Jeremiah Owyang coined the term “Intention Web” to describe social media which captures and promotes users’ future plans. Where the asynchronous web is about the then, the real-time web is about the now, Intention Web properties are about the later.

Event and experiential marketers seem to have been focused on using social media as a sort of historical record of their activities, posting content, including transcripts, photos, videos, Powerpoint presentations etc. after the fact.

Otherwise, the community has begun to embrace the now, talking about what’s happening on Twitter, Facebook and the like, by promoting and encouraging attendees to share their personal experiences real-time during speaking sessions, concerts and brand experiences of all types. By attracting and leveraging as many followers as possible marketers are able to broadcast updates and engage audiences well beyond the physical experience.

But what about the future? Aside from simply listing an event on Facebook, Linkedin or your favorite social network, what are you doing to build excitiment, drive anticipation, generate audience and foster community before your event takes place?

There are a few Intention-based social networks that specialize in driving this anticipation. Here they are, along with some ideas for how to best use them in your event marketing program.

Dopplr: “Dopplr is a service for smart international travelers. Dopplr members share personal and business travel plans privately with their networks, and exchange tips on places to stay, eat and explore in cities around the world. Dopplr presents this collective intelligence – the travel patterns, tips and advice of the world’s most frequent travellers – as a Social Atlas. You can use Dopplr on a personal computer and a mobile phone.” Setting up a profile is easy. Then you can build your network easily by inviting friends from: Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Outlook, or type in your own email addresses. Travel plans need to be fairly specific, and the carbon footprint section is interesting. While Dopplr is not about events, its a great resource for travel planning for a specific city with restaurants, hotels and activities explored in each location. Look for more mobile integration for Dopplr with their iphone App and recent acquisition by Nokia.

Meetup: “The world’s largest network of local groups. Meetup makes it easy for anyone to organize a local group or find one of the thousands already meeting up face-to-face. More than 2,000 groups get together in local communities each day, each one with the goal of improving themselves or their communities.” This group-centric site makes it really easy to find groups and their activities in locations where you are or are traveling to. You basically have two options: Find a Meetup Group or Start a Meetup Group. Finding a group is easy. Just type in a few keywords, and the site will serve up all the groups in your area that meet on the topics you’re interested in. Once you select a group, you’ll be brought to their page where you can sign up for “meetups” post pictures, and participate in the group forums. You can also share group activities with Facebook and Twitter. To create a group is also simple, but there is a nominal cost ($12 – $19 per month depending on length of commitment) to keep the group listed. Once you’ve created a group you can invite folks to join, promote your group r meetups through the site or other channels or simply wait for them to come to you via keyword search.

Plancast: “Plancast is the easiest way for you to share your plans with friends and discover what others are doing in the future.” This lightweight application allows users to keep tabs on what people are doing in real life. Simply create a profile (name, picture, location, bio) and you’re on your way. From there you can post What you’re planning, When it occurs and where it happens. You can subscribe to other users, or they can subscribe to you, this way plans are shared. Plancast seamlessly integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Google Buzz, so your plans can be posted across your social networks, and subscribers (think friends, followers, etc) can be invited to join you on Plancast. Once you post your plan, others can plan on attending or participating. Plancast is an easy way to organize nights out, tweetups or major events. It’s all about the subscribers, so build your network and use Plancast to get together.

Tripit: “TripIt turns chaos into order by making it easy for anyone to: Organize trip details into one master online itinerary — even if arrangements are booked at multiple travel sites, Automatically include maps, directions and weather in their master itinerary, Have the option to book restaurants, theatre tickets, activities and more right from within the online itinerary, Safely access travel plans online, share them, check-in for flights, or print an itinerary.” The interesting thing about Tripit is the ability to share your plans with others. Like Dopplr, this functionality can help users organize formal or informal meet-ups in cities where they are traveling to. You can add friends through email address books (e.g., aol, gmail, hotmail, live, msn & yahoo), my entering individual email addresses, or through Linkedin. Tripit also has a host of applications to try out from iGoogle integration to groups which let’s you track the itineraries and locations of people within groups you assign. Check out the interactive map that plots where people are traveling to. Tripit Pro also has some interesting functionality including tracking your frequent flyer program points and getting travel alerts. No other service does a better job integrating with social media applications like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google, etc. Its a great tool to organize not only your own itineraries, but those of your entire team.

