15 million in funding at around …

Video: Twitter in Plain English - This 2.5 minute video is a result of feedback from our fans. We’ve received a number of requests from people who want their friends to use the micro-blogging service Twitter, but can’t seem to explain it well. We hope this video helps. …

Twitter: A community or a utility? - I’ve been kind of out of the loop thanks to the mesh 2008 conference, so I’ve missed the furore over Ariel Waldman and her attempts to get Twitter to ban a user that she says has been harassing her. According to her account of the …

Twitter begins to communicate with their users - Today Twitter began to communicate with their users, which they are to be commended and congratulated for. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, there’s a long road ahead, and everyone’s going to learn a lot as we …

An RSVP gone wrong.

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I came across an interesting invitation to an event a few months back. The online invitation process was smooth until I got to the actual RSVP page. I wanted to see who was attending to decide whether or not to go, and to my surprise it said “Guest list will only be shown to people who accept the invitation”. Er?? Yes, but I want to know who’s coming so that I can decide whether or not to accept the invite. Didn’t that occur to the person designing this process?

Maybe it did, could it have been that the promoter of the event didn’t want me to see the guest list. Could it have been a ploy to create curiosity and if so shouldn’t the process have had a little more to it than a message simply stating “Guest list will only be shown to people who accept the invitation”.

I decided to take my chances and accepted the invitation, mostly out of curiosity to see who else was attending. Maybe the ploy was to get me to do so - in which case it had worked well. If I had seen a guest list full of notable people (invitees) after I accepted the invitation, I would have taken my hat off to the promoters for such a clean, simple and yet very effective strategy to entice me to commit.

Unfortunately, this was not the case. I accepted this blind invitation by letting my curiosity getting the better of me, only to see a guest list dramatically unfold that consisted of would-be attendees that I had never heard of and carrying the message:

“Thank you for accepting the invitation. we have reserved a seat for you. If you think that you will not be able to make it to the venue, please call us on this number ________..”.

Call? Firstly, if they managed to automate the RSVP process to sell the tickets, get confirmation and collect my money online why would they give me a number for calling in with all my regrets? If someone did call, how would they integrate that information with the RSVP system - doesn’t that kill the purpose of it being automated online?

The reason why I have shared this with you is because it is important to provide seamless and smooth experiences for your event’s attendees- or else everything else that you do, no matter how great, may go down the drain. People know it when they are made subject to clever strategies designed to influence their natural behavior towards taking an action. Whats more, they will respect it if that action results in a good experience. The simplest methodology to adhere to is to always ensure you build and maintain very high standards of quality for all your events - This applies to planning, marketing and execution. Thats one of the best ways to build customer loyalty.

Persuasion: Making event marketing work - Think about it: if on the junior VP’s invitation he sees that the CEO, CFO, VP of this and that, and he was invited, might junior be intrigued? “Hey, I’m invited to an event with the CEO”, he tells his wife. Perhaps at work he’ll ask …

What virtual events can do for your business

Posted by writer

What impact are virtual worlds creating that can effect our businesses? Its fascinating to see how big companies like IBM have these massive presence in virtual worlds like Second Life in which they are directly engaging their customers and staff. Its incredible to see how distances are broken down in instants in which you feel like you are in the same room as people who are miles and continents apart.

There are conferences, parties, garage sales, and all kinds of events happening in Second Life ALL THE TIME. That says a lot about the potential market for you to expand your services. If you don’t want to invest time in planning online virtual events, you can at least use those platforms for marketing your real-life services. Find out if your target market is on these and connect with them.

There are 3 million+ people (reportedly growing at 20%) in Second Life alone. Isn’t that reason enough to check it out and see how that rich platform can benefit your business? There are many ways in which you can make revenue; online sales, services and consultation to name a few. You can check out a list of virtual worlds to choose from here.

Just for bonus, here is an interesting video of a virtual wedding in second life

The age of content overload: how your events can stand out in the crowd

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So the internet is agreeably one of the most remarkable innovations of our time, and it started out great when it went public. Fast forward to some 15+ odd years ahead and we find ourselves in a love-hate relationship of information overload. There is so much content out there, when everyone and their neighbor’s cat considers it their exclusive duty to share their perspectives on everything. It’s incredible to see how much information is out there, yet it sometimes becomes difficult to find the right info or get to the right markets effectively.

There is a paradox of interests online, people are spending billions of dollars on product development and want people buying their products. Despite that, they themselves don’t want to be sold to. Double standards or just natural human behavior?

