How to plan the Social side of your conference or event:
There are two kinds of people you should care about when planning a conference or event*:
- attendees
- prospects to become future attendees
* no one else matters.
I was asking a conference planner this week if they were planning to stream content from their event online. The disappointing answer was, that attendees will be twittering and later (months later?) we’ll post video from the event on a dedicated web site.
That’s NOT good enough.
I’ve said it before, but here it bears repeating, “Your attendees are coming for inspiration, motivation and to make connections!” Giving your content away – far beyond your walls is paramount if you want to grow your event for the future.
mesh-Canada’s Web Conference gets it.
mesh provides a great resource that makes bringing business cards to the event irrelevant – helping attendees and non-attendees connect on their site. And, they make it easy for attendees to spread the Mesh goodness far and wide online.
Business Cards – Who needs ‘em?
By providing a social networking platform, attendees can put names to faces before, during and after the event. As well, links to all the important contact information is available right on the mesh site. By investing in a social platform, attendees will come back to the site again and again to connect with people they met at the event and extend those all important personal connections.
Your event, becomes the social networking hub where attendees’ business cards reside. By encouraging attendees (and non-attendees) to frequent the site, they connect your event with the real value you bring – Connections.
The mesh social site not only makes it simple to share conference content beyond the walls, they outright encourage attendees to share video, photos and more with those not in attendance – where? – right on the Mesh Site!
So even non-attendees will go the to the conference site (often) before, during and after the event to siphon up information from the event. Go back to the three most important take-ways from your event – information is NOT one of them. Information is free online.
If you were a potential future attendee, wouldn’t access to this kind of value make you even more anxious about the conversations and personal connections you missed out on?
This distribution of information away from the event in no way diminishes the value of your conference or event. Remember, you only care about attendees and potential future attendees. They’ll love permanent access to conference proceedings.
What can mesh teach conference or event planners?
Plenty:
- make your conference site a hub of social networking for attendees and future attendees.
- encourage attendees to share conference information far and wide , especially with future attendees.
- forget about non-attendees (those who will never attend your event) – These people may get information from your site, but they are not likely to learn anything new; they already have an entire Internet full of information at their fingertips.
If you follow the mesh example, next year’s conference or event will start filling with attendees sooner than you can imagine.
Hey, will I be seeing you at mesh?
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