Slideshare Helps Conference Organizers and Speakers

No secret we love Slideshare. From today we love the service even more for a couple of powerful reasons.

View more presentations from Adrian Mcewen.

Slideshare, the popular community for presentation junkies, recently introduced few new initiatives and features which got us hooked up heavily, if you’d allow the euphemism.

Let’s see:
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The Art Of Listening And Science Of Responding

In this guest post Jeff Hurt, our favorite event planning and change thinker on twitter, discusses Using Social Media To Listen To Your Event Customers

We’ve all experienced it. The hallways of the conference are buzzing with chatter about the event. Attendees are discussing what’s working, what isn’t, why the organizers planned it this way, what they are happy about and what’s discouraging them.

As meeting and event planners, we often wish we could be a fly on the wall listening to everyone’s discussions all at once. With today’s social media tools, we can engage in discussions with our registrants before, during and after the big event. Now, we can capture those hallway conversations and respond in real time. So, where do you start?

1. Create and encourage a culture of listening.

Listening is something that every staff member can and should do, and the organization’s principals should lead by example. Staff should listen in the hallways, invite feedback on evaluations and encourage attendees to provide comments and concerns to any staff member both face to face and through the social media tools available. The event is all about attendee, not you the meeting planner.

2. Develop a system for capturing feedback and ways to respond.

a. Setup an event presence in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social media tools.
In today’s web world, people go to several different sites to find information about an event. They no longer turn only to your organization or event website. They turn to their friends, colleagues and compadres. They also turn to the social media tools they use and you can help them by setting up “listening and chatting posts” within each social property. Twitter Tip: When using Twitter, identify one person to manage each event account and encourage them to list their name in the profile. For example Jeff4CVG09 meaning Jeff for CONVERGE 2009.
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10 New Event Concepts That Will Throw You Out (or on Top) of the Market – Presentation

Some further discussion on this post

If you are not able to see the video, click here

10 New Event Concepts That Will Throw You Out (or on Top) of the Market

By now you should know we don’t like traditional form of events. By traditional we mean: High Control – High Environmental Impact – Low Technology – Low Innovation. News is we are not the only one in love with new, innovative concepts. We set the trend, now the market is loving whatever we have been pushing in the past.

Photo by Jill Greenseth via Flickr

Bad news is that if you don’t understand new trends, you are going to be out of the market soon. Bad news is also that if you partially understand what follows, trying to adapt it to whatever old, traditional scheme of executing events, you are going to be out even faster.

There is good news though. If you understand the new spark of revolutionary, user generated, highly technological trends and implement them correctly you are going to be ahead of the game. Far ahead.

Let’s get down to business then and remember to handle with care:

1. Virtual Tradeshows

We are not the biggest fans of trade shows. We are sure there are a lot of Circus fans out there, but would you do business in a Circus. Feel free to do so. The culture of shouting to other people to capture their attention with loudness and noise, it’s indeed a thing that belongs to the 1960’s.

Virtual Tradeshows rationalize the concept substantially. Having arenas where companies measure is still indeed a juicy concept, and having them controlled under a virtual environment is the way to go.

We have witnessed great, one to one, intimate environments that stimulate great trade and business. Way to go.

2. Flash Mobs

The power of word of mouth is scaring and fascinating at the time. The idea of harnessing word of mouth has been around forever, but it is more a way to sell pretentious books rather than a proved business technique. The idea to virally leverage on events like these is more real now thanks to tools such as Facebook or twitter. Make sure you handle with extreme care.
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What Social Media for my event?

It’s the buzzword of the day, Social Media. Does it make sense to use it for your event? Here is what you need to know about time and budget required.

We had a great web conference (aka conversation) last night about the use of technology within events. It is recorded in the Event Manager Blog Channel for your use. We were overwhelmed with questions and we are looking forward to answering them on next events.

A graph to sum it up

The highlight of the night was a graph outlining the time and budget required to do both: promoting your event on Social Media and embedding social media and extra technology to events.

Here it is:
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