July 18, 2011

The Art of the Event TweetUp

Is there any other activity that is more suitable for social media and events than the Tweetup?

First, what exactly is a tweetup? Basically, the word is a mashup of Twitter and meet-up: tweetup. It’s a great way to use the power of Twitter and the short-term event, such as a conference or tradeshow.

So how do you organize a tweetup so that is actually works and pulls in people without getting too confused or overrun?

The first tweetup I tried to attend was at Natural Products Expo West around 2008. I tracked the invitations on Twitter, added it to my calendar and – well, I didn’t really know what to expect.

Tweetup badge — Which way to the Tweetup??

But it didn’t happen. At least I couldn’t find it. The problem was that it was scheduled for the bar at the Anaheim Hilton – a nice bar, indeed. In fact, the bar manager was one of the folks who was participating in the organizing of the tweetup. He had caught wind of it on Twitter and offered to help, although he didn’t actually start the process.

Upon arrival, I found the bar packed with a few hundred people. It’s just off the main entrance, near the lobby, so not only were the bar patrons hanging out, there were dozens of people walking through heading from one place to another.

So where was the tweetup? I asked a few people and got weird looks. ‘Tweetup? What are you smoking?’ I knew what a few of the supposed attendees looked like, thanks to online photos, but didn’t see any of them. After hanging, drinking a beer and looking around some more I called it a night.

The next time I tried to attend a tweetup it went much better. The venue was smaller, more out of the way – although still within walking distance of the convention center – and as a result is was a success. I met a dozen folks that I had previously only met online. It was a terrific fun event. Most of us hung out and yakked for almost two hours as folks came and went. Definitely a memorable evening spent getting to know other people in person.

So what does it take to pull off a successful tweetup? Let’s take a look.

1. Know the venue if at all possible. In fact, if you can visit it ahead of time to scope it out you’ll be way ahead of the game. Does it have enough room if a lot of people show up? Are you going to have enough light to actually meet and greet? Dark bars really aren’t conducive to networking – which is what your event is really all about.

2. Be prepared to have more people show up that you actually anticipate. At a busy tradeshow or convention, the news about tweetups can spread quickly. You should be willing to receive and welcome anyone and everyone that shows up.

3. Bring in a ‘name.’ While some tweetups may be on a smaller and more personal level, if you really want to create a successful tweetup, try and get one of the event’s main speakers to show up – and have them promote their appearance as well.

4. Create an online registration site. If you’re serious about making it a successful event, you might consider creating an online landing page for it, using EventBrite or Meetup.com or Twtvite.com to organize details, register attendees (even if free) and give a better impression to potential attendees. Even small events where you’re only looking for a couple of dozen people can benefit from these types of tools. (A quick check of Twtvite.com shows that it’s designed specifically for tweetups – I’d start there for my next tweetup!)

5. Ask yourself: what do I really want out of this event? Do you want it to be a party? In that case, you might want to schedule a bigger event with a DJ. Do you want a smaller, more intimate event? Make a point of inviting specific people that you’d like to attend, get their confirmation (you might even do some of the legwork via email to make your contact more pointed and personal) so you know they’ll be there.

6. Support the actual ‘business’ of the event. Make sure that the event has free wi-fi in place. Not every one has an iPhone or other 3G/4G network access. Having free wi-fi will at least keep the 3G network from dragging down to a crawl. The most natural thing to do at a tweetup is to take photos and post them immediately – make sure that your attendees have the ability to easily do that. Also, bring plenty of business cards and be prepared to swap them by the dozen.

7. Get there early to make sure all is as it should be. You might even pop for some munchies to get things going. If you’re going to provide for food, let the attendees know. If not, also let them know they’re on their own.

8. Provide nametags and pens. Ask that everyone puts their Twitter handle on the nametag along with their first name.

9. Talk to everyone. As the organizer, it’s your job to make everyone feel welcome, from the most well-known person there, to the geeky kid just out of high school. Wallflowers need not apply.

10. If you can create a ‘hook’ for the tweetup, do it. Having a purpose helps bring people there that may have otherwise decided they’d rather stay in their hotel room and watch HBO. Perhaps it’s the DJ. Or a guest speaker. Or a dress-up event. Or tradeshow managers so you can swap tips. Whatever.

