The event camp conference began with a hashtag. Event professionals conversed on twitter—terminating each tweet with self-explanatory #eventprof—before finally meeting in person in February 2010. That was in New York; on September 8th, they met again for Event Camp Twin Cities (ECTC), eager to develop more interactive experiences that they could apply to their own conferences. According to the event website, the focus was on “hybrid event technology, social media, and new collaborative formats.” Indeed, the meeting’s format was uncommon: the vast majority of participants attended remotely.
The co-chairs established a date, venue, and website before securing speakers or attendees. They used blog posts to build interest through announcements, video content, and interviews with speakers. They also used the blog to generate feedback, bouncing ideas off readings and finally implementing popular suggestions at the event. Naturally, social media played an extensive role in spreading the word as well.
But social media in marketing is old news. One of the event camp’s more notable innovations involved extending Twitter’s influence to the event itself. During the meeting, a reporting team sent out over 200 tweets each day with highlights from every presentation. Meanwhile, attendees and remote pods used Twitter to participate in audience polls, submit questions and comments, and contribute to group discussions.
The event ended up producing a large quantity of digital content—including over 9 hours of video and 3,400 tweets—so the next challenge for its organizers was to package the information in a way that would elegantly summarize the event’s development. They knew that the most effective post-event strategy places the event’s key ideas where the target audience will see it, meaning, in this case, on their website and the websites of media partners. Once again, they distributed the content through social media like Twitter and LinkedIn.
That covered the “where” of their post-event media blitz, but they still needed to figure out how and when they would present the material. For maximum accessibility, they opted to introduce each session as its own story with its own slew of photos and video. They decided to space out the material on a weekly basis, distributing in the middle of the work week so that target recipients wouldn’t be busied by weekend e-mail backlogs or impending Friday deadlines.
ECTC thought of everything. They ensured that each piece of content on each website shared the same format but were careful never to duplicate material verbatim—Google punishes this with lower positions on searches. They assembled expert collaborators to help with the overall vision, video media, and republishing of their content. They paid close attention to page views.
In the three months following the conference, ECTC content generated over 67,000 page views and over 750 video views. Organizers were pleased, but they recognized that short, text-based content succeeded far better than videos. Of course, depending on the audience and circumstances, the most effective post-event content is subject to change.
ECTC wasn’t flawless, but they made strides in demonstrating how meetings can incorporate a virtual aspect. Look out for the next event camp conference in August to see what these innovators do next.
See the full ECTC case study here.