Upcoming: “Upcoming is a community for discovering and sharing events. It can help you find stuff to do, discover what your friends are doing, or let you keep private events online for your own reference.” You’ll need a Yahoo ID to join Upcoming, as it is a Yahoo property. Once you’re in you can create a basic profile. Adding friends is a bit more challenging, you need to know their names or do a search for existing members. Alternatively you an invite users via email. Finding events is as simple as entering a subject (keyword) and location, and upcoming will seve up all upcoming events in your area. Adding an event is also quite simple. Other features include integration with music sites like Ping.fm, Pandora and iTunes to add concerts. Additionally, you can join groups to subscribe to their forums and events, or check out places to get information on all the happenings in your favorite locales. The only interaction with other social sites on Upcoming seems to be the ability to share events on Facebook. Upcoming seems to be more about posting and finding events than driving community or building personal profiles for interaction.

In conclusion, these are just some of the Intention Web sites you’ll find out there. Facebook and Linkedin already have some pretty robust event applications. And sites like Socializr, Baseloop are more geared toward smaller, friendly get-togethers. Deciding which application(s) to use is largely dependent on what you’re trying to accomplish. For managing travel to other cities with groups of folks or across your communities, consider Tripit. For connecting with your communities on the social web and sharing plans, Plancast is the way to go. For promoting your community look to Meetup. How are you using the Intention Web to build anticipation and coordinate your plans?

Social Anticipation: Using the Intention Web for Experience Marketing is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0

According to Quantcast, as of November 2009, MySpace has just under 60 million regular users per month, making it the second largest social network in the US. 57% of users are female and 43% are male. As far as age is concerned, 46% of MySpace visitors are 18-34, followed by 13-17 at 26% and 35-49 at 17%. MySpace also boasts a large Hispanic and African American population.

Like all marketing, the trick for brands is to fish where the fish are. In other words, make sure the digital properties included in any social media strategy attract your target audience. Its also a good idea to align your brand appropriately with the content of the property to ensure relevance for the community.

MySpace attracts a younger audience than Facebook, and the content is more entertainment focused, including, celebrity, fashion, video, sports and most importantly, MySpace is building their business largely through music. With recent acquisitions of imeem, and iLike, as well as the build out of MySpace Music, News Corporation appears to be focused on billing MySpace as the premier social destination for all things music.

So how can event marketers leverage MySpace for events? Here are 8 ideas to get you started.

1. Its not about the event, its about the community. This may sound familiar from my earlier posts, but it bears repeating. As marketers, its important we change our thinking from using MySpace or any other social media platform for an event, to understanding how we can incorporate our event into the community. Changing our state of mind will help ensure we are focused on the right things and enable long-term success. What’s most important is approaching social communities comprised of the right audiences for our products or services. In some cases, there will not be an organic fit between branded content and community interests. Content should be carefully crafted to align, or alternate channels should be explored if content alignment is not possible.

2. Create a profile for your event. Although designed for people, a profile can be built for an event. This is really easy to do on MySpace. Make sure your presence is branded appropriately and community centric. Myspace is completely customizable. You can change the layout and background or create a custom look and feel using CSS tools. From here you can add different modules that display exactly the kind of information you want to display on your profile. Take advantage of appropriate modules for your presence like:

• Blurbs – Shows the “About” Section of your profile
• Details – Miscellaneous details about your event
• Interests – Here you can include the subject matter of the event
• Companies – Here you can list participating companies
• Friend Space – Friends or fans listed (think attendees or other interested parties)
• Events – Create and manage all your events or curriculum / agendas
• Calendar – Displays important dates about your event

3. Add multimedia content to your profile. Keep it updated to educate, inform and excite your audiences.

• Music Player – If your event is entertainment focused, this is the place to keep and showcase it (under MySpace Music)
• Video Player – Record or upload your own videos (under MySpace Video)

4. Keep the information fresh, interesting and engaging. Other modules can be used to better communicate and engage with your community. Use them daily.

• Status and Mood – Keep your audience apprised on event activities
• Activity Stream – Publishes everything you do on MySpace
• Comments – Allows you or others to post comments to your profile

5. Create additional value for attendees. Still other modules can be used to help attendees navigate the locale around your event

• Local Reviews – Helpful for destination events where attendees may be looking for hotels, restaurants, attractions, etc.
• MySpace Local – Can be used for attendees during regional events to find restaurants, hotels, and attractions

6. Identify, attract and befriend the right audience. You don’t need to boil the ocean here. Start by searching MySpace for people who you know who are already part of the community and “friending” them. You can also invite people you email or IM via your contact list to join MySpace. The next step is to use MySpace search functions to conduct searches of Profiles, Groups and Forums to identify folks who might be interested in your content and your event and “friend” them. Finally, you can promote your MySpace presence off site to attract others to become your friend.