11. Build the buzz! Plan on promoting on Twitter intensely for no more than a couple of weeks. Yes, you can mention it before that, but most people plan their events as they ramp up during the few weeks prior. Most of your juice will come in the few days leading up to the event. And of course feel free to send direct messages or email to folks that you really want to come.

12. Create a unique hashtag for the event so you can track conversation about it before, during and after the tweetup. It’ll help you gauge how successful it really was.

Have fun, learn from the experience and use those lessons learned the next time around!

June 27, 2011

Which is more important? Blogging, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn?

The stats are unreal and the numbers keep rising:

Facebook has over 688 million+ users
Twitter: 200 million+
LinkedIn: 100 million+
YouTube: 300 million+
WordPress: 130 million+ blogs

Covering all of those bases takes a lot of time and effort. So if you can’t currently cover all of those bases, what’s the most important place to start?

It depends on how you want to use the various outlets for your tradeshow marketing. If getting people to the show is your weakest area, perhaps shoring up that effort will result in more folks showing up at your booth, where your effort and follow-through are strong. Twitter and Facebook are particularly good at driving traffic by using pre-show promotions and in-show calls to action.

If your post-show follow-up is weak, it might mean that you put more effort into making your target market more aware of what you’re doing post-show. Even though lead follow-up doesn’t necessarily directly relate to social media post-show, making your audience more aware of what you DID at the show is an effective way of keeping your audience informed. Use Facebook and YouTube to keep those followers and searchers informed. Twitter can drive traffic to both outlets.

To boost your pre-show marketing, as mentioned, the best outlets are Facebook and YouTube. Twitter can be effective as well, but typically only a few days or weeks prior to the show, while Facebook and YouTube can be used to roll out more specific and detailed information. Twitter works well for driving traffic and for connecting with other people attending the show, and in my experience people only really start to connect and make plans to meet up a week or two ahead of the show.

LinkedIn can be used effectively to narrowly target attendees that you’d like to meet in person. Find them by joining tradeshow groups and striking up online conversations and connections. LinkedIn is more work, but the payoff in making personal connections can be worthwhile.

Social media is not a coookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all answer. Your situation will be different from other companies as you have different goals and a unique situation.

But by understanding the basic uses of the various outlets, and how you can best implement those tools for situation, you can increase the odds that your company will get the social media edge on your competitors.

Addendum: I put the question out on Twitter this morning: “Which is more important in #tradeshow marketing? Blogging, #FB, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn? #eventprofs” and got a few folks to chime in quickly:

From ActiveEventsGuy: “All are important if you have a clear and well defined strategy. What are the messages, Who is your audience… Where is your audience online, and How the members of your audience like to consume the content (video, blog, visual, etc).” (okay, it took him two tweets to get all that in!)

From TuvelComms: “All of the above, depending on where target audience is. PLUS don’t forget to integrate w/ email, print, other mktg channels.”

EDPA_LVC re-tweeted my request…but didn’t chime in. Drat! Hey, feel free to comment…!

June 13, 2011

One Tweet Away From Brand Destruction

The news headlines seem to have daily cautionary tales on what NOT to do with Twitter. From Anthony Weiner’s ‘accidental’ tweeting of photos of privates to VodaphoneUK’s employee’s accidental posting to the company’s account a tweet that got him fired (“I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f—ing drive” ), it’s easy to find a Twitter tale of a tweet gone bad.

Brands cringe, PR guys lose jobs, companies backpedal from the wildfire of tweets, re-tweets and stories being picked up by bloggers and the press.

What’s a social media manager to do? Stay away from Facebook and Twitter? Hide? Or are we all one tweet away from brand doom?

Sounds like a good idea sometimes, doesn’t it? However, in spite of the danger, the social media universe can do a lot of positive things for a brand.

But one bad tweet can undo a lot of good. Not that a single tweet can kill a company, but a single misfire can certainly cause a lot of anguish and heartache.

So what’s a company to do to make sure it doesn’t happen? While nothing can completely guarantee that someone won’t mishandle the tools of social media, there are definitely things you can do as a social media manager or tradeshow marketing manager in charge of social media for events, tradeshows and conferences.

