First of all, a massive thank you to everyone who joined the first ever #EventPlannersTalk on Twitter yesterday where we discussed ‘How to Promote Events using Social Media’? So many interesting insights and thoughts on the topic were exchanged during that hour and I can’t wait to host the next one on 15^th September where we’ll discuss sustainability and green events.

Talking already about social media, it’s a good opportunity to share with you my impressions from the Marc Jacobs pop-up ‘tweet shop’ that took place last weekend in Covent Garden, London. After the successful campaign in New York, London was chosen to host the event. How did it work? They set up a pop-up shop for three days to promote the Daisy Marc Jacobs fragrance and customers were encouraged to use the hashtag #MJDaisyChain instead of cash to get a sample of the fragrance. In addition they had a DJ, coffee station, nail bar, lounge, Vine booth and Twitter wall.

That was a B2C event and in general I enjoyed the idea and the experience. B2B events can learn from this case study how to engage with their audience on social media.

There are only two things in my opinion Marc Jacobs could have done better. Firstly, why only tweets? They could encourage the customers to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and so on the campaign and gain larger brand exposure. Some people may have even more followers on other platforms than Twitter. Secondly, the brand didn’t interact with me. When I tweeted the hashtag no one from Marc Jacobs liked nor retweeted it, nor replied and welcomed me to the store or thanked me for coming. I just found it a pity that the brand didn’t engage with potential or existent customers, while they have them already in the store, using their products.

If you had the chance to attend the event I would be happy to hear your thoughts and experience and feel free to share impressions if you came across similar campaigns in the past.

All photos: © The MICE Blog

Unfortunately, there is no one solution fits all when talking about ‘how to promote events using social media’. The reason for that is that we have B2B and B2C events, private and public, local and international and hybrid and face-to-face events. The only way to know how to manage it, is to understand the different platforms and create an appropriate strategy for each platform.

It’s not enough just having Facebook, Twitter and Instagram profiles, it’s about using them and the quality of content that goes on these platforms and the frequency of updates. Yesterday I listened to one of my favourite marketing speakers (you can watch it here, he’s brilliant!) and someone asked him ‘is it better to update your social networks once a week with great content or daily with poor content’ and he answered the following: Why it has to be one or the other, why not both? So the bottom line is to put out a lot of quality content. By doing that you’ll realise that your community starts growing and people start engaging with you or your brand on social media. Gary’s comment is very relevant for events. Very often I see abandoned event accounts which start picking up and share content closer to the event date. I even noticed that some of the major exhibitions forget to change the event date on their profile from the previous year! That’s a shame because these events are missing to create meaningful connections with their existent and future audience. During the year it’s actually excellent time to attract attendees to your event, and social media is the most efficient and cost effective tool to do so.

Social media for events is about trial, error and testing. From my experience, you have to be 24/7 on it, you can’t respond to your customers only from Monday to Friday from 9am until 5pm because it will be regarded as poor customer service.

Lastly, and maybe most important, make sure that your tone of voice is the same both online and offline, especially for corporates. Just to give you an example, there is one corporate account I follow and used to like their friendly tone of voice on Twitter until I met them at an exhibition. The team didn’t have an idea about the conversation going-on on their social media, even their own updates. That’s a big gap when you think you ‘know’ the person and he ‘knows’ you because you follows each others updates. On the other hand, I tweeted with corporate accounts that were very coordinated, provided the names of representatives on site and our conversation keeps going on social media long after the exhibition is over.

If you have anything to add to the topic I’ll be happy to read your comment below or we’ll discuss more social media for events on Monday, 18^th August, so make sure you join the #EventPlannersTalk chat on twitter, 9pm BST (You can read the discussion questions here).

In addition, in my next post I’ll talk about the Marc Jacobs pop-up tweet shop in Covent Garden, London which is taking place this weekend, where customers can pay with tweets instead of cash for product samples.

I wish you all a fantastic weekend and see you soon!

Irina

Photo by: Irina Trofimovskaya