Social media can turbo charge your event

Principles for modern events

1. Holistic event strategy: Event strategy involves having a pre, post and during the event plans. These strategies should dovetail into a complete strategy that delivers on brand and business objectives.
2. Community engagement: Event activations should integrate with existing brand communities and on-line communities who are not physically involved in the actual event.

Pre-event: preparation for the event

• Hashtags/platforms/channels - Plan your hashtags, platforms and media channels to focus on. Decide on the media and content that needs to be produced in preparation for the event like video promos, on-line banners, tweets, updates and competitions.
• Create groups and tap into communities - Rope in your communities to share and communicate the event and activities. Tap into existing communities whether they are social media communities, your email list, sms list or your existing customer base. Plan content for each segment and drive them to one medium.
• Include social media in all pre event marketing support, add social media handles etc.
• Crowd source communications solutions and marketing ideas to expand engagement with fans and customers.
• Create an App -unveil sections of the App as the event approaches e.g unveil confirmed artists and activities etc

During

• Use event App to communicate activities, maps, speaker/sponsor/artist profiles and event programmes.
• Create QR codes that help attendants to check in/Tweet location/post on via the mobile App.
• Display screens to show engagement - live sms. Tweets, comments etc
• Display the hashtags and remind the attendees about social media engagements.
• Charger stations are standard at any event in the smartphone era. NB NB

After

• Follow up with the people who engaged in the conversations and shared their thoughts.
• Package the content from video, pictures, winners of competitions and package most important moments of the events.
• Develop an influencer program to drive ongoing engagement between events.

In closing, social media gives you reach that wasn't there before.