7. Engage your community. If you build it, they might come. In order to be truly successful, you must engage and interact with others. Reach out to other MySpace profiles with related content (industry, fan, speaker, exhibitor, etc.). Post photos, videos, music, stories, links and updates that will keep your audiences interested and engaged. Also take full advantage of MySpace:

• Blogs – Allows you to create your own blog or view others blogs – update your blog regularly. For more guidance on using blogs effectively at events, please check out my earlier post, The Importance of Blogs in Experiential Marketing.
• Groups – Join relevant groups or create your own group based on the event – make sure you participate actively.
• Forums – Start new discussions or participate in other revelvent discussions actively to foster your community and drive interest in the subject matter of your event.

Here are some thoughts on the kind of content you should post regularly.

• News about event content (again, think community interest first) and  event operations
• Links to outside blogs (speakers, exhibitors, industry sites, subject matter experts, etc.)
• Links to other MySpace pages (speakers, exhibitors, industry / subject matter groups, etc.)
• Photos and videos (speakers, experiences, exhibits, demonstrations, previous events, subject matter relevant, audience and fan provided)

Remember, the beauty of social media, is you don’t need to create everything, you can leverage and share what others have done, provided it is on brand, relevant to your audience and appropriate for your presence.

Think long-term. This is not just about awareness and audience generation for your event, but an engagement strategy that will make your event a vital component of the community and an important accentuation point in the relationship with your audiences, whether they be attendees, speakers, exhibitors, press, analysts or otherwise.

8. Leverage appropriate applications. There are hundreds of applications in MySpace. Browse application categories or search apps based on keywords. You can also create your own applications to be included in the MySpace universe. Here are some I’ve found useful:

• Custom Countdown: Allows you to create customized countdowns for your events
• iTwitter: Syncs your tweets to your MySpace profile
• RSS Reader: Include RSS feeds from your blog, news sites, subject matter experts, etc. on your MySpace profile
• Create Free Polls: Survey your MySpace audience and report the results
• YouTube Post: Post your YouTube videos directly into your MySpace profile
• Business 3.0: Integrate your business information, products, services, etc. into many social media platforms

Building a MySpace engagement strategy (or any other community engagement strategy)  is easier said than done. Participating in communities takes time and diligence, but with the right focus, your event can become a prominent fixture both within the MySpace community and beyond. Remember to observe, create, share and engage and long-term success will be yours.

These are just some of the things you can do with MySpace. There are many other uses and applications for events. If you have other ideas or ways in which you’ve used MySpace for events please share!

8 Ways To Use MySpace For Events is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0

The most significant takeaway: The definition of a lead varies by company, business model, industry, approach and audience.

All said, here are some thoughts to help you ensure your definition, data collection and pipeline management process are aligned for maximum effectiveness.

1. Determine the minimum information required. Typically we need a name and some contact information:

• Name
• Address
• City
• State
• Postal Code
• Country
• Telephone
• Mobile Phone
• Email
• Social Media

Minimum is important. You want to make sure it is as easy as possible for your target audiences to provide information. Also think in terms of communications platforms. How does your audience prefer to be communicated to? Email? Direct Mail? Telephone? SMS? What about connecting via Social Media? (Now there’s an idea! However, I’m not sure if we will get to the point of: “Please check here if we can ‘friend’ you on Facebook.” By the way, does a Twitter ‘follow’ constitute as an Opt-In?) Think about how your organization typically communicates as well, within the current marketing campaign, by your sales teams, customer service and beyond. There are also advantages and disadvantages to each communications channel. Think about the differences between interactivity, engagement, interruptive vs. collaborative, one-way vs. two way, static vs. dynamic, etc. The platform you choose determines the contact information you need, and says something about your brand and customers as well.

2. “Opt-In” is not just the law, it is a strategic weapon. Think carefully about how you want your audiences to participate. There are several types of Opt-Ins:

• Specific Marketing Campaign
• General Company
• Specific Product or Service
• Partner Offers

Interestingly, how you present Opt-In questions is just as important as what types of Opt-In questions you choose. Studies have shown this is a balance between quantity and quality of leads. Negatively-framed questions (Opt-Outs) receive higher participation rates than positively-framed questions (Opt-Ins). Pre-selected choices also receive higher Opt-In rates, however the quality of these leads tends to be lower than those where participants are required to select the option. Copy treatments and page positioning have also been shown to effect participation quantity and quality.

3. BANT Qualification has two inherent strengths. BANT Qualification, or understanding a prospects Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe (hence the BANT acronym) assists you in understanding whether or not a prospect is a viable customer. For example, a prospect’s budget is too low for your product or service, or they don’t have the authority to make the purchase decision. It can also help your sales teams in prioritizing leads. Should a prospect be looking to purchase a product or service in the near-term (Timeframe) of have more than enough Budget to purchase your offering(s), they could be considered a ‘hot’ lead.

