10 Creative Ways to Enhance Your Events Using Social Media
Liz King, Liz King Events

Every event planner knows that the fun of event planning is in the creativity. This session identifies ten creative ways to approach your events with a fresh perspective. Social media can help you to put the “social” into your events by promoting engagement, networking, and collaboration. Social media can also drive attendance and reinforce content. We’ll talk about ways to spread the word about your events and help your attendees engage better before, during, and after events. Think live streaming, affiliate marketing, and so much more!

Event Technologies That Will Change Your Life
Liz King, Liz King Events

As a busy event planner, keeping up with the innovations in event technology seems impossible at times. Which new technologies offer an indelible value-added experience and which are distracting? When are old technologies your best choice? Join us to learn about innovative companies that are changing the landscape of events. We will talk about QR codes, online communities, ticketing tools, and many other tools and resources that transform the way we plan and implement events. Consider this your one-stop-shop to get you up-to-date on all things event technology related.

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• Meet exhibitors showcasing innovative office products, resources, ideas, and solutions – all at one time, all in one place!
• Enjoy “The Platters: The Best of Conference Room Cuisine (and the Breakroom of course!)” – sample cuisine for your next meeting from local vendors! Sponsored by Seamless and BizBash.
• See the latest office products, ideas, and trends presented at the office* Demo Theater
• Get inspired by four thought-provoking Keynotes
• Attend the 2012 office* HERO Award Presentation
• Avoid the rush-hour commute while enjoying refreshments and hors d’oeuvres on us at the Thank Goodness It’s Wednesday office* Reception! ** RAFFLE prizes include Amazon, Smithsonian Museum Store, Massage Envy gifts cards, and more!

With the right strategy and support in place, blended conferences can be incredibly powerful for your brand. Here are a few things you should consider when organizing your next event.

The experience

Those who attend in person will have a dramatically different experience than those watching a livestream. Create a list of the challenges that each group might face and keep these in mind during your planning process. Challenges you might face can include:

• Difficulty engaging remote attendees when on-site participants are doing something hands-on.
• Remote attendees who are hard to hear and who may have trouble expressing questions from outside the room.
• On-site participants who lack smartphones or laptops and have trouble connecting with remote attendees.

Read more on PlanYourMeetings.com

1. The Location is Your Event Canvas — Once you have nailed down your location, all the other pieces of your event will begin to fall into place. After finalizing the location, you can start planning what other partners and vendors you will need to engage. Does the location have tables you can use for registration and networking? Are their chairs? How many? Is there adequate lighting? Is there wifi? How strong is the wifi signal? Do you need table furnishings? Can you cover the walls? What time can you get there to setup? Is there parking nearby? The list just goes on and on.

2. The Location establishes the Tone for Your Event — The location helps establish the tone of your event for attendees before they get there and gives a ‘first impression’ of your event and what to expect. For example, If you are having an event at an upscale restaurant, attendees will know this is a formal event versus if you are having it at a fun activity venue where it will be more laid-back and relaxed. Understanding the goals of your event will help you determine what tone you want to set before the attendees get there and take you one step further to contributing to your overall events success.

3. The Location will Motivate Attendance – One of the most important factors for considering your event location is whether it will help contribute to motivate guests to attend the event. Is it easy for them to access? Have they ever been there before? Is it well-known? Will the be excited about the location? Make your event as successful as possible by doing everything you can to make guests WANT to come to the event and you will be sure to fill up your event to the max.

4. The Location sets the Stage for Memories – An event’s success is only as good (in my opinion) as the memories it provides attendees. If I go to a conference and can’t truly remember what it was or what I learned… then it wasn’t a success in the long run. You want to make sure your event has a lasting impression and choosing a venue that will help contribute to this is key.

I urge every planner to consider these factors before they even start to think about possible locations for events. There are THOUSANDS of location possibilities so make sure you understand what you need from an event location before you start your search.

Photo by ViZZZual

Related articles

• Choosing A Location with Your Ideal Event Package by @imbookin(lizkingevents.com)
  

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• Event Tech of the Week: @imbookin(lizkingevents.com)
  

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Today, we’re talking about EventPilot

Your name: Silke Fleischer
Company/Tool Name: EventPilot by ATIV Software
Website: http://ativsoftware.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ativsoftware
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/eventpilot
Blog: http://ativsoftware.com/category/blog/

What is the “problem” that your tool seeks to solve?
I have been a speaker, exhibitor, and attendee at over 100 events in the last 10 years and because of my background, our EventPilot conference app is designed from an attendee perspective with a unique learning and training focus – it truly is a Swiss Army Knife for conference goers and offers valuable time savers:

• Find your next session easily even if there is no Internet. EventPilot doesn’t require Wi-Fi (a lot of app vendors say it, but you can test the apps by setting your device to airplane mode)
• Stay organized with note taking and bookmarking (on almost every aspect of the event) with an instant notes export – Writing a trip report from scribbles on napkins or the back of business cards is a thing of the past.
• No need to build your schedule twice: EventPilot can be setup to sync with your registration system
• Maximize your education and networking value with a visual schedule
• Manage the information overload with smart filters.

