Peter Drucker once said “the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer”. For someone organizing an event, you could apply the same logic and say that “the purpose of an event is to create and engage an audience”. Social media is an extremely effective tool for this purpose, yet many businesses are only in the earliest stages of learning to leverage. At NewzSocial, we are working with a set of customers who are blazing a new trail of ways to “create and engage” audiences using social media on a much wider scale around their events.
One example is the South Asian Heart Center, an organization that engaged a volunteer group of “social media champions” to promote their annual nationwide gala banquet. Using NewzSocial, these social media champions were setup to post a sequence of pre-planned content that had been arranged by the event’s marketing team. Then another wider circle of supporters were invited to like and comment on their posts to kickstart buzz and engagement. With social media as part of an integrated and orchestrated marketing effort, the event sold out much faster than anticipated and they had the “good problem” of having to adjust their planned sequence of posts halfway through to refocus on preparing the audience that was already registered rather than sign up new attendees.
Another company we are working with is setting up a “live tweet distribution system”, so that a marketing team at their event can send tweets from their mobile phones directly to an account which would then redistribute the post to the social media accounts of a whole group of social media ambassadors, greatly expanding the audience for this “near-real-time” content unfolding at the conference.
This is the first of a series of blog posts on this subject, I plan to share a lot more of the interesting lessons we are learning while working with our customers in this area where interesting innovation is taking place. In the meantime, let me ask a question for discussion: what innovative techniques in social media has your company or organization used that would make Peter Drucker proud of your events? I look forward to learning from you and to a continued dialogue.