So how do you get BANT information? Here, you have some choices. You can either address BANT with your marketing approach, leave it to your sales teams or adopt a hybrid model. Here are some examples:

• Budget: (formulaic) “What is your annual household income?”, (direct) “What is your company’s annual budget for X?”
• Authority: “Are you Head of Household?”, “Are you the final decision maker or do you recommend or influence purchase decisions for your company?”
• Need: “Do you own a home?”, “Does your company outsource your IT?’
• Timeframe: “When are you looking to purchase a new car?”, “When does your company’s fiscal calendar end?”

As you can see, these types of questions can be asked through a marketing campaign, as part of an initial sales or outreach (telemarketing) campaign, or across both.

4. Conditioning leads is good or you and good for them. Conditioning leads is the art and science of collecting additional demographic, psychographic and technographic information from your audience, while educating them about your brand and products. Conditioning allows brands to learn more about their audiences, and their audiences to learn more about them. It’s a courtship of sorts that will (hopefully) lead to a long-term relationship. Think about what additional information you’d like to collect about your audiences over time. This can inform your current pipeline, futures sales and marketing efforts, and provide some incredible opportunities for your customer service organization to drive retention, expansion, loyalty and advocacy.

Think of conditioning questions as the “nice-to-know” information about your audiences. This information, while not required for the sales process might help hone your future marketing efforts or give your sales teams an edge in establishing and building relationships with prospects. Some examples: “Do they participate in social media?” “What publications do they read?” “How many people are in their family?”

Similarly, understanding what additional pieces of information your audiences would like to, and need to know about your products or brand can help optimize your marketing, sales and service efforts. Here we include what audiences “need-to-know” about our brands and products in order to make a purchase decision, as well as the “nice-to-know” information that may drive audiences from the consideration to preference stages of the pipeline. “Does your organization align to your audiences moral and ethical compass?”, “Is your brand fun and playful, or more serious and straightforward?”, “How engaging and personal is your company?” Every communication with your audiences should tell a part of the story. People do business with brands they know, like and trust. Frequency and cadence of communications is important here. Understanding the balance between too much, too often and just right takes time and practice.

You can also use the conditioning process as a strategic tool to control the speed at which prospects move through the sales cycle. For example: for complex products or solutions, more conditioning may lower return rates and increase overall customer satisfaction. Or, if you have a smaller sales staff and a marketing campaign is wildly successful, conditioning can be used to keep prospects in a holding pattern until your sales teams can address them.

All said, capturing and qualifying leads can be a far more complex process than “name, address and phone number”. If you adopt a strategic approach to your lead process that is aligned to your sales, marketing and service efforts, you can manage your pipeline with great effectiveness and efficiency, build stronger and deeper relationships with your customers and drive long-term business success. Think beyond the lead.

Do you have any thoughts on defining a lead or managing the process? Please share!

Demand Generation: The Anatomy Of A Lead is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

Mashable recently published “Google Wave: Better than Twitter for Conference Chatter” by Charlie Osmond at Freshworks. At first pass this article made a lot of sense. Charlie talks about how #hashtags aren’t an ideal way for people to share relevant content, and that the wiki-like interface of Google Wave makes it quite easy for users to share information of all kinds, effortlessly. This creates a more optimized platform for conference back chatter.

After watching the above video and spending some time checking out Google Wave (many thanks to Mike McCurry for the invitation) I quickly realized Google Wave is much more of a game-changer for event marketers than I originally thought. For those of you who have not yet received the coveted invitation, or if you have but just haven’t had the time to explore Google Wave, here’s a brief synopsis.

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A ‘wave’ can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, presentations, drawings, maps, interactive games, and more in real time. Google Wave is an open platform and developers are being encouraged to create extensions, plug-ins and applications to make this offering even more powerful. Jay Lahiro also has a nice description on his blog.

We’ve been talking about social media as a conversation or dialogue for some time now. Google Wave allows us to have true ‘polylogues’, where multiple users can participate in the discussion at the same time.

There’s been a lot of discussion as of late about how to use Facebook, Linkedin, and especially Twitter for events. These discussions tend to segregate communications streams into ‘front channel’ and ‘back channel’. The intent here being that official, planned content around an event, whether face-to-face or virtual, is considered ‘front channel’, with most referring to social media as a ‘back channel’ communication stream. This is not to say that legacy social media tools cannot be used for ‘front channel’ communications, but few event producers have done so effectively. Participation tends to be limited to “We have a Facebook page.” or “Here’s the official Twitter #hashtag.” There tends to be an attitude that if you build it, they will come, instead of truly integrating social media content into an event and actively engaging communities online before, during and after an event.