For organizers, EventPilot overcomes the last hurdle to paperless events: Planners can finally include all session handouts. Attendees can take notes directly on session slides, just like printed handouts.

What is the best audience for this tool? Corporate events? Social? Other? Large? Small?
The EventPilot platform is extremely flexible and great for:

• Events at venues with limited Wi-Fi.
• Providing a paperless attendee experience without compromise
• Large events with unsurpassed performance
• Internal corporate sales/marketing meetings or training events
• Ease of use – EventPilot is the most visual app on the market and it uses native device navigation to instantly switch between screens

What does your tool help event planners do better?
With EventPilot, event planners can:

• Save themselves time (check out our blog)
• Eliminate printing costs and paper usage (http://ativ.me/co2)
• Generate additional revenue through a large variety of sponsorship opportunities not found in other apps.
• Offer exceptional value to their attendees

How is your tool different from/better than the competition?
It’s the little things we pay attention to and they make a world of difference to attendees. For example, a Twitter client with your hash tag is built directly into the app so organizers don’t have to worry about communicating the hash tag. Or you are sitting in the wrong session and you want to head to another one without walking a mile to the other end of the venue – just look up sessions near me. Or you want to put two sessions that happen at the same time into your schedule – well, you can.

EventPilot is designed to first assist the attendee in getting the most out of your event. The app is not a distraction, but instead a powerful communication, networking, and organization tool they can use before, during and after the event.
Also, all EventPilot implementations come with a free — beautifully designed — web-app (a web-app is all that’s provided by some of our competition), but we don’t stop there. Our primary focus is offline native event apps. We understand that being without internet access should not stop you from getting things done.
Once you have used EventPilot as an attendee, you wouldn’t want to go to an event without it.

What is the single coolest feature of your product?
As an attendee, I love just bringing my phone. EventPilot has some unmatched features so you really don’t need paper. Handouts are right in the session description, I can jot down my notes during sessions on the slides directly or tweet out great slides (yes, that’s right “tweet slides”)! Plus I have an amazing in-app schedule builder so I won’t miss any sessions and can maximize my time at the event.

As an organizer, I love the ability to instantly send out program updates myself in seconds.

There are so many more cool features …  a brand new moderated question module, social media integration, internal corporate distribution, schedule synchronization, QR code reader, etc.

Anything else we need to know?
We have done all the hard work and EventPilot is easy for you to implement. If you need a native app tomorrow or use it for multiple events, we offer different solutions to meet your budget or time requirements.

There is so much more than we can cover here – contact us for more details.

Today, we’re talking about One Lobby

Your name: Jordan Smith
Company/Tool Name: OneLobby
Website: OneLobby.ca
Twitter: @onelobby
Facebook: www.facebook.com/onelobby

Influential People Have Influence
One way to determine an influential person in an industry is to take a vote. Most people are automatically turned off by this idea because they think it but it’s a popularity contest, but the truth is that if you are influential, you have an audience. If two people send out a “vote for me” message to their audience and only one person gets a response, I do believe that person is a bigger influencer. Popularity contests got a bad reputation back in high school when the prom king and queen were chosen based just on who is most beautiful, but in the social space, influence is largely determined by the people who have tuned into you and respond to your posts.

Innovators Innovate
When I read articles about people who have made a “Top Innovators” list, I am always looking for their innovation. What are they doing that pushes the envelope? What are they creating that is bringing our industry to the next level? Innovation has become a buzz word, but I think we’ve forgotten what it means.

Influential People Have Expertise
While most influential people do not consider themselves “experts”, many of them are leading the way in a particular area of their industry. They might have a very narrow scope, but they know that one aspect very well. The mass population tends to be drawn towards people with great personalities and even good looks, but over time, most imposters come out in the end. People like to know that the people they look up to are genuine and very smart and they won’t follow fake influencers for too long. The influencers who truly have expertise can keep people engaged long-term.

Influencers Make People Jump
It doesn’t matter if you have 40,000 people on your listserv, that doesn’t make you an influencer. The way that I most judge an influential person is by their ability to get people to take action. If you send your newsletter blasts to 30,000 people, and get only 2% clicks, how influential are you really? If you can send to a very small targeted list and get many of them to respond, I would say that you’re more influential than someone with a big listserv. Too often, our society looks at popularity and the size of your audience and does not take into account the quality. To me, this is the most important component of an influencer.