Get everyone on the same page. Go over your goals with social media. Ensure that every team member understands what can happen if they accidentally send out a tweet over company channels instead of personal accounts.
If you don’t have a social media company policy, create one. You can search online sources and adapt other policies to fit your needs, or you can work with a consultant. A social media policy will clearly define what’s appropriate and what’s not when it comes to using Facebook, Twitter and the other outlets.
Make it clear what the consequences will be for blatant mis-use of company social media outlets. Be clear with them on the process of what happens when a tweet or Facebook posting goes bad. Certainly every incident will be unique, but the process of review has to be consistent.
Awareness: all team members have to aware of how social media works. A tweet can be picked up and re-tweeted dozens of times in a few minutes. It can circle the world instantaneously. There’s no deleting once the tweet is out of the bag! Even if you do delete a hot tweet, chances are someone will have seen it and can easily share it.
Trust: once your policies are in place and everyone understands how it all works, you have to trust them to do the right thing. Is every employee trustworthy? Of course not. But in my experience almost all are – and want to be trusted. They don’t want to risk a job because of a bad tweet.
Forgiveness. Yeah, this is a tough one for some managers. People have been quickly fired after a bad tweet went viral. But as a social media manager, you’ll need to weigh the circumstances of an incident and decide what the consequence should be – if any. If someone’s immediately fired, there’s little chance for learning. In most cases a bad tweet isn’t worth dumping someone, but could better be used as a valuable teaching moment.

(photo by CTBTO)

May 25, 2011

Be a Most Valuable Tweeter

Are you a valued Tweeter? Do you find and share things on your Twitter account that people like to read and then share with more people? If so, you’ve become a Valued Tweeter.

If not, let’s explore the concept a bit further to see if there is some way to put a box around what it takes to be a Valued Tweeter in the tradeshow world.

First, know your audience. Why are they following you? If you’re Andy Borowitz, your followers just want to get a nice chuckle. If you’re following The Expert, you want to be amused and informed and perhaps even outraged. If you’re Robert Scoble, your followers want to find out the coolest and latest tech news, along with your comments and insight.

So, who is following you? What have you been providing since you first joined Twitter? Are you offering just a few lame pedestrian tweets a week that gives no one a reason to come back or re-tweet? Or are you focusing on a handful of strategies that shows followers you’re really thinking about this Twitter thing?

Secondly, focus on what you want people to know you for. That’s your Twitter Brand. If you’re spending your tweets discussing that falefel sandwich you had for lunch or posting a Twitpic of your cat lazily lying in the sun, that’s WHO YOU ARE. If, on the other hand, you’re putting out a nice balanced mix of business and personal tweets along with links to posts, videos and other things that you find interesting, that’s what you’ll be known for.

What is your Twitter Brand?

Third, pay attention to what your followers are tweeting. If they’re tweeting about it, they’re obviously interested in it. The only caveat here is that if any particular followers tend to send out spammy, promo-laden tweets, chances are they really aren’t interested in your stuff. You’ll have to do some mental filtering of the type of posts here.

Fourth, REALLY pay attention to the type of material that gets responses and gets re-tweeted. And keep looking for similar types of tweets or posts to share. For instance, when I blogged about QR Codes, those posts tended to get re-tweeted and commented on several times. So I look for more QR Code posts and information to share.

Fifth, when you’re getting set to attend a tradeshow, focus on material that revolves around the show. Find the hashtag – it’s usually pretty easy to do if you just ask people that are going to the show. Then include the hashtag in all of your show-related tweets. Regularly search the hashtag to follow any conversation relating to the show – and follow those Twitter accounts of people going to the show. Most of them will eventually follow you back, so you now have more followers that relate in some way to your business world.

Sixth, as you approach a tradeshow that you’re either attending or interested in, the chatter relating to the show gets noisier and quicker. Depending on the size of the show, you’ll have a hard time keeping up! But if you can participate in any of the conversation in a valuable way, you’ll show the attendees that you are a Valued Tweeter. Offer insight into local restaurants, hotels, travel tips; links to blog posts about previous show experiences, etc.