Google Wave has the potential to change this paradigm. Here, official content (speaking sessions, blogs, photos, videos, exhibitor content -- promotions, product launches, etc.) could be included in a wave along with social media tools (Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Conversations, etc.) This allows for the integration of ‘front channel ‘and ‘back channel’ communications streams, allows users to create their own event experiences and creates a true community around the event.

Virtual event platforms like InXpo, Unisfair, ON24, etc. should take notice. An open platform like Google Wave can disrupt their business model and give brands, event producers and event agencies a free and simple way to connect audiences with brands virtually. For face-to-face events, Google Wave provides a compelling enhancement which can add real value to their experiences for their audiences (think the ultimate hybrid event). The true measure of success however will be for event producers to learn more about how to engage audiences both on and offline, and use the event as a communications hub where brands, subject matter experts and audiences each have an equal share of voice in the community.

It’s challenging to describe Google Wave in words. The above video does a nice job of walking through the basic offering, and there are several other blog posts, etc. which can give you some more insight, but to truly understand it you must experience it. I strongly encourage my fellow marketing, social media and event brethren who haven’t spent time in Google Wave to secure an invitation as soon as possible, and begin to use the tool to better understand how you might use it to engage your audiences. Google Wave is in preview mode, and has not been made publicly available. The faster we can get over the learning curve and more we can influence its development, the greater the value it will have for us as it becomes more widely available.

Already on Google Wave? Please share your thoughts, and be all means, please connect with me at ianmcgonnigal@googlewave.com.

Google Wave: The Future of Event Engagement? is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0

One way to advance the conversation around using Twitter for event and experiential marketing is to leverage third-party applications. There are literally hundreds of Twitter applications available. A case could be made for using any and all of them for your event marketing program. I’ve spent some time reviewing some of the more interesting applications which can complement your events beyond creating buzz. In some cases there are alternate tools which perform the same function as those listed below. Feel free to explore. These are some of my favorites.

Twellow: The Twitter yellow pages. This directory searches the profiles (bios) of Twitter users when you enter a keyword. This application can be used to identify potential attendees, speakers, exhibitors, suppliers, etc. Its very simple to use, and ranks search results by number of followers.

Icerocket Twitter Search: There are several Twitter search tools out there. This is one of my favorites. Its a real time search engine and searches for keywords used within tweets. For events, Icerocket can be used to find trending topics, monitor hashtags, or find people of interest based on what they tweet. Bonus: Icerocket also searches blogs.

Tweet Later: This is one of my favorites for event marketers. If you plan ahead of time, you can schedule some of your tweets to coincide with the event schedule. Great for reminding followers of speaking sessions, or promoting your booth and other activities throughout an event. The perfect tool for press releases of new product launches, etc. I’ve used this tool for tweeting key points of my presentation while I was giving it. With rehearsal and timing it can work out pretty well. Keep in mind, while you can schedule some of your tweets ahead of time, its important to stay connected and be a part of the ongoing conversation live.

Tweetdeck: Monitoring the conversation around your event is critical. Tweetdeck makes this simple by allowing you to monitor several keywords, hastags, and people at once. Consider using Tweetdeck to monitor the conversation around your event in realtime. You can also set up Tweetdeck on large format monitors for attendees to see what content is buzzing in the twitterverse while they’re at an event. Bonus: Tweetdeck also integrates with Facebook and MySpace.

Tweetbeep: A very useful tool that monitors keywords and links and sends activity alerts by email every hour. Imagine having trending topics about your event, sessions, speakers, etc. delivered to you as they happen. Deploy Tweetbeep in addition to Tweetdeck to monitor hot topics.

Twtvite: a free event management tool that helps you organize and promote local Tweetups (informal social gatherings of people with like interests). You can use Twtvite to organize tweetups around your event. If you are using Tweetdeck or Tweetbeep to monitor conversations around your event, Twtvite can be the perfect tool to organize adhoc discussions to complement planned event curriculum based on what topics are trending.

Poll Everywhere: Need an audience response system on the cheap? Poll everywhere allows audiences to submit messages or answer multiple choice questions via tweet, SMS or the web. The best part: their feedback is instantly embedded into your live Powerpoint presentation. This tool has some amazing applications for hybrid events. Here you can get feedback from both face-to-face and virtual audiences during a presentation that is also streamed live via the internet.

Twtpoll: Simple polling application that allows you to submit a question to the twitterverse. You can choose form 17 types of questions and set a time limit for answers. This is great for gathering information for presentations before an event, or getting feedback after an event. Bonus: You can share Twtpolls across any social network.

Twitpic: This tool allows you to share pictures via Twitter – complete with geotagging. Share live pictures of your event with the world! Encourage attendees to share their event pictures as well. You might even incorporate a photo scavenger hunt into your event using Twitpic.

