Seven Tips for an Awesome Event
MPI TechCon just provided a soup to nuts, A to Z, beginning
to end primer about how to promote and operate an event for today’s tech savvy
attendee. Did you miss it? The Chicago chapter of Meeting ProfessionalsInternational hosted a full day of education, but the education extended well
beyond that one day of programming. If you were paying attention, you would
have seen many valuable tips and tricks being shared in the days and months
leading up to the event. Here are a few highlights:
Early promotion of
hashtag (started during 2012 industry events – capitalizing on the many
potential attendees who were following the conversations taking place about
those events)
Early release of
mobile app
Pre-event e-mails
which provided many helpful tips about attending the event, including training
videos on twitter for those attendees who needed the basic education before
they showed up for the advanced content
Our industry’s first ever hackathon took place the weekend before the event. Attendees were
educated about what it was and why these types of events are important.
Pre-event Google+
Hangout with keynote speaker
Speakers were mostly (if not entirely) presenters from outside of the meetings and events industry. The
keynote speaker, Scott Stratten is one of the most well-known thought leaders
on the topic of making your business awesome. He did great job of relating his
material to the meetings and events industry. I have seen him speak twice
before and would pay to see him again. His content is so excellent, that it
easily applies to any industry he might be presenting to.
Virtual option
truly reached attendees far beyond those who would typically attend this event.
Highlights included: interviews in between sessions, pre-produced videos during
the down-time, social media integration helping virtual audience have a
presence at the event, wonderful production quality, virtual emcee, and programming
which was engaging for the virtual audience.
As a virtual attendee, I can only imagine how much more
innovative the on-site experience was. Check out their website to see what you can learn from them and view the sponsors who helped make it happen!
Thanks for the amazing blog post Elizabeth. We put a lot of thought and effort into the pre-event marketing strategy (there is actually more that we did...we plan to put out some article on mpitechcon.com explaining what happened and what the results were.)
ReplyDeleteWe also dedicated a lot of time to making sure the virtual experience was unique with exclusive content for the virtual audience. Everything from identifying interviewees who thought might be interesting for the individuals we saw purchased the virtual experience to small details like looking at the camera to acknowledge our virtual viewers.
I'm glad you liked it, Kyle! Feel free to post a link here to any further details. I had a question on LinkedIn about the human resources that were required.
ReplyDelete