Marketing

The website called Plurk is as quirky and eccentric as its name. Its tagline “your life, on the line” is definitely tongue-in-cheek as if offers to publish all your thoughts without censure and allows you to share your experiences with fellow plurkers. However, it favors brevity as it requires you to be concise by the limiting of each message to less than 140 characters. But as a plus it also allows you to share videos and send messages to mobile phones as well.

It is one of those social networking sites that is bound to make the event marketers and event managers thank their lucky stars. Through Plurk, a person can not only keep in touch with family and friends but also find and make new contacts, which is what social networking is all about. From marketing perspective, it means opening of innumerable doors and reaching people who otherwise would be inaccessible. Who needs grapevine and jungle drums when they can plurk.

As it has support for Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket etc., any marketing done on Plurk is sure to go places. Marketing through videos can become a whole new ballgame and building pre-event hype can be a whole lot quicker and extensive by using Plurk and all that it has to offer.

You can plurk links to your website or to a site especially built to promote an event. Using the private messaging system, marketers can send special notes or invites to important players.

Plurk allows you to share messages with the whole wide world or just a select circle, so event managers can send info to the general public or only to related groups as the event demands. It can help the managers perform better by keeping them on their toes as they will need to keep the information current. The feedback gained from post-event plurks can be very helpful in gauging the success of an event.

A few basic problems of Plurk should also get a mention here. As more people come online, it slows down due to the load. It doesn’t have the option of having multiple conversations simultaneously. However, these issues can’t mar Plurk’s huge potential as a social networking site through which business and marketing opportunities can be expanded to new horizons. It will allow event managers to feed in all that is hip and happening to the public the very minute it happens through internet and the even speedier mobile messaging so happy plurking!

Social Media Strategies

After opening up to the public, it seems Yahoo Buzz has been able to generate quite some traction around the product. To me, the six month wait was rather disappointing in the sense that they didn’t blow me away with anything innovative. So far, it seems to be at par with Digg, Propeller and others of their like.

In Yahoo Buzz any one can submit their interesting story to a link and have an opportunity to get buzzed by the Yahoo community. The stories are arranged by category and is very similar to the concept of digging. Stories on that topic will get an extra boost in the rankings. You can also discover most remarkable story or video or can share it with other social networks.

Is there anything different that they’re doing? If you’ve benefited from regular traffic spikes through Buzz, share your stories with us.

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When I read this in upcoming.yahoo.com I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“You see someone you are attracted to on the other side of the restaurant. You want to approach that person but what do you say? Now its all about a simple click and hello. At our mixer, EVERYONE will have a device with their personality embedded in it. You approach someone you want to meet, press a button and point it to each other. The next thing you know is you are talking! Great ice breaker.”

No, really!. They claim to have an audience comprising of late 20s to early 40s. A mature age. An age when starting conversations or breaking ice isn’t always such a big issue. Or is it?

Even if it is, two valid issues:

1- the idea of pointing devices at people at a real event in the real world, and waiting for them to quickly read your “profile” and then decide how to react to your introduction is rather silly. This can work in virtual worlds, but not in real life - not in this way atleast. Perhaps they could have built devices that track people of similar interest for you - that would’ve worked better.

2- “device with personality embedded in it.” - Um, your entire personality embedded on a tiny screen that people can read from afar? Are we really that shallow?

Its good to see that people are trying to bring technology and social media into their events, but its not always so interesting to see how they fail to bring the right value out of it.

No offence to any excited attendees.

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I was discussing with a colleague about how wedding planning has changed from what it used to be in the old days. Social media has changed the event planning landscape so much, that gone are the days when planning a wedding took months and arrangements were a headache with everybody on tenterhooks praying for everything to go without a hitch. Now all this can be done by a click; well a number of clicks to be exact but from the comfort of your home without you ever stepping out of it.

WedDepot:

I came across some interesting web 2.0 websites that were specifically designed for people who are planning their special days. WedDepot offers everything from pre-wedding events to honeymoon arrangements, in fact, even to a newly-wedded couple’s first home. It is a comprehensive website with a sassy interface and a large number of options to attract interest of even the most hardened bachelors. It is definitely a microcosm of the macrocosm as it brings together all wedding-related topics under the sun and presents them as a neatly wrapped up wedding present.

On one hand it discusses frivolous matters like: dove release, fireworks and ice sculpting, but it also means business as it offers tools like a wedding checklist and budget calculator.

