Archive for August, 2008
10 reasons why every company should host virtual events
There has been an endless debate on whether or not to jump on the virtual events bandwagon. We’ve seen examples of how companies like Microsoft and Nokia hosted their virtual events. We’ve also seen how companies like IBM have such a dominant presence on virtual worlds such as Second Life.
If your company has a large enough user-base or prospect lists but you can’t justify the costs of holding live physical events, then you should consider going virtual. It’s time for us to drop our inhibitions about virtual events and face the facts. Here are some to begin with:
1- There are actual calculatable benefits of virtual events, like increased productivity time, reduced carbon footprint, zero traveling time, increased volunteer participation, zero geographical boundaries and bigger audience attendance.
2- Ability to engage people more interactively on a one to one level. When networking, you can have conversations with multiple attendees at the same time (just like in IMs) and yet make them all feel you are talking exclusively with them. It’s also easier to locate contacts from your existing Twitter, Friendfeed, LinkedIn or Facebook networks. Those are people you may not necessarily recognize in real life, but will be able to find easily in a virtual setting.
3- During these interactions you can share material, knowledge, presentations, PDFs, photos and other files. You can also add content recommendation systems.
4- One of the biggest post-event challenges is to analyze the attendee’s data. Virtual Events makes it much more advanced and quantifiable. You can see exactly what each attendee did, where he went, who he talked to, what material he downloaded, what questions he asked, what conversations he had with others etc. This is all valuable information that can help you understand your audience better and follow-up with them accordingly.
5- Using all of the information about a prospect or user that you gather, you can then easily categorize them according to how interested they are and how much they already know. You can then add them into your sales pipelines in different lists depending on their current relationship status.
6- Event marketing in virtual events is much lower than live physical events. According to Brent Arlsaner, VP of Marketing for Unisfair, a virtual events coordinator; virtual events generate leads at about $23 per head count.
“Take our client Quest Software’s first virtual event, which generated leads at a $23-per-head count. Marketers know that $23 per lead is a pretty impressive return on investment.”
7-If you are pressed on time, it takes on average one third to one fourth the time to organize virtual events as opposed to physical events. Less organizing time, means lesser headaches and lesser overhead costs.
8- If you want to hire booth staff or volunteers, you can get cheaper options from across the globe instead of being restricted to geographical constraints. All you have to do is put up a job post on Elance or oDesk and review the candidates that apply. You can pay only for the actual work done rather than for the number of hours.
9- The registration and ticketing process of virtual events is simpler in nature since it eliminates the need for paper tickets completely. This can be integrated with a payment system to make the entire registration process a seamless experience. Instead of tickets, you can simply grant access on the doorway when someone logs into the event space.
10- You can market richer content which is available on the spot instead of waiting for the event to be over. Some attendees may immediately add the pictures to their flickr, friendfeed or blogs. Pictures of the event or attendees can be taken and passed around during the event with your clients/sponsors brands visible in the background. This will give the clients or sponsors an added incentive to advertise or sponsor the event.
Is this why companies like On24 are coming up with virtual event platforms for other companies to host their events? What other virtual event platforms can be used?
I would like to take this debate a step forward with you guys. If any one of you has hosted virtual events, please share your experience with us here. If any of you have had a chance to market virtual events, what challenges did you face? If any one of you faces barriers to entering the virtual events world, let us know what they are. Together, let us try to evaluate whether or not this is the future of events. I’m tagging some notable people in this domain, Julius and Eugene to get the conversation ball rolling. Let’s hear all of you out.
P.S: Its okay to disagree.
Creating online social media campaigns
Event marketing using social media tools is about creating the right campaigns that have the maximum impact. Social media and networking channels offer a lot of flexibility in crafting out our messages just the way we want to. You can measure the impact and reactions of your messages and adjust your campaigns accordingly.
You can also add mental and emotional triggers to make your campaigns most effective. This helps people make the buy-no-buy decision quicker.
I came across a social marketing tool that claims to help us create online social media campaigns with ease. Its called Shoutlet. It helps in creating the content, distributing it to the right audiences and in measuring the results of the campaign in real time. Quite a handful, I’d say.
Shoutlet has some big companies, like ebay, in their client list already. Its a cost effective tool for serious businesses who want to reach out to their markets in a more organized manner.
Their standard edition is for $299/month - which may be a bit costly for startup services and one-person shops. But if you are organizing huge events and could benefit from their campaing development and outreach plans, then its a sureshot way of helping yourself build hype before launch.
Inspiring audiences through content
Have you come across the website MuseStorm yet? Its actually pretty interesting and I have a feeling it may be somewhat useful for event promoters as well. Apart from their interesting web interface and catchy color scheme, their services also stand apart. Here’s what they have to say about themselves:
“MuseStorm provides the one platform you need to produce, manage, analyze, and deliver widgets that extend your brand message into social and viral environments.