Seventh, keep in mind that if you want to make Twitter valuable you have to show up there on a regular basis. Checking in once or twice a day should be fine. Checking in once or twice a month is not worth it. If that’s all you can do, don’t bother to get involved.

Finally – pick up the phone and call a Twitter follower once a week. What, pick up the phone and make it personal? Sure, why not? Find someone that looks interesting – no doubt you can find someone like that in your dozens, hundreds or thousands of followers. Do a little research, pick up the phone and say HELLO. Find out more about their business. Don’t worry about trying to sell something to them. If you plan to do that, you’ll intimidate them and they won’t want to talk to you. You’ll leave a bad taste in their mouth.

If, on the other hand, you ask how you can help them – if you genuinely would like to find out what they want to succeed in business, you might find a way to give them a hand or refer them to a potential client. Yeah, I know, it’s sort of counter-intuitive. But if you offer to help people, they’ll find ways to reciprocate. Ask them to describe their perfect client. Ask them to tell you about their favorite projects. Learn about them, and you personalize the tweets. Next time they see one of your tweets (and you see one of theirs), you’ll have a greater connection, perhaps even a nice emotional connection to the person.

You’ve just become a Most Valuable Tweeter.

May 4, 2011

Getting Started on Twitter

As a tradeshow marketer, you may be wondering how you can use Twitter to your advantage in your marketing scheme. After all, Twitter is the bomb, right? It’s at the top of everybody’s list of cool social media toys, right?

According to the latest stats, an average of 460,000 people start a new Twitter account each day. That’s about 167 million per year if the trend holds. With a current usage of just over 200 million, Twitter stands to double the number of accounts in less than 18 months.

So don’t tell me Twitter is for kids. These are adults and businesses getting involved.

But you’re still waiting to get started.

I understand. You don’t know exactly where to start. Or maybe you have a small following on your Twitter account and it’s just too much time and too confusing to try and get any traction out of Twitter.

First things first. If you don’t have an account get one.

Next, to get people to follow you, you have to do two things: 1) follow people and 2) advertise the fact that you’re on Twitter.

As to the first – follow people – you have to decide who to follow and why. If you start following people at random, and they’re unrelated to your industry or to your overall goals, you’ll dilute your Twitter stream with a bunch of unnecessary tweets. Now sure, a little of that’s okay. If you want to follow Charlie Sheen, help yourself! But Charlie probably won’t be of much help when it comes to finding valuable information about your industry.

Go to Google’s keyword tool and put in a few terms that relate to your industry. Search for those terms using Twitter. Follow those Twitter accounts that appear to be in your industry or realm.

Now make a list of companies that are either your direct competitors or are in your industry. Don’t limit yourself to the large and most obvious companies. Be sure to include those smaller and medium-sized companies, too.

Next, make a list of the most prominent people in your industry. Writers, authors, CEOs, marketers, advertisers, designers, creative people…the list can go on as long as you want it.

If you can’t easily find these people on Twitter, you may find them through LinkedIn. Often people will list their Twitter handles on LinkedIn.

These are all people and companies you should start following.

In my experience, about 75 – 80% of people that you follow will follow you back.

Now that you’ve gotten involved in Twitter, start to participate!

But…what to tweet? That sometimes is a hard choice. After all, you don’t want to be known for inane and useless tweets about what you had for breakfast (unless you’re eating a stunning b-fast in Maui or someplace unusual!).

So look to other tweets for ideas. Think about what you are interested in. Think about what your industry might be interested in. If you find a link to an interesting story of blog post, share it on Twitter.

If you see a fun or clever or useful post, re-tweet it. Reply to the author and thank them for sharing.

Find ways to interact. That’s what it’s all about.

The more time you spend there, the more comfortable you’ll be, the more you’ll understand how to interact and ultimately Twitter can and will become an extremely useful communication tool.

March 23, 2011

Using Social Media to Support Your Overall Tradeshow Marketing Goals

Are you using social media to drive traffic to your tradeshow booth? That’s great – it be an effective tool for creating buzz at the show. Even though social media activity is effective at communicating with your community, using social media is often not integrated very strongly with a company’s overall marketing goals. Let’s see if we can help change that for you.

