Page 157 - DMGT304_EVENT_MANAGEMENT

Event Management

Notes Slideshare: It is a must use site if your event utilizes presentations at all. Especially if you
have multiples presentations. Create an account for your event and gather all the presenters'
presentations in one place. These are commonly featured on the front of SlideShare.net,
which offers added promotion for you.

7.2.3 Online Marketing

It is getting pretty easy to plan and market an event entirely online these days. Marketing your
event to the masses is probably the most wide open category for online event planning tools.
Almost any social network or community presents marketing opportunities. Find the one that
fits your event and target audience the best and try to use the tools creatively.
Facebook Events offers an "invite your friends" feature that is one of the easiest share
opportunities online. Consider making your Facebook event stand out by marketing a
chat or livestream of the event instead of the event itself. This allows people that may not
be attending the physical event to participate in the invite process and promote for you.
Ustream: Livestreaming of events is becoming more and more common, and streaming
your content for free is a great marketing tool. But Ustream and other livestreaming
services (Justin.tv, Livestream.com) are more than just video feeds. You can use them to do
things like interview speakers beforehand to generate buzz, and emphasize the chat features
that take advantage of Twitter and Facebook, sending their interactions with your content
to their networks.

Avartize.com allows attendees to champion your event with very valuable real estate:
their avatars. The site lowers the barrier for people to be able to support your event in a
very visible way. Send them to the site, they select the avatar they want and through
Twitter OAuth they are given a new avatar in seconds. There are two main options:
provide an overlay such as a logo in the corner or replace the avatar completely with a full
image advertising your event.

7.2.4 Communities, Connecting

If you have multiple or repeating events, you need to try and organize the community that will
inevitably form around them. These resources range from loose affiliations that allow you to
browse groups to more complete social networks. Many groups will start on the lower end of
the scale, say a Facebook Group or Meetup.com, and evolve over time into more of a complete
social network of their own.

Meetup.com is built to help people form grassroots offline meetup groups. Groups are $72
a year and come with a nice set of community and invite tools. There is a large built-in
community waiting for groups to form around niches in which they are interested. Email
notifications are sent to Meetup.com users when a new group in their area is created
around a niche that they have expressed interest in. If you want to form a niche group that
meets monthly, this is an ideal tool-set.

Twitter Lists - If a good portion of your attendees are on Twitter, consider forming a
Twitter list as people register. Publicize the list and help attendees connect before and
after the event. This is also an easy way for people to see what attendees are talking about
the day of the event.

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