1. Get a venue. Well you have that. Just reserve a part of the hotel bar or exhibition floor at your conference. It needn’t cost any more than you’re already paying.
2. Create a landing page on your website. Doesn’t have to say much more than where, when, why and who.  Link this to a registration form. Tweetups are generally free to attend so you’ll need to vet your registrations. Ensure your Twitter account is obvious and give people the chance to tweet it easily.
3. Promote it. You should have already built a following on Twitter so just start tweeting about it. Send an invite to your connections in Linked In and invite anyone that confirms their attendance at the event. Create a hashtag for the tweetup and use that in the promotion.
4. Organise a few snacks and some free booze. You don’t have to go mad but don’t be tight either. You want people to have a good time and come to the next one. Even better, get it sponsored and then you can throw a party.
5. Get organized. You’ll need to have a list and check people in.  As the face of the tweetup you should welcome everyone.
6. Network. Meet people and make introductions. Get people talking get them networking.
7. Get up and speak. You need to be the face of this. Prepare and deliver a short speech and possibly a video, of course this will be pushing the event. And if you have the budget, you could even have some entertainment.
8. Monitor the success. How many tweets did it generate? How many attended? How many followers did it generate? Did any of these become customers?
9. Why wait for next year? If it was successful why not run these once a quarter? Fancy getting your customers together for a drink once a quarter…

Would love to hear about any tweetups you’ve attended or run. Any more tips?

And, a conference is a natural extension of social media.

Here’s my thinking on how the two work together

Stage 1. Conference planning

Social media can be immensely powerful for finding and inviting great speakers and sponsors.

1. Set up a Twitter account for the event and follow relevant twitterers
2. Set up the event in Linked in
3. Start a blog. You’ll be doing loads of research. Blog about what you find. Tweet each blog post. Blog lots its great for Search Engine Optimisation.
4. Start making connections in Linked In. People you find in your research, last years speakers, sponsors and attendees.
5. If you’re selling sponsorship then find all the speakers in Linked In, look at their connections are they linked to their suppliers? These are potential sponsors. Look for previous sponsors and new sponsors, look at their connections, they may well be connected to their partners and competitors.
6. Search for relevant groups in Linked In, join them and the join in the discussions. Don’t post overt marketing messages, genuinely join the discussions. This will build your cred in that group, later you can introduce your event.
7. If there’s no specific group on this topic in your region, then start one. But be active and drive the group.
8. Search for competing and similar events in Linked In and look at who is attending these. Connect to them.
9. Sign a speaker? Blog it, Tweet it.
10. Sign a sponsors? Blog it Tweet it.
11. During your research you’ll redoubtably come across relevant blogs. Subscribe to them. Post comments on their blogs regularly. They’ll get to know you which will come in helpful later on.

Stage 2. Conference promotion

You’ve got the programme, the speakers and the sponsors. The brochure goes off the press and the usual direct marketing activity kicks off. What’s your social media marketing strategy? If you used social media well in the conference planning section then you just need to build on this.

1. Set up a Facebook page.
2. Set up a hashtag for the event and market it.
3. Link your conference site to your twitter, facebook and linked in group
4. Advertise your twitter handle, hashtag and your facebook page in all offline advertising.
5. Get a promotional video for the conference. Post to site and to You Tube. Encourage sharing.
6. Continue blogging – but with more marketing spin. It’s now time for the conference marketing guys to get blogging seriously. Announce offers, new speakers and sponsors. Talk about who’s registering and talk about and link to conference advertising and PR. Production folk to also continue blogging. Tweet these.
7. Post speaker photos to our website and to Flickr. Tweet these.
8. Email a weekly round up of the bog and include current offers to register.
9. You’ve built come cred in Linked In in stage 1, now build on it. Announce your event in the relevant groups you’re a member of. Get attendees to RSVP to your event listing and invite them to join your group if you have one.
10. Encourage speakers, sponsors and attendees to follow your conference on Twitter. Then encourage them to re-tweet you. If you mention them they’re pretty likely to re-tweet you.
11. Invite the bloggers you have built a relationship with to attend and blog at the event. They may even blog about the event before, but you can’t expect this.

Stage 3. On the day(s)

1. Ensure all attendees know the Twitter hashtag and encourage them to tweet.
2. Have the twitter feed for the hashtag running live on screens around the venue.
3. Listen to Twitter and respond and join in the conversation.
4. Blog the proceedings on the event blog. Tweet.
5. Video the presentations
6. Have a tweetup at the end and meet your followers.

Stage 4. Once it’s all over

1. Post event photo’s to site and to flickr. Blog. Tweet
2. Post event presentations to website and to You Tube (if under 10 mins). Blog each one. Tweet each one.
3. Email attendees and encourage them to link to and share the photos and videos.
4. Post presentations to slideshare. Blog them. Tweet them.
5. Start back at stage 1. Using all this new content as new fuel.

I’m sure I’ve missed a million tricks. Got any more?

Get an RSS reader.

1. If you haven’t already got a google account, get one. It’s free. Click on “sign in” on the google home page (top right) and then click on “create new account”
2. Once you have an account, sign in.
3. Then go to the top menu. Under “more” go to “reader”
4. That’s your reader.
5. Simply add subscriptions by clicking on the “add a subscription” button. Type in either the url of the news site or blog you wish to follow, or search by search term and it will return results of news sites and blogs matching your terms. Then click on the +subscription button under the ones you wish to follow.
6. Once a day, or more, you can go into reader and scan down all the latest news relevant to you.