Let’s say you’re working with an ad agency. They’re tasked with getting fifteen media mentions out of your tradeshow appearance. Meanwhile, your marketing department is tasked with getting X number of brand impressions. And your sales staff is tasked with generating X number of leads and closing a certain percentage of those leads. All of these entities are working to support the company’s overall marketing goals of creating more sales.

So how can you use social media to directly support all of those entities on conjunction with your tradeshow marketing, instead of just being a stand-alone operation that interacts with your community and not much else?

Start with the end in mind by breaking down your marketing goals: for example, based on past experience the sales department will need X number of leads to create X number of sales. For instance you may know that for every 100 leads generated at a tradeshow, the sales department can close 62% within three months.

Add to that your goals in press and blog mentions, and overall branding impressions and you have your end goals in mind. How can social media support those goals?

Start by choosing your key social media marketing metrics that relate to your tradeshow appearances. It’s easier to take each individual show and look at them separately, although at the end of a year it’s useful to compare and tally all of those numbers to see how the overall efforts at all shows combined performed.

Traffic: are you using social media to drive your customers to your tradeshow booth? Keeping track of traffic at a tradeshow is difficult without outside help, but by adding this component to your metric measurement, you get a better handle on how effective your tweets and Facebook postings can be. Beyond that, you can promote giveaways or contests via social media which specifically brings people to your booth for that contest or event.
Leads: when you track tradeshow leads, have a check box or area where you can indicate whether the visitor found you via social media. Did they reach you via a tweet? Was it a Facebook posting? A YouTube video? A company blog post? All of these social media outlets should support your efforts and by tracking the results you can determine which is most useful.
Buzz or Mentions: often an ad agency that’s working to bring you media mentions will have their own set of industry press contacts, and they can effectively exploit those relationships. Those efforts can be supported through social media: Twitter in particular is becoming known as a place where press relationships are started and developed. Not only that, once you meet a blogger or reporter on Twitter, the connection is direct with no gatekeeper.
Customer Support: your community of customers, clients, hangers-on and competitors (yes, they’re there too!) are all talking about you. Whether you want them to or not, they’ll say what they want when they want. By being proactive in listening to and responding to that conversation when appropriate, you are helping to improve the company’s overall performance. It may not show up as a direct impact on the bottom line, but the impact is there: fewer customer support tickets; less need for customer service support personnel; quicker response to nip problems in the bud before they become giant negatives that have to be dealt with. Your customer support team can be invaluable in your social media monitoring because they often are the front line in dealing with customer problems and know what’s happening before anyone else in the company.

Now that you’re tracking metrics, add those to your actual goal numbers previously set. Build a spreadsheet that takes into account the number of booth visitors you achieved through social media and where they came from. Add in your confirmed impressions via industry press and blogs (often a harder number to pin down: you should be able to determine a magazine’s circulation numbers, for instance, but knowing how many blog readers a specific blog has is probably harder – I’d suggest looking at Alexa rankings along with Compete.com and Quantcast.com although the caveat is that the data is very approximate).

Finally, add in actual leads and confirmed sales. When you track the numbers from show to show, and continue to implement social media to draw people to your booth, a clearer picture will emerge of which social media tools are the most effective and which are not. Having that information will help guide you to determine where to put your focus from show to show.

(graphic author: Gautheron – Creative Commons)

March 21, 2011

Social Media is NEW! (No, it’s not…)

You’ve probably heard it a lot, and maybe even agree: Social media is NEW! It’s something that’s so brand-spanking new that it’s going to take you a lot of time and effort to figure it out! There are new tools, new toys, new ways of connecting. And since it’s NEW it’s gotta be confusing and confounding.

Nope, that’s not true. Social media has been around for quite awhile. Yes, some of the tools and toys are relatively new, but think about it: if you’ve been online for at least a decade you should be used to this stuff. I’ve been connecting with people online since before the Internet. You may remember a brief period of time in the early 90s – before the ‘net – when there were online community bulletin board systems (actually around from 1979 – 1995). These BBS’s would allow people to dial in to a central computer, share notes and programs. I remember having a conversation with a guy who introduced me to one of his BBS’s where he shared software. It would take two or three days to transfer a small software program from one computer to another via a dial-up connection.