WedDepot is a good way to get started with wedding management plans. It offers articles, photo galleries and info on bridal shows and wedding expos. It provides a list of vendor options for each subject, be it invitations, jewelry or the wedding dress. The portfolios of all these professionals are available and one can pick and choose to one’s own taste and convenience. It is also open to new entrepreneurs who are interested in getting their business listed.

This gives an opportunity to buy and sell stuff ranging from stationery to cake toppers. It even tells how to build a free wedding website.

MomentVille:

The topic of wedding websites brings me to another site called MomentVille. It provides a platform for building a wedding website in just three simple steps. It is attractive because not only is it free but also has no expiry date. It offers several different themes to choose from and a person can upload videos, slideshows and music along with photographs. The user can share the joy of his/her happy day with friends who can subscribe to the website and receive an email anytime the site is updated. It also lists several vendors for all sorts of wedding-related finery like invites, jewelry, shoes and even for cruises and hotels.

How Event Marketers can make the best of this trend:

All this bodes of a new world in which everything can be done if you have a computer and access to internet. You now have professionals who are willing to offer their expertise and skill to help you. Event marketers and event managers can use websites like WedDepot and MomentVille to maximum advantage. Marketing of wedding-related events like bridal fashion shows, jewelry exhibitions, opening of a new beauty salon, re-vamping of an accessories shop through such websites is sure to be a hit and is guaranteed to attract serious buyers. These two websites provide all the basic guidelines to any event marketer and manager on how to go about their business thoroughly. They show that everything needs to be well thought-out if they want to be taken seriously. All areas need to be covered and no stone is to be left unturned if an event is to go smoothly without any pre-wedding jitters.

It’s also a great way to get access to potential clients. If you can openly demonstrate your marketing services via these channels, then a lot of serious clientele can get access to you for planning their weddings. You can also get a chance to add these people up in your contact lists.

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Yes - so we’ve all seen youtube and other such websites make it big in the online world. A good search engine for files was inevitable and it was only a matter of time before someone launched it.

Our businesses require active research, and often times it requires alot of file transfers, downloads and exchanges. These files are from multimedia files to content, PDFs, podcasts and so on. FilesTube’s slogan “Download Everything” pretty much sums up what they have to offer.

So all of you who have to research often and find themselves on Google invariably most of the day, can bookmark this site for their daily site-visiting as well. Its good. Its fast. And it offers a whole bunch of things for downloading that we’d have difficult finding elsewhere.

This is especially good for event managers who want to upload videos of their events for other people to view and download. Great stuff!

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Seth Godin is the author of six bestsellers, including Permission Marketing, an Amazon Top 100 bestseller for a year and a Fortune Best Business Book. His newest book, All Marketers are Liars , has already made the Amazon Top 100 and has inspired its own blog.

Tags: sethgodin, google, all marketers are liars

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I’ve been covering a lot of web 2.0 sites recently - not because of any other reason then the fact that I’ve been checking them out myself. Whenever I come across something that I find interesting, I like to share it with you guys so that you can look at it as well. We have another blog running in the parallel at eventslisted.info called The Event Launch Guidelines. We share different resources, tools and tricks for levering social media in the event launch process.

Sosius is basically an online workplace for your team. It offers great storage and security for your content and discussions so that nothing between the creaks and is properly secured. You can access and work on your important files from anywhere in the world (and from any PC). This is great for people on the go.

Whats more is that Sosius has been built from the ground up using an open architecture and includes a powerful API to allow you to extend and customize the interface as well. If you really want to use it as away to manage your team, then you can get some tech people to customize it around your existing workflows.

Event management requires a lot of planning and collaboration. Often times the team isn’t always in the same physical space and we have to resort to emails and phonecalls. The issue with that is that the information becomes too spreadout to be accessed or referred to later on, and risks not having the team on the same page w.r.t your work expectations.

Sosius has been designed to solve these very problems and is thus quite a life-saver in many regards. I would encourage all event managers and promoters to atlease check it out for themselves to see if their teams can benefit from it.

You can set up a free Sosius account with 200 MB space.

Social Media Strategies

(image source: camerahobby.com)

Events don’t just end there - often times the post-event phase is the most active part for the audiences. “Did you know that..?”, “And this happened..” “It was so cool..”. Fact is, you’ll be launching more events later on, so this post-event activity is important for your business. Its at this point that most event planners get a chance to breathe and feel a natural high. The buzz and excitement doesn’t end there, it amplifies.