You can add my blog to your reader paste in www.sharonroessen.wordpress.com

LINK TWEET “This is what I’m working on now”
Post a new blog article then tweet about it. Linking your blog article to the tweet. Use a URL shortening tool so that the URL doesn’t use up all 140 characters. I use Hootsuite.com and this has a shortening tool in it, tinyurl.com does same thing too. If you have an RSS feed on your site you can register on twitterfeed.com and it posts tweet as soon as content on your site changes.

CLASSIC TWEET “This is what I’m doing now”
The easiest to write – but try to make interesting don’t post inane stuff like what you’re eating.  Add personality too them, they tell people who you are.  They don’t have to just be work related.

OPINION TWEET “This is what I’m thinking now”
Sharing thoughts on your actions. But for business purposes keep your opinions limited to topics on your industry. Comment on industry news stories or comment on what another industry expert has tweeted.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED TWEET “This is what I’ve jsut done”
Announcing “I’ve just done this” is another way of saying “What do you think of this?”. You may well get replies on this kind of tweet.

ENTERTAINMENT TWEET “I’m making you laugh now”
Being entertaining now and again will get you followers.

QUESTION TWEET “Can you help me with something now”
Ask for help and advice. People love to help. Questions can also be used to start conversation.

PICTURE TWEET “Look at what I’ve been doing”
Post a picture to Flickr or a video to Youtube – then tweet about it and link to it.  Alternatively, use www.twitpic.com, load image and tweet it at the same time.

So no excuse for boring tweets or tweets that are just loaded with direct marketing messages.

Give your tweets personality and supply interesting information that your industry and customers will find useful.

Here’s a few ideas I’ve come up with so far:

1. Make sure you look serious. Get an account, connect it to your twitter account, complete your profile and add a photo.
2. Search for groups that match your business interest. Request to join active (many members and lots of discussion) groups. Do this for many groups.
3. Once you’ve joined a group you can look at the members in that group. Should any of these people be in your network? Invite them.Look at the discussions taking place. Join in. Post new threads and comment on existing ones where you have something to add. Don’t be overtly “salesy” you’ll get kicked out of the group.
4. Start your own group if there isn’t one already on your area of interest.
5. Post your event in the events section. And tell your network you’ve posted it. Ask people to RSVP.
6. Search for other events in your area of interest. Look at who has RSVP’d to that event and invite them to join your network and then your event.
7. Search in Answers for questions being posted in your area of interest. Go and answer some (but only if you have something real to say) add your url at the end of the answer.  Conversely, post some questions “I’m looking for an expert on email marketing in Melbourne, anyone know anyone?”
8. Market you LinkedIn presence. On your email signature, your website, your blog…

Here’s another article on this subject http://www.michaelflavin.com/4-tips-putting-linkedin-to-work-for-b2b-marketers/

Anyone any more tips?

1. Don’t spam. Don’t follow loads more than follow you. Don’t constantly send out blatant marketing messages like “check out my blog” “sign upto my RSS feed” “come to my event” …mix these with other tweets too.(Joel promises to teach me how to write these other tweets later in the chapter – will blog when I get there)

2. Follow style rules. Use real words not SMS speak. Don’t type in UPPER CASE, that’s shouting. But can use symbols like @ = +

3. Give credit for retweets. Retweets help you go viral. But don’t ask people to retweet you.

4. Stick to 140 characters. Don’t split a tweet over many tweets in an effort to say more.

5. Follow people that follow you. But you don’t have to follow everyone. Check out their twitter home page before following and see if they are tweeting stuff you want to read.

6. Spark conversation and entertain

Here’s seven killer strategies to get more followers. Taken from Joel Comm’s Twitter Power book (www.twitterpower.com)

1. Look for people you already know. Load you outlook address book to google mail and then link this to Twitter. And ue www.search.twitter.com for a much better search engine to find people on Twitter.

2. Tweet your blog. Load your twitter feed onto your blog and website. Go to twitter.com/badges to download standard plug ins for type pad and blogger. For WordPress go to alexking.org/projects/wordpress.

3. Pay your followers! Give them something free if they follow you. Free ebook or report for example.

4. Respond to requests. Spark conversations. Ask questions, use the reply button and reply to others questions. But only on questions where you can add value.

5. Mobilize your social network. Place your tweets on facebook and LinkedIn.

6. Put your twitter address in your email signature. Easy hey!

7. Run a contest. Ask a question, give a time restriction and offer a prize for best answer.

I’m going to test all of these (already done 1,2,5,6) over the next few weeks. I’ll post the results, please post yours.

So I’m a traditionally trained direct marketer. And pretty good at it!

I’ve just returned back to work after another six month maternity leave (my third) to find that the world has changed for marketing people. When I left in July 2009 I was starting to dig around social media and work out how it could work for my company. I wrote a paper on it emailed it to my marketing guys around the world and told them to start doing it. That’s that box ticked I thought!

How wrong I was.

Returned in Jan 2010 to find we’re (www.terrapinn.com) not doing any of it. And many of our competitors are. We used to lead marketing innovation in the events industry now we’re lagging way behind.

I freaked.

I bought a couple of books on amazon and starting reading – fast. (Will blog about what I learned in these shortly).

There’s only one way to change behavior and that’s by changing your own. I need to lead by example. So by the end of my first week back I started tweeting. By the end of my second week back I reactivated linked In and now its the end of my forth week and I’m starting this blog.

I am totally sold on the power of social media and I am passionate about events. I want to change the way Terrapinn creates events, markets them and entire customer experience.

We run over 200 conferences annually – all around the world. That’s a lot of people I have influence and change.

So this is what I’m going to blog about – my journey in changing business conferences through first changing myself, then my company and then maybe the entire industry.

I’d love input from social media experts and my colleagues and peers in the business conference industry.

follow me on twitter: twitter.com/sharonroessen

Was that ok for my first blog?