Twitvid: Like Twitpic but for video. Super easy to use. Share videos of speakers, entertainment, demonstrations, etc. via Twitter. Encourage attendees to participate. Bonus: autosharing to Facebook, MySpace and Youtube is integrated.

Twitcam: Create a live twebcast! Broadcast your event via this simple, instant streaming video application. This is great for speaking sessions, demonstrations, etc. Integrates with a twitter window so observers can comment / ask questions during the presentation. Its a good idea to have a moderator and a decent webcam / mic hooked up to your computer.

Tweetchat: Very cool application that allows users to conduct  live chat over twitter via #hashtags. I participate in the #eventprofs tweetchat as often as I can. You can organize tweetchats during your event on trending topics, or schedule these as part of you planned curriculum. Tweetchats can also take place off hours or for virtual participants.

These twelve Twitter tools will help you advance your event program beyond the profile, #hashtag and promotional tweet. If used appropriately these applications can drive community engagement before, during and after each event to create real relationships with your audiences across your event program. Use one, use some, use them all, its your choice. Understand your audience and objectives first, then pick the best tools to meet your needs. I’ve only scratched the surface here. Again, there are hundreds of third-party Twitter applications out there, and they come and go daily. If you find something that’s worked for you please share!

12 Twitter Tools Every Event Marketer Should Know About is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0

Often event-producer-provided audience descriptions can be somewhat biased and useless from a marketing perspective. Case in point: Aren’t we all “decision makers”? Because of this, I’ve come to respect third-party audits by companies like BPA Worldwide or Exhibit Surveys. Wherever possible, its a good idea to insist on third-party audits to drive true marketing discipline into your program and the event industry at large. All said, chances are you don’t want to attract and start a conversation with everyone who attends a trade show – You want to engage with the folks that really matter, your suspects and prospects.

I’m always amazed at the size and scope of the spend many companies make at major events to drive awareness and audience. I wonder if anyone ever bought anything because of a 24-story building wrap. I’m not saying awareness vehicles have no value. On the contrary, awareness is critical in driving pipeline. My point is: each and every tactic and investment at every event should be scrutinized and prioritized to ensure it is the best tool to accomplish your business objectives with your targeted audiences. Event marketers don’t have to have the largest budget, the biggest booth or the most impressive sign to win. They just need to be strategic in their approach and apply intelligence to their process. Here are some ideas that can help you own the show without breaking the bank.

BYOA – Bring Your Own Audience: The audience is the most important part of any event. Don’t rely on someone else to provide it. Be sure to link with sales organizations and have them personally invite key customers and prospects to the event. Design experiences just for them when they get there. Leverage business partners to participate in your presence and ask them to do the same. Use search (both standard and social media) to identify and invite suspects. Engage in a direct marketing campaign with key media properties to drive awareness for targeted audiences that meet your demographic and psychographic profile requirements. Its a lot easier to catch the right fish if you stock the pond.

Get The List: Negotiate sponsorships with event producers that include the pre registration, registration and attendee lists. Sort and parse the list to ensure you’ve boiled it down to just your target audiences. Communicate with this audience before, during and after the show. Ensure you build a communication stream well-before the event to determine how you will handle opt-ins, hot, warm and cold leads and ensure this process is followed.

Engage The Press And Media Early And Often: An event is not the first time you should contact the press and media. Its imperative you build relationships with key media properties well-ahead of time. Remember, if you can provide content that is relevant to their audience and is easy to execute you will go far. Just like any business relationship, press and media relationships are predicated upon a mutual exchange of value. Make sure your content is newsworthy and you spend time helping them succeed. Its not always about your company, brand or products. Hold a press conference before the event to drive mindshare and monopolize the media. Remember to invite prominent bloggers in your industry who are respected by your target audience – they often have greater pull than mainstream media.

Be Everywhere That Matters: Fill educational tracks with experts that can provide high-value content in sessions relative to your companies niche in the subject matter of the event. Secure a keynote speaking opportunity. Participate in panel discussions and roundtables. Remember, audiences spend far more time in sessions and attending speaking opportunities than they do on the show floor.

Get The Smallest Booth Possible: That’s right, I said smallest. Your largest investment should be in engaging with your audiences. You don’t need to bring every product in every product line. You don’t need 300 signs scattered throughout the booth. You don’t need every employee in your company to staff your booth. What you do need is enough space to manage flowthrough of your targeted audience over the course of the show. You also need space for the appropriate number of staffers to manage these attendees.  Ensure your experiences and demonstrations have enough room to comfortably be executed. Other things to consider include business theater and meeting space. Take advantage of off floor or off site meeting space. The cost per square foot is often less and you can control the experience more effectively. Above all, make sure your booth is open and inviting, and most importantly, efficient.

