Archive for July, 2008

Social media etiquittes for event planners

Posted by writer

It seems that people tend to misuse social media and networking sites for their marketing campaigns leaving users irritated. Spam in emails is something I have learned to get used to (sort of), but Facebook spam and blog comments spam is always an annoyance.


It is important to be careful in your social media strategies and implementation because one wrong move can defame you in seconds in the online world. Although these things may seem obvious to most people, I will still share them with you so that you can run through your plans to make sure you don’t unintentionally push the wrong nerves. As event managers or marketers, your reputation and credibility are things that need safeguarding.

I consider these an understood underlying part of my preachings, but if we’re not on the same page about them then there is a chance you may misinterpret my social media strategies and harm your events or businesses. So, here goes:

If you are leveraging social media for marketing your events, please make sure of the following:

1- You send messages to only those people who are interested or have opted-in to hearing from you. No random catching strangers in the marketplace.

2- If you have found your demographics online (randomly), then try to build a relationship of trust with them before pushing marketing message down their throats. Make them your friends by helping them or providing them value. This is always a mutually beneficial relationship.

3- Even if you have built a relationship with prospects, make sure they are open to hearing about your event, instead of giving them attendance ultimatums. You don’t want to drive the traffic away but instead attract them.

4- To attract that traffic don’t fabricate things about your event that are not true. There is nothing worse than finding out that you have been deceived into buying tickets. deliver what you promise and promise what you can deliver.

So there, is out of my system now. We’ll move onto more serious topics tomorrow onwards.

Social Media - an online mindset shift

Posted by writer

Its interesting to see how event managers with old-school traditional marketing knowledge are using social media in the wrong way. When it comes to social media, you have to have a complete mindset shift or else you’d end up wasting time and energy with little or no rewards.


People who don’t change their mindsets want to see immediate results, want to get immediate outreach (outreach doesn’t necessarily mean better branding), don’t have the right conversations with their potential customers (have to be two way), don’t let communities evolve on their own (by trying to control everything), are not open to criticism, don’t switch to online mediums completely (still rely on offline techniques more), can’t synergize different mediums for planning and marketing their events.

Of course, I do understand that it can be difficult to just switch a perspective that has been embedded in our systems for years. If you are having trouble adapting your thinking process around the latest and newest technologies, here are some things that may help:

1- Be in the know of whats going on. Subscribe to different authority blogs in your industry. Get Google alerts for updates on happenings that can effect your business. Keep yourself constantly up to date.

2- Learn from others. When other industry thought leaders share their experiences and ideas - be sure to learn from them. Often times, those people who close themselves up to what others are doing become increasingly averse to social media.

3- Keep a watch on new tools and spend time playing with them or analyzing them regularly. Follow the latest internet marketing trends (Brad Fallon’s www.freelinereport.com is good place to start) and keep trying them out off and on to see how your events and businesses can be improved by using them. If you don’t like a tool, you don’t have to use it - but at least give them a try. There are so many cool free online applications that can benefit you.

4- If you think you are still not the social media type - get tech friendly people on your team and give the space and leverage to get creative with social media marketing. This is a great way of bringing in new ideas into your business. If you think you are up for it, you can even hire experts to do your events marketing for you.

Whatever road you choose, try not to stay stuck with the old methods of marketing. Leverage the power of social media.

Tags - Simple strategies to create effective tags

Posted by writer

Tagging
Tags are the words to describe your blogs, videos, posts, book marks or whatever it is that you are tagging. The concept of tags has been with us since time immemorial - where humans like to place information in chunks and categories. In the blogging and online world too, we use tags to make it easier for us and others to find information. If you are running a company or event blog, we’d advise you to spend a few minutes every time you write a new post to add relevant tags to it. This little step goes a long way to routing interested traffic to yourself.


Tags are basically the meta-data that goes into search functions. That makes them important tools for bringing in relevant traffic to your site. So using them properly can be an effective marketing tool for attracting your targeted customers or readers from the internet. Almost all internet users use search engines - you just need to figure out a way to be visible when they’re searching for things that are relevant to your business. Follow these best practices;

Tagging best practices:
A few important things to keep in mind regarding tags are that;

- they should be short; preferably single words if possible

- they should be simple; in the easiest possible language

- they should be memorable; simple memorable words are searched more often

- they should be relevant to the content of the site/blog

- don’t limit yourself by being too specific. E.g. write “fund raiser” instead of “charity fund raiser concert” or write “outdoor event” instead of “outdoor pool party for teens”.