Regardless of what magazine or blog creates a list of innovative people, I think anything created in a vacuum related to influential and innovative leaders is not reliable. Regardless of how these magazines and blogs have chosen the people on their list, I think there is a lot of room for improvement. There are a lot of influencers in the industry who are never mentioned on the list. And most of the time when I read one of these, I don’t know anyone. While I am not the most connected person in the industry, I think there are great people who are being left off and I wonder if they’re being replaced by people who are truly more influential.

Photo by Quinn.Anya

Today, we’re talking about Mediasite

Your name: Erica St. Angel
Company/Tool Name: Mediasite Events by Sonic Foundry
Website: http://events.sonicfoundry.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/mediasite @Mediasite
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/mediasite

We provide webcasting services to create hybrid events, virtual conferences and online meetings, so now the remote audience can also join in, get the information they need and further that relationship with your organization and your brand.

What is the best audience for this tool? Corporate events? Social? Other? Large? Small?
We’ve done webcasting for events big and small. As small as one hotel room with an executive presenting for one hour and we record so the onsite attendees can watch on-demand — all the way to multi-track, multi-room live events where we stream hundreds of hours of educational content from a convention center over several days. Most of our clients are associations, corporations and government agencies who host meetings with presentations for education, training or marketing.

Because we use our own webcasting technology, we’ve perfected a system to make hybrid and virtual events worry-free. We equip planners with trained technicians who work onsite to webcast your event. Using our Mediasite webcasting platform, we record the speakers’ audio and video synchronized with their visual aids and instantly stream the presentation over the internet. People can then watch anytime, anywhere. The result is a hybrid event that increases overall attendance, broadens exposure for the event, its sponsors and speakers, and can generate more revenue for the organization.

But our team often works as project managers too, joining forces with your existing production, AV or other service providers to ensure you have all the technical components in place to go live without a hitch.

Webcasting also helps support green meeting initiatives by putting all conference sessions online in real-time, minimizing the need for printed handouts, DVDs/USBs, as well as travel requirements for individuals who attend the webcasted event.

Certainly, we’ve all used a webcast app for one on one conversations with friends and family.. Sometimes, there are problems, and sometimes it’s flawless. Webcasts are used to stream live and on-demand concerts, professional sports and even Occupy Wall Street.

For a professionally produced webcast you will expect it to work flawlessly. Your audience should log in without issues, without interruptions, sound quality should be good, and synchronized with the video.

What is needed, then, tin order to have a seamless experience? Of course the right webcasting production company is a must, but what are some of the elements?

• Pre-production planning & support
• Logistics coordination
• Day of event project management
• 24 hour support
• Browser bases
• Branded pages
• Interactivity via texting, Twitter, FaceBook
• Single or multi-camera shoot
• Multi location support
• Real time integration of PowerPoint and video
• A webcasting production company that talks “techie”, “planner” or “layman”

1. Ask Your Network
Colleagues, friends and family are all great sources for information on event locations to consider. They not only attend events, but they are dining out, going to the theatre and reading about all kinds of locations for events that you may not know of. A referral is a really great way to also get to know the venue management and event experience before you book. Don’t forget to ask your online network too! Put the word out on Twitter, Facebook and your LinkedIn Groups. Also stop by the Q&A sites like Quora and you will be sure to get some great recommendations.

2. Read a Magazine
A great source for event locations are popular local interest magazines like NY Mag and Time Out NY. These not only highlight locations where awesome events are already happening, but a lot of times venues are featured and sometimes even a venue directory at the end of the magazine as well. You’d be surprised how many great ‘hidden’ locations you will find that would be perfect for your event. Unfortunately you will still have to do a bit more searching to find the important details like capacity, food/beverage packages, availability and pricing.

3. Use the Internet
Avoid the general search of “event locations in NYC” in google, as that will lead you to individual locations that have paid a bunch or have just optimized their keywords to get listed first. Instead check out online venue directories like venuesonline.com, nycgo.com, bizbash.com. These industry sites have some great info on the various locations including pics and capacity. RFP sites like Cvent and EventNow also have a bunch of locations listed and allows you to submit your details in a form to have the venue followup at a later date with more details on the options available and price quotes for your event. However you are interested in saving time and effort, the newest way to check out event locations are venue booking sites like imbookin or eVenues. imbookin allows you to search locations and see pricing and availability on different packages and lets you select more than one package to add to your event cart so you can customize your event. eVenues focuses more on room rentals and bookings by the hour for meetings as an example. Both sites are making a huge impact in the venue search arena. As you can imagine, any tool that is available 24/7, at your leisure that helps you narrow down your options and get the information you want is a winner.

The perfect venue for your event is only one question or click away. Once you discover all the possibilities the hard part will be deciding which one to go with!

Related articles

• Choosing A Location with Your Ideal Event Package by @imbookin (lizkingevents.com)
• Event Tech of the Week: @imbookin (lizkingevents.com)
• imbookin Aims to Be Your One Stop Event Booking Service (eventmanagerblog.com)