We help agencies and brand marketers focus more of their time and attention on the creative aspects of building social- and viral-marketing campaigns.
You bring your creativity. We’ll provide all the technology you could ever need or want. MuseStorm. Inspire your Audience.”
So, if they are helping us deliver our messages to the right people so that they can potentially become viral campaigns - then we should definitely check them out to see how good they are at it.
Marketing is all about spreading the word to the right people at the right time. There isn’t any exact formulas that you can follow for that - you just need to use the right tools and time your efforts perfectly. It about having a sense of timing and understanding your market perfectly.
Most of the credibility that event promoters or managers gain is based on their past porfolios, experiences and the grandiosity of their ideas. All of this is easier to demonstrate and show today to prospective clients because of the way teh internet has evolved. Everything has become pretty much an open platform. This also means that junk content from not-so-good professionals will flood the space as well. This makes it even more important for you to be able to stand out amongst the crowd and speak in a way that reaches out to your audiences.
I call that inspiring content. Content that makes people think, talk, discuss, comment, react, share, learn.
Zookoda - driving traffic with email newsletters
Email newsletters have always been a great way to keep your community members in the loop. Its a way to keep in touch with them, off and on, without actually have to write an email. All you have to do is repackage your content and send it off to your lists on a regular basis - weekly or monthly, depending on the list type. Its also a way to quickly show your lists pictures of your recent successful events without having them go to your websites or event pages.
Basically, Zookoda is linked to your actual Blog and sends summaries of the posts to your lists via email. You can choose to send the emails on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It summarized the content itself and sends off a link to your Blog for those who are interested in reading further.
Its a great way to package your posts and deliver them to people that matter to your business. Since these people have opted in for the newsletters themselves, they wont find it intruding or annoying to get some quick updates from you. You can also try to make sure you schedule the newsletters in way which is least intrusive.
Two things interest me. 1- It allows us to customize the look and feel of the email according to our Blog’s brand. That adds a level of consistency and personalization that I find rather appealing. Secondly, it allows you to send Blog summaries to mobile phones in the form of text messages - which can be very useful in special situations. Lets suppose you are hosting an event and are posting traffic and other updates on your blog for interested attendees. With Zookoda those messages can go go directly into the pockets of those people that are on the go and need them the most.
You can send off promotional emails and also schedule recurring broadcasts with it. This can be good for any pre-event podcasts that you have in store for your audiences.
Prelaunch buzz - does BuzzLogic help?
“Conversation targeting.”- I was looking around for platforms that completely utilize the power of social media to provide formal WOM services. Our markets often follow certain credible blogs and news sources and are highly influenced by them.
As an example, in the tech sector - when TechCrunch gets hyped up about a new web 2.0 product, their thousands of followers follow suit. Its just a natural way that people react. Hype catches hype - buzz gets around. So, having said that, its always interesting to see businesses that are based on completely on this model and have something solid to offer.
They are targeting marketers, advertisers and even bloggers for their services. It is specifically designed to allow us to target our conversations to our prospects, by finding the right influencers in the market. If your entire campaign is based on your ability to generate prelaunch hype - then this is a sure shot way to go. The ROI is almost immediate. What you’ll need to focus on is converting the high traffic to customers. If your websites are perfectly designed to close sales, then BuzzLogic can definitely help you buy that jacuzzi you’ve been dreaming about.
For event marketers creating the right buzz becomes even more important for a successful marketing campaign and a smashing event. The amount of buzz is proportional to the audience attendance and excitement - which in turn is proportional to the margins that you can make out of the event.
Yes, influence really is golden. If people get to hear about something good from someone they trust, its far better than any marketing message can ever be. The thing to be careful about would be to ensure that your products or events really are that good and worh talking about. Once the buzz is ignited, it needs to spread - not die out. So, make sure you’re worth the buzz and let BuzzLogic do the rest.
Putting your contacts in one place - the Soocial way
Soocial is a pain relief when it comes to managing the headache of finding contact information. People who network a lot, have tons of contacts to manage in a multitude of different places. Soocial is a tool that syncs them all up into one master address book. No matter where you add or change some contacts details, this tool updates the connected web apps, devices automatically. Phew, quite a relief!
Hassle-free contacts:
If you can ignore the cheesy Hasslehof picture on their main page, I’d say do give this tool a chance. Its a great way of making sure your networking contacts are insync, updated and handy. So, currently they work with 37signal’s highrise, Gmail, Mac’s address book, their own online application and different kinds of telephone devices.
With the onslaught of networking tools, its good to see that people realize the need to add some organization to the chaos. Organized chaos, so as to speak. Truth is, each one of these contacts is important. Some may turn out to be partners, some potential customers, some prospects, some evangelists, some super promoters, some regular followers, some will teach you a thing or two. When we’re crunched up on time and need to get things finished, we often don’t have the patience to parse through multiple address books to select or shortlist people. But if you have them all in one place and have them organized into categories, its easier to make the best use of them.
