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Picture this: You organize an industry event for 300 colleagues. It sells out, the participants go home happy, they start talking about your event, and your ideas spread.
A success, right?
Not quite.
If you're organizing an event today, you can't limit your focus to the people attending. You need to think about your event's online presence -- the online content your guests will create and the people they'll reach with their content.
The Inbound Marketing Summit organized by HubSpot on Monday was a great example of the type of online scale an offline event can now generate. The IMS sold out, it's getting lots of positive reviews, and it probably had a significant impact on the thinking of its participants.
But that's not the end of the story. The Summit also reach far beyond its participants with a burst of activity on blogs, Twitter and social networks. There were 300 people at the event itself, but through these online channels, the Summit reached over 100,000 people.
Consider just my case: I was posting updates to the 300 people who follow me on Twitter, my tweets were showing up on Facebook where another 400 or so (mostly different people) are connected to me, and all my activity was being posted to FriendFeed where I have another 40 or so connections. With 300 other people publishing as much as me, you get a lot of reach.
The IMS content also generated significant traffic from search engines. For example, there was so much IMS traffic on Twitter that "#IMS08" reached Twitter's top trending topics list on its search pages. This made the Inbound Marketing Summit visible to anybody searching on Twitter all a day.
What do you need to do to give your event this kind of social media bounce?
Here are a few things we did that we recommend:
(1) Create an Event Tag - At the beginning of the Summit we asked participants to tag their media with "IMS08". This made it easy to find content related to the event, which gave people more of an incentive to create content.
(2) Build a Streaming Page - We created a single page to aggregate all our content from videos, photos, blogs and Twitter. This made it easier for people who weren't at the conference to keep up with and participate in the conversation.
(3) Use It Yourself - Don't setup social media tools for your event and forget about them. Use them, promote them and make sure all your contacts know about them.
(4) Give Up Some Control - If you want to create conversation and social media bounce for your event, you have to give up some control. Don't impose rules on recording or photography. Make it clear that any and all media making is encouraged. The more people create media about your event, the more broadly the ideas from your event will get distributed.
Have you experimented with social media and events? What has worked well for you?