I had the pleasure of attending the Monitoring Social Media conference in Boston yesterday. While I was there to discuss Social CRM, I took the opportunity to listen to a number of other speakers.
All of the speakers were great. However, Aafia Chaudhry, CEO, JuvoLab & Founding Partner, Noesis, did a really nice job presenting the findings of research she performed at a recent conference. She analyzed how companies at a recent medical conference were utilizing Twitter as part of their conference communication efforts. Her findings, summarized on this slide, fall into two main categories:
Driving traffic to your booth and your website.
Aafia noted that one company had a large display setup at their booth where a twitter stream of conference-related tweets displayed. People gathered at the booth to catch up on key highlights and to see their names scrolling by, it was a success. One company, however, became so self-promotional in their attempts to drive traffic that the twitter audience became frustrated and negative towards their tweets, having the opposite effect. Add value and respect your audience, good things will follow.
Educating the community
Adding value, providing education…. These are the keys to success on twitter and beyond. Many companies provided updates on treatments, disease-specific facts, and medical trials. These updates, this information, was not about the company but was valuable information that others at the conference, and those not at the conference, could benefit from. Become a trusted source of information and people will come to you.
Twitter, Facebook, Email, and other communication methods can supplement your in-person efforts at a conference. Don’t miss out.
John
Originally posted on The Lab is open.
Great post John, and excellent takeaways. At the 2009 NAGW Conference we provided a large screen near registration that showed all the conference related tweets using our conference hashtag, and it met with great success. Probably something we’ll consider doing again in 2011.
We’ve also used Twitter to send out conference updates and reminders to attendees, run contests and prize giveaways and interact with speakers and attendees.
I believe the self-promotion and trusted resource points you made above also apply to speakers who happen to be sponsors as well. We’ve always advocated that our speakers sell their authority and expertise, not their company. As you stated, “become a trusted source of information and people will come to you.” The same absolutely applies to Twitter, Facebook and Blogging.
Ron, you folks did a nice job at the conference with this too. Looking forward to watching you evolve this further too as I think you can make the on-site learning and collaboration even better next go round.