Yes, I agree, there is a bombardment of information out there. Yes, I agree you can’t trust the validity of someone’s claims. Yes, I agree its difficult to get to your targeted audiences without getting lost in the crowd. However, I also know that the recent changes in the web have added a layer of self-balance to this problem. Let me explain…

When you add social media to this equation, you see how people are coming together in communities and taking ownership of safeguarding information with no personal interests. Think: Wikipedia. You can also see how networks are formed based on credibility and trust. Think: Linkedin, Facebook. You can also see how original thought leadership is given more popularity and authority. Think: Technorati, Digg.

There was a big jump when these social media tools added an element of human monitoring, rather than search engine optimization (which is usually run on calculations and algorithms). The human to human element was added in a natural way, in which communities develop and spread only based on merits. Communities have a self-balancing effect that ensures that junk content is not promoted. This system itself ensures some reliability in data.

Watch a great little video on the Information R/evolution

So, yes I agree, there is too much information. But I have the comfort of knowing that the internet has evolved in a way, so as to combat this challenge. Even in the event management and marketing business, you can see the impact different media tools, like social bookmarking sites, have on business. People trust social channels because they are humane and real. There are so many new players in the jungle that you can leverage to help carve niches in your service offerings.

So, the way to deal with this information overload problem is to look for community based validations. Spend more time to research and do background checks on the sources of information. Carefully understand who your market is, where they are and then plan how to get to them without getting lost in the crowd. It’s not impossible or difficult, it just requires planning and knowledge of the different tools that are at your disposal.

Exploratory topic: Are clever ways of marketing events online ethical?

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This is more of an open discussion, rather than my thoughts. There has always been an endless debate about ethics in marketing - and I feel that it very important for all of us to draw a line between whats right and what can be considered manipulative.

I actively advocate good practices for online marketing and sometimes come across people who have very different opinions about internet marketing. If event marketing is about; creating a brand for your event, telling the brand story to your community, finding ways of using social marketing tools to increase the outreach of your message - it seems ethical.

But what about things like creating scarcity to increase the sales of tickets? Or using emotional triggers to help people make go-no-go decisions? I feel that if these things are done properly, without the intention of manipulating your audiences, then they are good internet marketing practices. By ‘good’ here, I mean that they really work!

An example of this is how certain companies send out emails to their lists asking for testimonials - except that they subtly write out a carefully worded sample testimonial with it to lure them into saying the same kind of things. Should that also be considered unethical, or just simply careful planning? I’ll leave this prerogative to you. It will be great if you can share your thoughts on this.

Creating traction online

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One of our commenter asked a very valid question, Do social applications (like Facebook) only begin to help in marketing events after a critical mass is already achieved in your following?

In my own experience I would agree that greater hype is built when more people are talking about it. However, having said that, the powerful thing about social media is that you can attract “more people” to your page without even knowing them. Initially when you’re just starting out, it doesn’t matter how many people you have on your Facebook network, what matters is how you get through to the people who could potentially be interested in attending your event.

For example, let’s suppose your target audience for an event are college students and frequent travelers (25-35 age-group) in Florida. We already know that the market demographics on facebook are skewed towards college students and professionals. So the potential of your market size is considerably huge. Theoretically, all you need to do is reach out to these people!

I’ve noticed that when events are built into fun activities, they can turn into great powerhouses for generating hype. You can build a page on the social networking apps with customized navigation and add applications over it to get the people involved in the pre-launch stage. You can get them to plan some elements of the event, or have competitions (e.g. poster design competition for the event). These competitions can be linked to real-life prizes like “accommodation discounts”, “free tickets”, “free drinks”, etc. You should also be able to show a list of other people who are attending. That will make them want to be there as well. There has to be an incentive for people to participate and refer you to their friends.

I believe that once you can find your potential customers, they will market your event further for you. In many ways, it depends on how you are branding your event. You can read our thoughts on event branding here.

So, to sum it up, I feel that even if you are a small shop or are planning a local club party, you can create movement and traction online if you play your moves well. Hopefully, we will be discussing these little tips, thoughts, ideas and strategies in this blog and our other Launch Strategies Blog over the next few months. Stay tuned!

Management qualities harnessed with social media - a recipe for success for event managers

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The Event Manager Blog had an interesting discussion on the qualities of good event managers. I’m just briefly going to extend that discussion with a perspective on how to marry those skills to social marketing tools and techniques in order to be the best at what you do.

