Veteran Marketer: Why Event Pros Should be on Social Media
Should event planners pay attention to social media? To find out, we went to the experts. Here, writer Marion Renk-Rosenthal investigates what you need to know about the evolving online world. Below are the highlights of her interview with marketing expert Allen Weiss of the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.
{what social media is}
The first question is ‘What is social media?’ Basically, the answer is: People having conversations online. That’s all it is! They do this through different platforms. People like to make bigger deals out of it by getting into specifics, like twittering. Twittering is a conversation online using micro-blogging. That’s all.
{which platforms you should use and why}
[If] you talk to social media people, they say you have to be on everything. You have to be more strategic than that. The easiest way to think about it is to think about your users and your consumers. What is the way they want to touch your company? Just think about it in a simple way. The conventional wisdom is that teens all abandon TV and that they all want to go online. Well, Nielsen reported that that is not true. They reported that teens use TV and online media. It is older people who are going online more.
You start by thinking about your users and how they like to communicate. It’s true that many like to communicate in social networking sites. So, what sites do they go to? It used to be very complicated. There were about 500 sites. But most people like to be on Facebook. If it’s more professional they use LinkedIn, and if they want to be on the latest craze they go to Twitter. It used to be mostly MySpace, but MySpace is really more devoted to the music scene, so if your users are galvanized around music, MySpace is the way to go.
{why you should participate}
I think people have to participate in social media!
Whether you want to participate or not, consumers will participate. Since they are having conversations, they will talk about what you do.
Let’s say the company doesn’t want to be involved in this because they think they may waste their money. Well, just go online — don’t twitter all day — just listen to what people are saying about you. Companies that use it really well are listening to know what people are saying. They are using it for customer service. That’s a very big deal!
For instance, our customer service department uses four Twitter accounts. You can contact us by phone, by e-mail, through our website response form or through Twitter. You choose! Whatever you want to do is fine with us. We offer four ways of contacting us.
The bottom line is if you understand what your customers are doing and if they participate in social media, it makes sense to at least have a presence so they can interact with you, so that you can listen to what they are saying.
{how to advertise via social media}
People get confused because they look at social media mostly as an advertising vehicle. You can use it for advertising as well.
To give you an example, let’s talk about an event we organized this past spring.
It was called Digital Marketing World — Winning Against the Odds. It was a big event and it was totally virtual. It was free, sponsor-based. Now how would we get people to go to this virtual event? We had big names. Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign Manager David Plouffe was our keynote speaker.
Prior to social media, we would have blasted out millions of e-mail messages to say “Sign up for our event.” Our USC event organizers estimated that in order to get about 8,000 people to attend this event, it would take anywhere from 6 to 8 million e-mails. This year we did it with 300,000 emails and did it all through Twitter and we got 14,000 people.
We almost doubled attendance. It was all done through systematic strategy.
So how is it done? All our department employees get a daily e-mail from our chief content officer with instructions to the whole team about the daily message: “For Twitter, write [the] hashtag and tweet the following…” “For Facebook and LinkedIn, post the following message…,” etc. All of our employees go into their Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts and put these words in there. That is a strategy to promote our event.
Now let’s step back. If every day this were all I was doing, I would not have 2,600 followers. So what I do is participate and post other things. I am chatting with people. The event is only part of the conversation. I tweet, “How are you?” “What else is going on?”
Where it gets confusing for companies is that they want to promote something — but it is not simple promotion, it has to be a conversation.
{the bottom line}
My recommendation is, if your customers are using it, use it. But do it strategically. Don’t just twitter away. Try to find people among your employees who enjoy social media. The biggest challenge for most companies is that they cannot always control the message. They get the good and the bad in the conversation. However, it is necessary to hear it all. Welcome the whole conversation. Let your users participate. Listen and learn.
Contributor Marion Renk-Rosenthal is a freelance journalist and a contributor to event industry blog The News from EventWorks.