Social Media Event at Show or Expo (example tweetup)

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Permalink Reply by Lara McCulloch-Carter on June 17, 2009 at 7:51pm

Tim, you should join our #eventprofs chat on Twitter. It's an organized chat and we discuss this very subject quite frequently. Many of the chat participants are avid users of SM in events. Chat is Tues 9-10 PM EST or Thurs 12-1 PM EST. If you want instructions, you can view them on my blog http://www.ready2spark.com/2009/02/twitter-event-chat.html or on our Wiki http://eventprofs.pbworks.com.

All my best,

Lara

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Permalink Reply by Jeff Hurt on June 19, 2009 at 4:25pm

As Lara said, you should join our #eventprofs chat on Twitter to learn more. There are many meeting and event professionals using social media for their events. Here are a couple blog posts that might help you get started

Social Media Strategy: Plug Into A New World (highlights from MPI's CLC09)

Eight Ways To Make Your Meeting Or Event Blog And Twitter Friendly

Five Ways To Visualize Twitter At Events

Research Paper: Tweeting At Conferences

How To Live Blog (Or Twitter) An Event Effectively

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Permalink Reply by Kerry Smith on June 19, 2009 at 9:24pm

We had an event in April and created a twitter address for the event. Attendees were tweeting like crazy during the event, and via twitter, asked if we would carve out an area during our evening networking event for an impromptu "tweet up". We made it happen and even created stick-on labels to go on our name badges for the twitterers to write their twitter handles so they could identify each other. It was a terrific organic and unplanned thing, and it all came together on the fly. Everyone who participated loved it, and the group continues to communicate event 2 months after the event. It taught us alot about the opportunity to facilitate the community and then let go, and then to provide support where necessary. The goodwill and enagement was powerful, and something we will look to build upon at future events. And the best part is that it cost us nothing and it added a fresh and fun element to our show.

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Permalink Reply by Preeta Panicker on June 23, 2009 at 3:28am

Here's an example I found on an events magazine website:

Art of the tweetup
Friday, June 19, 2009
By Ken Briodagh


In the beginning there was the meet up, where people would get together in real life. Then there was the Internet, where suddenly everyone met friends online, chatted via instant message and stayed in touch by micro-blogging their daily lives on websites like Facebook and Twitter. Now, online social circles are moving out of cyberspace and back into the physical realm. Where is everyone going? Why, to the nearest tweetup, of course—a real-world meet-up made up of Twitter followers, or “tweeps.” And brands in the know, like Panasonic and Zipcar, are moving there, too.

Now, if you are still in doubt about whether people will move offline to actually (gasp!) meet each other in person, check this out: Panasonic did it with bloggers at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year and well over 100 guests came to the brand’s tweetup after-hours event to hang with company execs and check out the exhibit, VIP-style (Crayonville, New Haven, CT, handled the event).
Bob Greenberg, vp-marketing at Panasonic North America, said the company saw that its Living in HD campaign had developed a wide following in the blogosphere, due in large part to the online videos the brand created to support the initiative. Though the online following was there, the brand had yet to leverage it, so CES became an opportunity to make a move.

“We had this huge event in CES and we had never reached out to our online community,” he says. “So we sent out invitations and they came and we really saw the virtual world come to life and people come together in real time.”

Panasonic invited its Twitter followers and friends from other social media communities to come to the booth for a private tour, get expert answers on products and get access to executives who might otherwise be out of reach for many of the attendees. “These people are more in tune than traditional media and they are very influential among their followers,” Greenberg says. “We needed to tap into these new influencers and treat them like we treat traditional media. That’s important to them. If you don’t respect that, you lose as a marketer.” Panasonic plans to continue hosting tweetups, perhaps later this year.

Zipcar brought its members together for Earth Day in New York City as a thank you and a call to action as part of a greener practices initiative they called Green Confessions. The 500 people who came to the event were encouraged to tweet their not-so-green secrets like taking long, hot showers or throwing out plastic grocery bags without reusing them.

The urban rent-a-car company holds environmental responsibility and sustainability as corporate values and wanted to find a fun, interesting way to promote that message and leverage its Twitter following while getting some more mileage out of its Green Confessions promotion, kicked off in Washington, D.C. a few weeks earlier. So the company booked New York City hot spot BLVD (pronounced “boulevard”), sent out the tweet-vitations and announced it in its members-only newsletter and email blast. The event’s hashtag (a twitter-specific word that helps followers find tweets by topic) was secured and the physical space was set up with eight flat-screen televisions, all of which featured live-feeds of the green confessions and tweetup-related tweets during the event.
“This was such a fun way to both poke fun at ourselves and attract some attention to what we’re doing,” says Scott Cochran, New York marketing manager at Zipcar. “People were huddled around the screens, tweeting and talking about the confessions. It was like a snow globe version of the Twitter-verse.”

But it wasn’t all fun and games. The members who attended the tweetup were invited to bring a non-member friend to join in the fun. The strategy helped Zipcar garner 50 new member sign-ups at the event—a respectable 10 percent of the attendee list.

Like Panasonic, Zipcar intends to stay on the tweetup circuit. They will expand the program, however, to include more markets, possibly including San Francisco and Washington D.C., where, this year, virtual attendees watched the Twitter-feed and contributed even though they could not make it to the physical event.

The take-away for Zipcar? Tweeps that follow their friends online will follow them offline, too. So be ready. “We needed to have a better idea how the live-feed screens worked and Twitter’s bandwidth limitations,” says Cochran. “Next year, we’ll be ready and will have a much bigger event with 1,000 to 2000 members.” EM

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