Taking Businesses Events To The Web A Whole New Way With Social Software

Conferences, exhibitions, seminars, conventions and other events are an inherent part of the marketing world and continues to be something businesses rely on heavily to engage their customers, demo their products, kick start discussions, interactions, reach out to people and gather leads for their business. A big concern for CMO’s however was the rising costs of organizing and hosting such events and with growing competition from more cost effective online sales leads the effectiveness versus cost of these events was often questioned.

The global recession didn’t help this plight and we saw more cutbacks on large corporate events. Still, a lot of these business events have years of brand building put into them and are still popular among people. In the technology world alone, names like CES, SXSW, CEBIT and other strike a chord with hundreds of thousands and similarly many businesses have managed to host successful events of their own year after year. While marketers don’t see the usefulness of the events fading, there is a greater pressure to drive more results from these efforts and social software may be one of the best solutions yet.

Social networking software platforms tuned into business use can closely work in conjunction with an offline business event like a conference. While these events are organized to bring people and the business together and interact, social software provides a virtual platform to much the same. When used together, that’s when their synergy is really brought out. A webinar with a large software company in the virtualization space brought out some interesting points on how they managed to extend a very popular annual conference of theirs to the online world. Their goal was to take the conference which lasted a few days online so that the discussion and community around it could continue the discussion around their technology area all year round instead of restricting it only to the few days the conference was in session. Another challenge they had was extending the value of the event that was held to others who could not physically make it to the event and the need to expand the community.

By migrating their static conference website to a social networking driven community website fully equipped with collaborative features like wikis, discussion forums, groups, resources, and more, they managed to turn it into a space where attendees as well as those who couldn’t make it to the event could sign in and continue to benefit from the event. Members could log into the community, access content and material distributed during the event, interact with other members in the community, share experiences and knowledge, interact with experts and thought leaders in the field, attend online sessions and really keep the spirit of the event alive all year round.

Some of the takeaways they managed by extending the event website to build a community are:

• Managed to include a member registration process with a detailed member profiling as one would find on social networking sites. This allowed them to profile their customers and partners better and gather more detailed information which is a great resource for sales and marketing.
• Built an online resource for content within their field from all the documents gathered during the conference as well as online sessions, discussions, forums and more which could be used by members much beyond the actual event.
• Were able to hold several expert sessions and online events throughout the year keeping a wider community engaged at a fraction of the cost of a physical event.
• Were able to expand the community and extend the value provided to customers and partners during the event to those who couldn’t make it and drive more traction from the original event.

This example can be extended to just about any business event and highlights what can be achieved by replacing a static event website with a social software enabled one which can help deliver more from a business’s offline event marketing. A simple solution, but one that can take events to a whole new level.

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