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SOCIAL NETWORKING
 We’re considering using Web 2.0 social networking to promote our annual face-to-face event for customers and prospects. But we’re hesitating for a few reasons. First, budgets are tight right now, so we don’t have a lot of time and money available to launch this initiative. Second, we’ve seen a lot of event blogs and online communities out there, but the majority of them seem to be populated by event managers themselves and exhibit little evidence of much customer participation. Does anyone have advice on how to establish a successful Web 2.0 presence — preferably on the cheap?
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CONNECTING THE DOTS CAN SAVE YOU MONEY
I lead a group called Microsoft Across America, which is the everyday “face” of Microsoft Corp. My group alone organizes 1,200 live events per year, as well as an additional 1,800 events that we work on with outside business partners who are part of our overall sales ecosystem.
Approximately three years ago, we began shifting our marketing mix away from more expensive channels (like direct mail) to less costly Web 2.0 technologies, such as Webcasts and blogs. The results thus far have been tremendous. Cost per customer touch, for example, has decreased by more than 200 percent. And overall, the changes we made have brought approximately $300,000 in savings directly back to our bottom line. More importantly, our strategy is helping us to strengthen relationships with key customers and prospects. How did we do it? Here are two tips for success:
 Create a connected experience. Many people make the mistake of assuming that Web 2.0 is totally different than traditional event marketing, so they treat it as a separate vehicle. But to be successful, Web 2.0 has to be integrated into your overall marketing mix, or your branding and messaging will become skewed. We approach Web 2.0 as a continuum, which means that everything we do, both online and off, is related and connected.
If we hold a face-to-face event, we conduct a follow-up Webcast that supports the information we conveyed during the face-to-face event, but goes deeper into certain content areas that are more suitable for a Webcast format. Then, when we write a blog, we extend the message conveyed at our face-to-face event and our Webcast, but communicate it in a slightly different way.
For example, when we produce a Webcast on Microsoft’s Office Communications Server, we might focus on best practices for deployment that help our customers save money. Then, when we write a blog posting, we try to maintain consistency in our content and messaging, but extend the initial conversation by adding more detail, offering opinions, and asking for customer feedback.
Set objectives and measure results. Getting 20 people to visit a Web site or attend a Webcast is not a measure of success. Yet, I run across four to five examples each week where an event marketer is celebrating the fact that he has 20 eyes looking at his or her content. The problem is defining how 20 people looking at your content fits in to your overall event objectives.
There’s a simple solution here, and that is to establish consistent metrics upfront that are tied to the business and are consistently maintained for both your offline and online events. For our team, the metrics that matter most are revenue and customer satisfaction. So, when we launched Web 2.0 as part of our marketing mix, we set up systems and processes that would allow us to extract and report out those data points. To track revenue, for example, we instituted a standardized registration process that is consistent across our online and offline events. To measure our contributions to customer satisfaction, we instituted a standardized evaluation piece on the back end of all our online and offline events that requires customers to rate the event or Webcast and indicate whether they would like us to follow up with them at a later time.
All question fields on the registration form and the event evaluation are aligned to fields in our company-wide CRM database. This allows us to track what our customers and prospects do over time to better understand the extent to which our events played a role in their purchasing decisions and impacted their overall satisfaction with Microsoft and our products.
 Rodney Clark,
general manager, Microsoft
Corp., Seattle
START SMALL; THEN GROW FROM THERE
If budget is an issue, start small by actively listening to and participating in the conversation. Discover what your prospects and customers feel is important by tracking what is being said about your industry, events, and company in the blogosphere and on relevant social networks such as Twitter. Then, contribute useful content via comments on blogs, bulletin boards, and social networks.
Once you thoroughly understand the social-media landscape, concentrate your efforts on one or two social-media initiatives until you understand what’s required. For example, if you want to use social media tools to drive sales for a trade show when travel budgets are limited, consider creating online experiences that deliver similar content to engage your audience and motivate them to interact with your firm. This could entail a sponsored or paid Webinar or a series of downloadable videos that give your company a human voice and presence.
Alternatively, let others do some of the work for you. For example, instead of creating a show blog, do an outreach to key bloggers in your industry and invite them to attend your event for free. Many shows go so far as to set up special tables equipped with electrical and Internet connections for bloggers. An added bonus? Your customers and prospects are more likely to listen to a credible “outside expert” than to your company’s representative.
These are just a few suggestions to get started with Web 2.0, but you should know that there are no shortcuts. One of the biggest mistakes that event marketers who are new to social media often make is not providing related support for these strategies, and not having upper-level management involved in the process.
 Heidi Cohen,
president, Riverside Marketing
Strategies, New York
IT'S A FULL-TIME JOB
One of the biggest lessons I learned while organizing Going Solo 2008, a one-day educational conference for freelancers and small-business owners in the Internet industry and beyond, is that promoting an event through social media requires a huge amount of time and energy. I’ve been blogging and advising clients about the effective use of social media for more than eight years, and even I was astounded by how much time it took me when I sat down to do it.
To promote Going Solo, I created a blog and a Twitter account. I set up a newsletter. Basically, I went anywhere and everywhere where people were online. Anywhere I could create an event listing, I created an event listing, and anywhere I could create a group — be it a blog, a forum, or a chat room — I created a group.
Then, I sent out personalized one-to-one messages to everyone in my network using e-mail, instant messaging, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other platforms. Next, I composed a rather neutral e-mail explaining what Going Solo was about and whom it was for, and provided links to more information and a “call to action.” I sent this impersonal text to various people I knew, with a personalized introduction asking them if they knew anybody who would be interested in receiving information about the event, and a plea to forward the message to those people.
There is so much talk about the fact that social media allows things to spread virally that I think many people expect it to happen all by itself and become disappointed when it doesn’t. But the fact is that Web 2.0 is a lot of hard work. Getting online communities to grow, getting people to talk, and getting my friends to mention Going Solo to their friends required a lot of one-on-one communication and personal follow-up. Done well, it’s really a full-time job, even for someone like me who is already well connected in the online world.
 Stephanie Booth,
independent Web consultant,
Lausanne, Switzerland
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