But we were connected.

In fact, ‘instant chat’ was available as early as 1988, which was when IRC (internet relay chat) made its debut. It became a PC desktop feature with ICQ in 1996. Yes, we were sharing instant messages with smiley faces by the mid-90s.

Then came CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL (remember all those millions of CD’s you get in the mail hoping to get you to get on board with AOL?). And the web and email. Being from a radio background, my interest in those days was figuring out to share audio online. It wasn’t too tough, and shortly thereafter I was hosting (albeit briefly) a short comedy show online through a website I had figured out how to set up.

Yes, it was all pretty rudimentary in those days. But around 2004 podcasting came along and I jumped in with both feet.

Then around 2006 we all read about the new Web 2.0 where we’d all be interconnected. Except that we already were connected in so many ways.

Early in the decade lots of people were connecting using Friendster (founded 2002) and MySpace (2003).

Today with Facebook (2004), Twitter (2006), YouTube (2005) and LinkedIn (2003) generally regarded as the ‘big four’ of social networking, it’s not hard to realize that this stuff has been around for several years. And with our online connectivity reaching back a couple of decades, don’t believe anyone who says social media is “new” – it’s not.

What’s new is that the tentacles of social media are reaching further into small businesses, who are then trying to figure out how to implement these platforms into their marketing mix.

It takes some adjustment, admittedly. Often new people need to be brought on board, or current employees need to be re-purposed for some of their work day to ‘figure out’ how to use social media to reach their target market.

The good news is that there are unlimited resources available to help. If you’re the self-help type, you search blogs about social media marketing. If you’d rather hire consultants to teach you how to tie it all together, that’s appropriate as well. No matter how you approach it, there are myriad ways you can implement social media in your tradeshow or event marketing efforts.

But again – none of this is really new. If you think it is, you literally haven’t been paying attention. And you’re living in the past….around 1979.

If you still haven’t started using this “new” social media to reach your market, when do you plan to?

(image courtesy of Mentionablehonor and is used through Creative Commons)

March 14, 2011

Have a Plan Even if it Changes Mid-Stream

No matter what your goals are at a tradeshow, whether you’re walking the floor or exhibiting, you probably won’t get far unless you have a plan (obviously that’s a given) – and are flexible enough to let the plan adapt and evolve as necessary.

This past week at Natural Products Expo West 2011 in Anaheim, my plan – as it originally stood – was to meet people, find out their problems and issues with their exhibits or marketing approach, and have a brief conversation that left me an opening to follow up later with a specific reason. This is the ninth time I’ve been to the show (we have eight client booths there), so my plan is based on what’s generally worked in the past.

As someone just walking the floor, I’m prohibited from offering my services or trying to sell something at the show. That’s the way it should be. After all, I’m NOT an exhibitor. Only exhibitors who have paid those high space rental fees have the right to blatantly sell their products.

EMAB-Expowest — Earth Mama Angel Baby at Expo West 2011

But I can certainly engage people in conversations and see where they lead. More often than not the best way to leave the door open for someone to hear from me is to invite them to subscribe to my monthly tradeshow marketing newsletter. Easy enough to do – I simply ask as I’m ready to leave if they mind if I put them on the list. Only once did someone say no – and that was because they weren’t the right person in the company, so the newsletter would have been of no use to them.

And I value not only my time, but the exhibitor’s time, too. I want to be in and out of a booth in about 90-180 seconds, which means that I strive to be precise with the encounter. It’s the same for an exhibitor, by the way: you should try and keep your engagement time with attendees at a bare minimum. Enough to qualify or disqualify them and to gather pertinent information should they be potential clients.

I started the show with a list of exhibitors and booth numbers that had promoted themselves on Twitter – some 75 at least, along with their Twitter handles. Knowing that it would take fully two days to cover the show and talk to that many booths (along with several others that I randomly stopped at for one reason or another), I figured I had would my hands full.

