Social Media Strategies

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.”

Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)

Social Traffic - The book

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