Use Time As A Competitive Weapon: Create experiences and engagement activities that monopolize the time that your suspects and prospects spend with you. If you have days filled with demonstrations, booth tours, speaking engagements, meetings, etc., audiences will spend more time immersed in your brand and will have less time to spend with competitors.

Leverage Social Media Or Virtual Technologies: “What happens in Vegas…” or more appropriately, “What happens at the event often stays at the event.” This is unfortunate considering the huge investment made. Use social media to enhance, expand and extend the event experience for attendees and outside participants as well. Videos (YouTube), Photos (Flickr), Blogs, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, private social networks, etc. can all be potent additions to your strategy. Remember an event is a point in time, relationships are long-term. Engage and interact with your communities both on and off line to improve the ROI of the event.

Follow Up Quickly And Consistently: Remember the communication stream? Execute the plan to follow up with and engage opt-ins, hot, warm and cold leads. The reason for investment and participation in the event was most likely to obtain these suspects. Don’t waste the investment by dropping the ball when the event is over. Leads are gold. Covet them. Communicate with them. Build relationships with them. Now.

Creating mindshare and heartshare doesn’t have to be expensive. Recognizing and engaging with a targeted audience is more effective and efficient than betting the farm on broad-based awareness efforts. With the proper alignment of tactics to business objectives, and the discipline to scrutinize and prioritize each and every investment, you’ll be well on your way to building the right share of voice to own the show.

Have other ideas? Please share!

Owning the Show: The Art Of Building Share Of Voice is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0

There are many reasons people participate in the world’s largest social network. Some to understand what’s happening amongst their circle of friends, others to play games – the most popular games on Facebook are about farming and the mafia (thought of the day: what does this say about our society?), still others to share links, photos and videos.  As far as events are concerned, there are over 3 million events created each month. Three million events. These of course range from meeting for drinks at the local pub, to birthday parties, concerts and full-scale trade shows.

With so much activity going on, how can event marketers possibly be successful on the Facebook platform? The answers are simple, but implementation and successful engagement can be quite complex. Here are some insights to consider as you build your presence.

1. Its not about the event, its about the community. As event marketers, its imperative we stop thinking about using Facebook for an event, and start trying to understand how we can incorporate our event into the community. Changing our state of mind will help ensure we are focused on the right things and enable long-term success.

2. Create a page for your event. This is really easy to do on Facebook. The hard part is building in relevant, compelling content that will keep your audiences engaged. Make sure your presence is branded appropriately and community centric. With the right discipline and focus, your Facebook presence can become the content hub for the subject matter around your event. Build comprehensive content into the Info section,  post key photos, keep the Wall updated with fresh content and initiate relevant and engaging discussions on the Discussions tab. Take advantage of widgets like:

• Fan Box (where audiences can become fans)
• Live Stream Box (where your community can communicate)
• Page Badge (so fans can promote their affiliation with you as well as promote your event on other sites)

Post photos, videos, stories, links and updates that will keep your audiences interested and engaged. Here’s the hardest pill to swallow: In order to build a true community around your event, its important to have appropriate targeted content that is truly source agnostic. This might mean allowing content from competitive events – granted this content does not need to be as prominent in your presence, but it should be allowed. Otherwise, here are some thoughts on the kind of content you should post regularly.

• News about event content (again, think community interest first) and  event operations
• Links to outside blogs (speakers, exhibitors, industry sites, subject matter experts, etc.)
• Links to other Facebook pages (speakers, exhibitors, industry / subject matter groups, etc.)
• Photos and videos (speakers, experiences, exhibits, demonstrations, previous events, subject matter relevant, audience and fan provided)

Remember, the beauty of social media, is you don’t need to create everything, you can leverage and share what others have done, provided it is on brand, relevant and appropriate for your presence.

3. Leverage appropriate applications. The Events application can be used to promote your event, or other activities both around and within your event. Beyond this there are hundreds of calendaring and other organizational or promotional applications that can be used. Some I’ve found to be valuable include: Polls, Promotions, SlideShare, CitySearch, EventBrite, Social RSS and My Documents. Search or Browse the Application Directory and select a few that are right for you and meet your needs. Another option of course is to hire a developer to create your own Facebook applications.

4. Identify, attract and befriend the right audience. You don’t need to boil the ocean here. Start by searching Facebook for people who you know who are already part of the community and “friending” them. You can also invite people you email or IM via your contact list to join Facebook. The next step is to use Facebook search to conduct searches of People, Pages and Groups to identify folks who might be interested in your content and your event and “friend” them. Finally, you can promote your Facebook presence off site to attract others to become your friend or fan.

