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Guest Blogger Cameron Toth on “What Event Camp 2010 Can Teach Conferences”

By: @CameronToth
Event Camp 2010 was a #eventprofs community generated conference that took place at the Roger Smith Hotel in NYC on February 6, 2010.

Community
Empower your community to create events and content. One of the greatest lessons from Event Camp was how much the attendees knew. Select great moderators and presenters who can funnel the content and keep a crowd on topic but don’t keep your most valuable resources (your attendees) tied down. Everyone learns more when they teach!

Go All The Way
Jump in with both feet. If you are committing to doing a virtual event, an exciting event, an educational event, etc. than do it and do it passionately. Don’t try to be all things to all people.

Pre-Meet!
Create ways for people to meet online, at an airport, at their office, in their city, in anyway that you can. Utilize http://foursquare.com, http://twitter.com and every other piece of free software out there. The more you get people to create community and connections before a conference the more valuable the conference will actually be to the attendees. Walking into the bar on Friday for the attendee arranged dinner the night before Event Camp people remarked how great it was to already be familiar with so many people they had never met face to face. That is helpful for any conference or event and should be the goal of any pre-event community effort!

Extend the Reach of Your Event
By creating several ways for attendees to share their photos, stories, movies, and anything else they are able to create you extend the life and reach of your event. Catalog all the places where your community is posting online and off line and make sure your attendees have a central place to go to find all of this relevant helpful information. #Eventprofs have a Wiki (http://eventprofs.pbworks.com/), a hash-tag and a great community that propels it forward. Does your event propel people forward?

Virtual Access
If your hybrid additions are experimental inform your community and work with them to create successful strategies that follow best practices. If you must charge for access to components choose a price that makes sense to your team and attendees.

Virtual Access Best Practices

  • Live Broadcast events with view of speaker, slides and Twitter feed (or other back channel)
  • Provide sessions on demand (more people in general view on demand sessions)
  • Make sure your venue and AV provider can provide land lines that do not share bandwidth with WiFi to provide quality streaming and recording.
  • Make sure you have a strong WiFi and cellular signal for major carriers at your venue to insure that a majority of your attendees can follow along and feed the backchannel. This will extend the reach of your onsite event into the virtual world and provide likely mentions of your event and sponsors to a broader audience. (Remember to provide quality programming because bad news will travel fast.)
  • Have an online community manager(s) onsite that has authority and information to quickly solve problems and inform anyone and everyone of potential issues and fixes.

Thanks to the organizers of #EC10 Jessica Levine, Christine Coster, Jeff Hurt and Mike McAllen for creating an inspiring event!

I would love to hear your lessons from events and best practices. Please comment below or email me at CameronToth@me.com.

Cameron Toth is the founder of Toth Communications. He speaks and trains people on Social Media tools and strategies. Check him out on Twitter at http://twitter.com/CameronToth or his website http://www.CameronToth.com.
 

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Liz

Liz King is a social media-integrated event planner and award winning blogger. As the owner of Liz King Events, she runs an innovative firm that creates dynamic branding events integrating the use of social media. Planning events from soup to nuts, she works with her team to create and sustain your event brand and enhance attendee engagement. Liz is also a co-founder of the Event Technology Showcase PlannerTech. As the owner of Liz King Events, she has been featured as a speaker at the International Association of Exhibitions and Events, National Association of Colleges and Employers, ExpoWest/Supply Expo and several other events as an expert on the topic of social media and events. She has also been featured in Connect Meetings Intelligence and Convene Magazine, among others.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Event Professionals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Paul Salinger

    Cameron,

    nice post – and thanks for the picture :-) .

    some good thinking. one thing I would say is that most event marketing folks do not see their attendees as community to be nurtured, nourished and generally even listened to as far as what content they might want to actually hear. They merely see the butts in seat that are there to meet their revenue goals, registration goals, or lead generation goals and the main objective they have is to push out the marketing or sales message relevant to their campaign.

    we’ve talked about this before through eventprofs, but this requires a cultural and mind shift in the kinds of skills needed to be a successful event community manager now and add strategic value to both your audience and your organization.

    it will no longer be enough to be a good event marketing person that delivers excellent event experiences or logistically perfect events, but will require a level of skill in creating and maintaining communities of attendees that are both consumers as well as creators of content – or at least active participants in the process.

    there will always be people who excel at running the operations of events, and we need those people. but, we also need a lot more people willing to step up to become event strategists, event designers and event community managers to really transform how events could be run to be even more successful for both the audience and the presenting organizations.

    cheers,
    paul

  • http://twitter.com/CameronToth Cameron Toth

    I love your input Paul!

    I agree. Listening is not usually a corporation’s or large-event’s strong talent. I am hoping that as Twitter and the communities that people are creating within corporations and events become widespread that the cultural and mind shift that you are talking about will happen.

    As usual the market drives people and communities are really starting to get in to the driver’s seat! Instant public feedback is powerful stuff.

    Thanks,
    Cameron

  • http://twitter.com/CameronToth/status/111668983337451520/ Cameron Toth (@CameronToth) (@CameronToth)

    TY! I forgot all about this! RT @lizkingevents: {Blog Archive} #eventprofs "What Event Camp 2010 Can Teach Conferences" http://t.co/gyH9qnv