- If comma separated use capitals to start each new word to make it easier for the search spiders to identify the different words.

- If asked to space separated tags its best to start each new phrase with lower case lettering and each new word in a phrase with a capital letter without spaces. “leavingTheSpace” “toSeperateEachNewPhrase” you want to tag like so.

Just remember to focus on terms people search for. Go over your content, find the things that are relevant to your content and use them as well. For example if your article is about wedding parties, also add tags to “engagement”, “wedding ring”, “wedding cake”, “wedding planning”, etc. However, make sure you limit yourself to a maximum of 6-8 keyword tags so as not to dilute the tagged word density of the post. Too many tags have a negative effect in the search rankings.

Using Google adwords for driving traffic to your Event page

Posted by writer

Why is a Google Adwords campaign important? As an event marketer, you probably have some fancy event pages where prospects can build communities and get information. If you’re a techy event marketer, you probably have cool widgets installed in the event page to build hype and excitement around your events. The issues that event marketers are likely to face is how to draw more and more people to your event page. Thats where Google Adwords comes in.


When we’re looking for information online, the first thing we do is look for it using search engines by typing out relevant words or phrases. These words are called “keywords”. With the help of these keywords, you can attract your customers to your event pages. If you’ve been following my blogs, you would already know how much I support social networking sites and blogging to expand your event communities.

Simply put, Google Adwords is a way to maximize the content and attention of those social strategies. You should never let them go waste. Here are the steps to go about them:

1- Work on finding the best keywords for your event. Don’t just stick to generic words like “event” or “concert” - get into detail, find longer tail key words that indicate the person searching them have commercial intent, like: “rock concert ticket sales”, “Celine Dion concert tickets”, “concerts in Alabama”. Remember one thing: The purpose optimizing keywords is to get your targeted stakeholders to your site and if possible stakeholders who have commercial intent. Whether you want audiences, vendors, potential sponsors, etc. Customize the keywords accordingly. The success of your campaign depends entirely on these keywords, so make sure that they are as relevant to your audiences as possible. However, keep in mind that once you have the desired keywords listed keep them on the side for reference.

You can get assistance from SEO professionals for this step if needed. You can find SEO experts in different online project outsourcing sites.

2- Decide your Google Adwords campaign strategy. What will suit your own marketing goals better? You can choose between cost-per-click, cost-per-impression. In cost-per-impression your ads get placed on 3rd party websites relevant to your target audience instead of them being placed on Googles search engine results pages. This is a little more focused on your event’s niche and is thus a good (and cheaper) option for advertising. So in the above example, people who are interested in rock concerts (targeted audience) will see your ad.

Your event page should ideally have a high conversion ratio. If the purpose of the event page is to get people to participate in the pre event planning, then you would want to convert the maximum number of visitors into participants. This is especially important if you are paying for Google Adwords.

Lets suppose you have selected the pay-per-click model - this means that you will have to pay for each click on your ad. So that advertising expense will become more prudently spent if you are able to convert those ad clickers (just invented the term :)) into active participants.

Another thing to note here is that if your keywords attract the wrong kind of traffic (ill suited traffic with no interest in your event) then you will end up paying for the clicks that will result in nothing. So selecting the right keywords for your niche is something you need to spend a good amount of time on. Make sure your ad itself is also designed and written to appeal to your target audiences.

3- By the time you have come to this stage, you must have already chalked out a budget for your event advertising. Depending on your advertising campaign plan, calculate the maximum budget you can allocate to Google Adwords out of your total Social Media Marketing budget.

4- When setting up your Google Adwords account, you can choose to limit your spending so that it doesn’t hit the roof unexpectedly. You can alter your budgets and keywords according to the results and trends that you get from advertising using Google Adwords.

5- Expand the keywords that you had earlier chosen. This is also often referred to as the long tail keyword strategy, in which you find different un obvious phrases with more words in them that stem out of your base keywords or plurals and common misspellings of your keywords.

6- Before completing the setup process, do make sure to check other tips Google has for you at their site (www.adwords.google.com)

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