“Bubbles” increases access to web apps
If you have a few online applications that you use very often, like gmail or someone calendar tool; you can use BubblesHQ to add them to your desktop. This makes it much easier to use them and you don’t have to open up a browser to see if theres anything new there.
This level of flexibility is important for event marketers, when we have to keep a tab on multiple threads at the same time. Theres no point being restricted in a browser window if we can avail the benefits of our desktops.
Heres what they have to say:
“Your favorite web applications have been running in a Browser for too long. They’re trapped in tabs, crammed between a gossip column, driving directions and an image search for cats. With Bubbles, your web-apps are a click away. super-charged with new features like customized notification windows, even when your web-app is minimized. No more separation between your desktop and the web - use Bubbles, and your favorite apps are just a click away.”
Just like desktop apps, bubbles puts up icons of your web app wherever you want it and shows notifications of updates.
Blogging about your event
Blogging is one of the most defining inventions of our time. While there are thousands of blogs that are just used as personal journals or ways to rant and vent; useful and meaningful blogs have a strong presence as well.
Its amazing how different people hold separate opinions, have individual preferences, perceive things differently, have their own ways of expression, and think with unique mindsets. Its amazing how much variety there is in human personalities. Its amazing how societal and other external factors influence our perspectives. Its amazing how two poets would always come up with different lines, even if they are writing on a similar topic. Human psyche and behavior amazes me. I have heard that close to 50% of all searches in Google are new word combinations or phrase structures which is astounding if you consider the number of searches each day.
Thats when the power of blogs as a means of transferring one persons thoughts, experiences, opinions, knowledge to the rest of the world at a just a click of button becomes so immense. Its a remarkable medium of conveying messages to your audiences in a meaningful, personalized and rich manner. This is why whenever I come across someone who shrugs and says “oh I don’t know about blogging for my business, I’m not much of a writer”, I just can’t help but feel bad for them. You’re selling to people online, you are putting up online advertisements and banners in different websites, but you can’t blog? I often question the thought process behind such an attitude if working online, do these people honestly think they can compete online today with little more than a product, service & a sales pitch? If you can’t write, hire someone to write it for you. If you’re busy, get someone else involved. But if theres ONE sure way of communicating directly with your audiences and customers in an open channel that builds a list of names into a community of buyers, its through blogging. It tells a story, paints the inside picture, creates a personalized feel and introduces people who may never, ever meet you to who you are and what you or your company stands for. If someone isn’t getting the least thrilled by reading your blog, he/ she’s probably not your target market or your blog is not providing value or insight to them.
One of the best approaches of starting blogs is finding your own special niche and focusing on it until you become an authority in that area. Authoritative blogs command a higher presence level and have greater number of followers (readers).
If you are marketing events, then writing about the events in the pre-launch phase, is one of the best ways of keeping your prospects in the loop, all the while raising the hype levels. Through your blogs you can link them off to your social networking sites and vice versa.
There are a number blogging tools and services that you can use. WordPress is definitely one of the better options out there. So go out, make a content plan, set up a blog, and start writing. Its that easy?
Using Trackur for keeping track of your online reputation
If you have been networking online for a while and are prepping people up for an event or an exciting launch, chances are that people will be talking about you (or your company, or product). Sometimes it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a tab on all such discussions to get a feel for the general (or majority) tone of the conversations. You need to be able to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns or social networking efforts, to see whether or not you are using the right mix of approaches.
Getting an early feel equates to directing your business decisions in the right direction, thus online reputation tracking becomes an integral part of your social life. I recently came across an interesting software that is built around this very concept, and does a great job at it. Say hello to Trackur.
It monitors traffic based on the keyword(s) that you want to track on websites, blogs, videos, multi-media content and gives you trends based on the analysis. Apparently, its just been opened for public downloads some 4 months ago and is already catching a lot of media attention. They have three different pricing models based on how many keywords you want to track. For a single keyword tracking (e.g. “Simon Ford”), it’d cost $18/month - so its not a cheap solution. However, for event marketers whose businesses depend on reputation, signing up can be more beneficial than costly. As an example, identifying bad PR early on can help you deal with it better.
There are some competitive products in the market as well, like BrandsEye and Reputation Defender which may even be cheaper alternatives. What I noticed about Trackur though, is that it is focused a lot on simplicity and searches the internet pretty rigorously to ensure the data is as close to accurate as possible. You can measure the effect of your prelaunch hype marketing and the buzz before your events. You can see the spikes and troughs in the conversations and add relaunches or promotions when you see the conversations fading out. You can customize your tracking by putting filters on the keywords that you are searching for.
Watch the video if you are interested in finding out more about it:
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