These days, many people are beginning to understand the potential use of social media to create event buzz. Whether the occasion is large or small, it can be enhanced tremendously through Social Media.

Posting event information on SM sites is simply the 1st step. The real power comes from the sharing opportunities. How many friends do you on FB? Over 10? Over 100? Keeping the numbers easy, let’s say there are 10 committee members posting to their FB pages x 100 friends = 1,000 sets of eyes seeing something about your event.

Social media allows planners and the organizations sponsoring the events the opportunity to have long-term interactions with the attendees well in advance. Events have become much more exciting and part of that excitement is the anticipation or buzz that starts to build around the event long before it ever takes place.

There are things you can do to leverage your SM promotion like using photos, videos and relevant links in the post instead of just text. It also increases the impact if it’s of interest to one of your friends and they repost to their network. It’s no longer a matter of 2 friends who tells 2 friends… There really is no limit to the power of Social Media to promote your event.

A few of the unlimited number of Social Media sites being used to promote events:

o Facebook event pages
o LinkedIn – We ask our staff to create a LI profile. This helps our company spread our message and it’s a great online resume for them. You can post status updates about events or other projects you’re working on, similar to Twitter. You can also send formal event invitations to your contacts on LinkedIn.
o Eventbrite.com – Eventbrite allows you to sell tickets, if that is something that
you want to do
o Meetup.com
o Twitter – use hashtags to make it easier for people to find people talking about your event
o Committee and attendees spreading the word on their SM sites!

Related article:
Using Social Media for Event Planning

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One of the difficult logistical aspects of planning an event with a large number of people working from different locations is organizing everyone. Email addresses must be managed and all the decisions, contracts and communication threads need to be tracked. A few Social Media tools help with this process!  

  • Private Facebook & LinkedIn Groups – great for personal events like reunions, birthdays and showers.
  • Yammer.com – on a more enterprise level. It has none of the ads and other distractions that you findon Facebook. Yammer allows you to organize & archive by topic or project. You can schedule meetings, post documents, throw questions out there.  This is geared toward large intercompany collaboration. Or say you have a client you’re coordinating a 25th Anniversary Gala. You can set up a joint Yammer event network between your Yammer network and the company’s network. You can then have specific people organized into, silent auction committee, awards committee…
  • DropBox.com – Allows you to “drag & drop” large files and invite others to access from any computer or mobile phone. For example, you could put all your sponsor logos and high rez photos in folder for the committee and brochure designer.

Please share tools you use!

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The City of Trenton is once again hosting a weeklong celebration of activities for businesses, entrepreneurs and individuals starting or changing careers from October 17th to the 21st. Last year, more than 5,000 people came to the Capital City and we are expecting an even larger crowd this October.

Visit http://www.smallbizweek.com for the schedule and other details.

TSBW highlights include:

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ABS works with a number of non-profits who host Board retreats, committee meetings, workshops and fundraisers.  We find ourselves responsible for event planning throughout the year and Social Media has added a powerful tool for our marketing and communications!

Social Media Marketing – broadly defined: sharing in an online community.

Social Media (SM) allows for the creation and exchange of user-generated content. This form of marketing is driven by word-of-mouth, meaning it results in earned media rather than paid advertising. People generally pay more attention to an event if they hear someone they know talking about it.

Whether or not event planning is your job or business, you’re going to be involved with planning events of some sort – birthdays, retirement parties, reunions. SM helps make it easier to organize, promote and share.

The following  just scratches the surface for how event planners are using social media. Please add to the conversation about your experiences using Social Media for events!

I. Pre-Event Planning/Collaboration

II. Promotion

III. Location Based Apps

IV. QR Codes & Microsoft Tags

Click here to download a discussion at Middlesex County College on the subject of Social Media in Event Planning – October 15, 2011.
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