5. Engage. If you build it, they might come. In order to be truly successful, you must engage and interact with others. Reach out to other Facebook pages with related content (industry, fan, speaker, exhibitor, etc.) and participate in discussions, post photos, videos, links,  content and comments to their Walls. Think long-term. This is not just about awareness and audience generation for your event, but an engagement strategy that will make your event a vital component of the community and an important accentuation point in the relationship with your audiences, whether they be attendees, speakers, exhibitors, press, analysts or otherwise.

Building a Facebook engagement strategy (or any other community engagement strategy)  is easier said than done. Participating in communities takes time and diligence, but with the right focus, your event can become a prominent fixture both within the Facebook community and beyond. Remember to observe, create, share and engage and long-term success will be yours.

Five Powerful Ideas For Using Facebook For Events is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0

The number of people who use social media is estimated at 110 million in the U.S. according to a study by Anderson Analytics. That’s about 37% of the total population (304,059,724 according to US Census data). Of that group, Facebook dominates with 78 million regular users, followed by MySpace with 67 million, Twitter with 17 million, and LinkedIn with 11 million regular users. This also means that roughly two-thirds of people do not use social media.

What’s most interesting to me about this is the conglomeration of behaviors that Social Media has proliferated among users and marketers alike.

A marketing program is like a ship, and right now many marketers are running over to the Social Media side of the boat and its listing. If we are not careful and move toward balanced, sustainable models, our vessel will capsize and it will take us some time to recover.

At the end of the day for marketers, Social Media is a channel. Granted, its a complex channel with multiple communications streams, both synchronous and asynchronous. It can also be used at many stages in the sales and marketing cycle.

Social Media is the next big thing, but we must be disciplined in our approach toward using it as a marketing tool or we will fail, publicly.

Here are some tips that will help you navigate these sometimes murky waters.

1. Set Your Objectives: Determine where you want to be in the next month, quarter, year and three years. What do you want / need to accomplish at every stage in your sales and marketing cycle? How many sales? How much revenue? How many suspects, prospects and customers? Determine business objectives first, then examine marketing objectives and social media objectives that will help you meet the needs of the business.

2. Gather Intelligence: Understanding your audience is critical. Who are they? What do they do? What are their interests? What are their emotional and rational triggers and inhibitors? How do they behave both on and offline? Where are they? What sites do they visit regularly? A good place to start is to look at your existing customers – chances are there are more just like them. It’s also a good idea to subscribe to different demographic and psychographic services to identify similar audiences. Read what the analysts are publishing. Observe your audiences. Listen to what they are saying. Participate in the conversation.

3. Choose Your Weapons: Create marketing tactics and campaigns (both on and offline) that activate your audiences triggers and overcome their inhibitors. Make sure you use the right tools for the job. Understand which tactics will drive awareness, thought leadership, lead acquisition, nurturing, conversion and loyalty. Deploy only the best tactics for each purpose. Again some will be online, some will not. It all depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Be creative, be selective, be on brand and on strategy at all times.

4. Chart Your Course: Make sure your map (media plan and editorial calendar) addresses your audiences where they live, work and play. In short, hunt where the treasure is. If you are using Myspace and your audience is more of a Facebook crowd, you won’t be very successful.

5. Grab the Booty: As you capture leads and grow sales, remember to exploit advocacy wherever possible. Your customers can be your best sales people, especially on the social web.

6. Log Successes and Failures: Measure program performance. Understand what worked, what didn’t and note what adjustments should be made mid stream and in the future. Which social media sites were the most effective in reaching your audience? What’s the right frequency of communications? Measurement is critical to continuous improvement and long-term success.

7. Hire Mercenaries Carefully: You can’t swing a dead parrot without hitting an unemployed social media consultant. History tells us that the people who make the most money during a treasure hunt are not the pirates, but the people who sell them the treasure maps. Patricio Robles points out “Unfortunately, the rise of social media has created another internet opportunity that is ripe for snake oil salesmen. And boy have they taken advantage of it.” in the blog post, How to spot a social media snake oil salesman. Look for established agencies who have worked with companies like yours and have a proven track record of business success. Just because they have a Facebook page and 1000 Twitter followers, it does not mean they are experts. The bottom line is demonstrable business success for their clients.

8. Keep exploring: Experiment in uncharted waters, but remember where the best treasures are buried. The 80 / 20 rule of proven methods to experimentation applies.

Maintaining a strategic and balanced approach to your marketing program is an important step in helping you find treasure where others have failed. Understanding the relationship between social media with other tactics in your portfolio will help you get there faster, and use fewer resources along the away. Keep your hand on the helm and your eyes on the horizon and you’ll reach your destination safely.

Originally posted on the AMA Boston Blog September 1, 2009

8 Tips for Surviving the Social Media Treasure Hunt is a post from: Experiential Marketing 2.0