Amongst the different thoughts shared by a wonderfully active Linkedin community, one caught my attention the most. James Minella summed it up nicely into 5 attributes: organization, bigger picture, multi-tasking, interpersonal skills, creativity and flexibility. Event managers who already have these skills are already a step forward, but these skills can go to waste if they aren’t linked to powerful online mediums. Here is how that can be done.

1- Organize work with productivity tools. Keep a track of comments on your blogs. Keep a track on what other people are doing/saying. Know what your customers are thinking/doing. Keep track of schedules and collaborative planning softwares.

2- Keeping a bird-eye view of the bigger picture using different online tools, such as mind-mapping softwares. You need to be in full control over your plans at all times - mindmaps and other similar softwares help in allowing that.

3- Multi-tasking 24/7. Lets face it, we have to deal with countless stakeholders at all times. We have to deal with managing, planning, implementing, collaborating, envisioning all the time. If only we had 4 clones to work simultaneously, eh? If you can multi-task well offline, you will be able to work even faster on the internet. This is a fast-paced business and you need to be ahead of the game - twittering, googling, planning, blogging, commenting, tagging, marketing. Social media offers countless tools to choose between and saves the time to switch between them.

4- Interpersonal skills to build relationships of trust. Building credibility isn’t as simple as imparting knowledge - it goes much deeper into the foundations of personal interactions. How well you can build relationships with your community online will directly effect the success of your business or services. In my POV its one of the most important skills to attract larger audiences to your events.

5- Creativity in interacting with the markets and flexibility in how they are handled. When finding or approaching your customers, you can get as creative as you want. Hold competitions, ignite heated debates, spread viral campaigns, etc. Flexibility is also important when handling customers or prospects - remember that it is an open platform, so chances are that people may complain, bad-mouth, or disagree with you. Never react to such things negatively, but handle these situations with tact. Remember, whenever someone complains to you, a part of them already wants to be on your side - a part of them wants you to improve - a part of them wants you to become more relevant to their needs. Thank you, James for the good pointers. Here’s what James wrote:

“I think, just like any position, each person has to identify their strong points and accentuate those assets while identifying their areas of improvement and addressing those on a daily basis. In general, I would say any successful Event Manager is:

1. Be Extremely organized - overly so

2. Maintain a big picture philosophy at all times, meaning you work on ever detail while keeping in perspective the larger impact and goal

3. Be a good - no great - multi-tasker. To successfully run any program you are going need to ensure that 50 things are getting done at once, whether it’s in preparation or execution of the program.

4. Possess strong interpersonal skills. You need to be comfortable realting to and dealing with high level executives, government officials, vendors, co-workers, sponorsor representatives, customers,supervisors, suppliers, full-time staff, part-time staff and more.

5. Be Creative and Flexible. I think these two go together because in the event business things are always changing. Which requires you be flexible to develop a solution and solution comes about as a result of yoru creativity.”

Social bookmarking. What is it good for?

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A background of my relationship with bookmarking: I remember the old days when I’d have a set of fancy rectangular bookmarks (something I got for myself from Barnes and Noble) lying on my desk at all times. I’ve always found it natural to organize myself while I’m working or researching with simple yet effective techniques. I used to color code the bookmarks with tags like “to show to clients”, “interesting event ideas”, or “vendor lists”, etc. Of course this was the “pre-web 2.0 era”. The era when we had to figure little productivity things out our self. Come web 2.0 and I was perhaps one of the first few to adopt online bookmarks. This is not because I’m tech savvy but simply because the concept of bookmarking is very natural for me. I do most of my research online, maintain my contacts online, I brainstorm online, I plan online and I even market my events online. What better way to manage my content than using these tools to organize the work.

Social Bookmarking: Now this is where it gets interesting. The online world thrives on sharing and community-centric approaches. So, I can tag things on my browser, cluster them up into categories if I want to, share them with other like-minded people or just open up the web feeds of the bookmark lists for public view. How does that benefit me as an event organizer? Well, I get to learn from other people, I get to rate and comment on other’s bookmarks, I get to collaborate to form richer information sets and, most importantly, I get to meet people interested in the same topics. That, to me, is invaluable for business; since my business is all about networking and relationships. Shifting bookmarks from my home computer to the office computer; or from my laptop to my team’s pcs has been as simple as exporting and emailing a single file.

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