Getting the Message Out Using Social Media

According to one Northern California-based meeting planner, social media marketing is key to driving up event attendance.

By Kevin Woo  One + | February 2010

NOT LONG AGO THE PHRASE “GUERRILLA MARKETING” REFERRED TO UNCONVENTIONAL MARKETING PRACTICES that relied primarily on ingenuity and imagination—think Apple’s 1984 George Orwell commercial that launched the Macintosh computer—or ingenious tactics such as stapling flyers to telephone poles, waving signs on street corners or wearing sandwich boards. The objective of guerrilla marketing campaigns was to create buzz at minimal cost.

In cities such as San Francisco, artists, musicians, singers and comedians have used guerrilla marketing tactics for decades to draw attention to their work. Guerrilla tactics were all the rage in the 1960s to promote political activism or to draw attention to a grassroots initiative. Meeting and event planners have also employed guerilla-like tactics for years, but now they can use social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Digg to get their message out.

Rich Gosse, a San Francisco meeting and event planner, organizes dances, wine-tasting parties and dinner cruises around the Bay Area. In the past few years he has begun to rely heavily on social networking Web sites to efficiently and cost-effectively promote his events to reach potential attendees. Gosse says he believes that people gravitate to groups on Facebook and MeetUp.com in order to find others who have similar interests.

Last August, Gosse organized a singles event in Palo Alto, Calif., near the Stanford University campus, and used a combination of social network marketing and public relations to drive awareness and create buzz. He targeted bloggers to create online buzz; posted event notifications on Facebook, Yelp and Twitter; and pitched local media outlets before and after the event.

Targeting Bloggers

According to Gosse, targeting bloggers was a key component of the PR campaign. Several blog sites are used widely by people who attend Gosse’s events, and he used the sites’ popularity to promote the event. Gosse says the tactics he used to pitch stories to bloggers are similar to those he uses to pitch mainstream media.

“We did not do anything special to attract bloggers—they came across us on their own, mainly because of so much coverage [from other media outlets].” Chris Brogan, president of New Media Labs, consults with large companies about how to use social software and community platforms to improve business communications and says that reaching out to bloggers is very different than pitching traditional reporters.

“I get dozens of pitches a day,” Brogan said in a recent blog post. “I delete almost all of them unread unless I know the person, and then half the time I delete those, too. The reason is that people aren’t considering what I write about before pitching to me. I rarely ever cover software here, so if you’re showing me a software story, it damned well better have a human angle.”

To get through the pitching clutter, Brogan suggests that PR representatives and meeting planners do two things to get a blogger to write about your event:

First, follow them on Twitter, comment on their blog posts and set up Google Alerts and comment on related articles. Creating a relationship and helping a blogger get to know you are the keys to garnering coverage.

And second, be sure to throttle back on the hard sell when pitching bloggers, says Larry Weintraub, CEO of Fanscape, a digital word-of-mouth marketing agency. “[Bloggers] are influencers and have the ability to promote your events and can actually be your biggest event evangelists if they are approached in a manner that doesn’t smell of sales and direct marketing.”

Social Networks

Facebook and Twitter are two of the most popular social networking sites for organizing events. Weintraub says that when setting up a Facebook account for a specific event, it’s important to make the home page look professional, include specific information about the event and link to a page where those interested can purchase tickets or get more information.

The key to successfully marketing an event on Twitter is to post messages continuously, because tweets can get buried in individual in-boxes due to the overwhelming number of people who tweet at the same time. For example, major news events such as last summer’s Iranian election revolution generated nearly 250,000 tweets per hour worldwide.

Posting meeting notices on social networking sites needs to go beyond merely cutting-and-pasting the same text over and over, however. “With the rapid growth of social media and the consumer cynicism surrounding being overtly marketed to, subtlety is key,” Weintraub said. “Posts such as, ‘Hey, come to our event because it’s cool’ won’t cut it. It’s not engaging and doesn’t prompt people to even care, because the market is saturated. That’s where a more nuanced or subtle approach is needed so that you can return to these sites as an active participating member and where your posts will be valued as opposed to being thought of as a troll coming in to spam the group.”

Search engines can also be great resources for event planners seeking to identify specific social networks and to find individual groups within those networks.

Meeting planners can create new group pages for events but should be sure to use the appropriate buzzwords, making it easier for people to find the groups during word searches. Sally Falkow, a senior strategist with Expansion Plus, a social media agency, says that conference speakers and attendees are the most credible sources you can use to promote an event. She recommends that meeting planners ask speakers or presenters to blog or tweet about their upcoming presentation, let blog or Twitter followers know about the conference and where they can get information and a search engine to find reporters in the space who might also blog or tweet and contact them about your conference.

To complement the online marketing programs for his Bay Area events, Gosse relies heavily on the tried and true—public relations and press releases. Gosse’s PR campaigns are designed to reach a broad, local audience that might not belong to an online community and to create awareness of the event before it takes place and garner media the day of the event. Falkow adds a social media spin to Gosse’s PR strategy. “Issue press releases in social media formats, make the content easy to use and re-publish [and be sure] to have a social media newsroom for the conference so that every press release and update is syndicated in a feed.” One+

KEVIN WOO writes about the meeting and event industry from his home in San Francisco.