Turns out the ‘Twitter’ greeting was very engaging to almost everyone I met:

“Hi, I’m curious who your company Twitterer is? Or would that be ‘Tweeter’? I’m Tradeshowguy, I saw your booth number on Twitter and someone tweeted out an invitation to come by!”

It was a bit of a goofy intro that created smiles and broke down barriers. Often I was quickly subjected to what is commonly referred to in sales as an “information dump” where a bunch of product information is dumped on you before the speaker has even bothered to qualify you. I’d just smile and let them go on. Sometimes it turned out to be pretty interesting stuff. Other times…not so much.

(By the way, I found it interesting that over half a dozen people I met throughout the show had heard of me; they were looking for tradeshow marketing tips before heading to Expo West and found this blog. Definitely a nice ego stroke…)

Then we’d chat about Twitter and social media and how they used it to promote their company at the show. If the opportunity arose and they showed interest, I’d mention that I regularly speak about, consult and teach social media. By then, I’m about ready to wrap it up. If they’re active on Facebook or Twitter, often I’d offer to take their picture and post it on Facebook immediately (always a big hit – who doesn’t like having their picture posted on Facebook?…apparently, no one). Finally, I’d suggest they subscribe to the email newsletter. Again – almost everyone took me up on it…which means they’ll be hearing from me once a month. The key: stay on someone’s radar regularly and you increase your chances for a future sale.

The real evolution of my approach happened when I discovered that not only did people love to get their photos on Facebook, but they loved to talk about Twitter – even those that didn’t use or understand what it could do for them. The natural curiosity of the social media phenomenon was a conversation starter every time – much more than I originally thought it would. So I made a point of beginning almost all conversations with that.

How do you approach your tradeshow marketing? What’s your plan? Are you able to adapt and evolve the plan as necessary? Do you need several people to implement the plan, or are you just walking the floor of a show trying to make connections that could turn into future business?

Whatever your situation, make a plan, follow it, and let it evolve as necessary.

February 21, 2011

Social Media is Useless

Or to expand a bit: social media for the sake of social media is useless. If the only thing you’re doing with social media is tweeting for fun, posting stuff on Facebook just to stuff some things into the cyber-ether, or goofing off with silly videos on YouTube, you’re most likely wasting your time.

However, if you’re doing useful things in social media, such as listening to the talk about your industry and products, responding quickly to comments and questions and reaching out to those who both praise or complain about your company – yes, you should keep doing that. Because you’re using social media in such a way that can actually impact your bottom line.

It’s the same if you’re getting involved in social media at tradeshows, events and conferences just for the sake of ‘being online’…you’re probably not getting much bang for your buck. If on the other hand, you are consciously communicating with clients and potential customers in such a way as to engage them thoughtfully, it can definitely impact your bottom line.

Let’s face it: social media is not free. Oh, sure the tools are generally free. Getting those Twitter and Facebook accounts just take a few moments, and there’s no monthly fee to have those accounts. But you are spending TIME to tweet and post on Facebook. And TIME is MONEY. If your employees are engaging in social media on your company’s behalf and doing it on the clock, yes, it costs money. So they’d damn well better be doing something useful.

Which is where most companies tend to let the negative potential of social media keep them from doing anything. The trouble is, those companies that are operating on fear are going to be so late to the party that they might as well not bother to show up. They might as well go back to using the telephone, fax machine and cold calling as their only methods of sales communication.

It’s all about TRUST. If you don’t trust your employees to engage with your online community in a thoughtful and positive way, chances are they WON’T do it! However, if you’re letting your employees get involved in social media because you feel they know your company better than some highly-paid consultant, and you TRUST them to represent the company in a positive light, good things happen.

They share stories about why they love working there. They help customers and prospects to solve problems and leave them wanting and willing to tell friends and acquaintances about the great experience they had.

In a tradeshow setting, social media can be used to not only bring people to your tradeshow booth, but to wholly engage them while they’re at your booth – and get them to share that great experience with their community, making you look like the stars you are. Shoot videos of them raving about your product, share photos of them on Facebook or your blog, tweet out that ‘so-and-so just stopped by the booth!’

Using social media to show off your customers is a great way to make them feel loved and wanted. If you can do that successfully, you have created a customer that will naturally bring you more customers…without even trying.

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