One small but important strategy is to use photos of the event. Tag all of the names in the photos that you know and add them to different photo sharing sites such as flickr and photobucket. When people discover their own photos of those of their friends, they will feel a bond with your event’s brand as well. They will feel important.

Secondly, add photos to your event pages that people can come back for and discuss. Have interactive sessions on votings for coolest/lamest/funniest photos. Get a fashion expert to run a commentary on the best dressed people in the event. Photo sharing helps people bond together. If you can create the right emotions in them whenever they think back about your event, chances are they will come again to your next event and will probably also get some other friends along.

Another great tool designed specifically for events is Pictoma. It allows you to create events by filling out a form and share pictures against the event with the attendees/friends. Others can add pictures against that event as well. They can also order online albums or printouts of the photos. Another similar site, Pix-Yu, allows you to add photos against an event, share it across multiple social networking sites and get paid for the number of times your pictures are viewed.

If you had an event page in facebook, then you can directly add the photos to Facebook without having to upload on other photo sharing sites. However, if you want to increase the outreach of the photos then use PictureSync to send the photos to different photo sharing sites in one single step. These sites have made it incredibly simple to share pictures with your audiences and prospective customers. People love sharing and spreading things that they like to their friends, so if your photos catch their fancy, chances are you’ll get some nice spreading around as well. A lot of people search for photos online. Make sure you tag your photos properly so that they are easy to find based on your desired keywords.

If your photos are location based, e.g. an event in Austin, TX, then use the geotagging tool to get the map and location of the event as well. In popular events like the CES shows, people often take photos from their cameras and phones and upload them immediately (during the event) to their blogs and to content sharing sites. Imagine if people were putting pictures of your event online while it is going on - imagine them twittering about it to their friends who couldn’t make it. Imagine what impact this would have on your event’s brand.

Its all possible if you can manage to create the right kind of buzz. Later on, you can also create fancy mashups and slideshows from the event pictures. If you put them together in a nice, melodic, emotional (or funny) way, those slideshows may actually spread virally. Who knows? And if they do, imagine what kinds of traffic will be directed to your event pages or website. Its not impossible. Its just a single tool used wisely.

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Social Media Strategies

There is a marketing strategy that is often used around us and can be incredibly effective if executed properly. First build trust, credibility and reputation with your lists of prospects using social media networking sites like facebook, linkedin and others of their like. Blogging is also a great tool for communicating with the audiences and telling them your perspective on things. Through your blog, you can give them free content, information and tips up to a point where they feel enlightened. If you are marketing an event, you give them enough information about what to do without diving into how to do it.

When they learn something from you that they didn’t quite know about, they will invariably look up to you and follow you. Once you have their trust you can up-sell them a course on the ‘how to go about it’ part. If they are sure that you are indeed someone who knows what you’re talking about, they will be less hesitant in doubting your abilities. And you should be knowledgeable in whatever it is that you’re selling - you can’t and shouldn’t ever risk losing your customers by fooling them into buying below-par material from you.

If done well, you can even get them onto an expensive subscription course or seminar that steps them through executing what needs to be done. All of these are revolving door strategies of relaunches that we have discussed earlier in our Launch strategies blog here. Business is about getting the most out of your products, services or events, so why wait around? Social media is a powerful tool in our hands that shouldn’t be put to waste. Can you think of innovative ways of marketing your events online using Facebook? How about Twitter? Think about it.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in a world where everyone coexists as a social tribe? Thats the internet for you. Have you ever wondered how online networks often represent the tiniest niches and topic areas that you never even thought existed? Have you ever wondered how amazing it is to be able to say something, and be heard (or read) all over the world through the internet in less than a second?

If social commentary is about the cream rising to the top, allowing early adopters and thought leaders to lead groups who still lead their tribes in a self regulated filtering manner. What kind of a tribal system would this be? Now, not everyone in society is web savvy enough to exploit what is already happening, so the changes social media has upon us may not be as apparent to some as they are to others.

BUT I have always wondered how the future of social media will take shape? How will things turn around this time? Will they be any different from what they have already achieved so far. What happens when my small kids grow into adults and each of them have been trained onto the internet as kids so the entire population lives like this. What implications would this have for event managers or promoters? Should you start working on strategies of promoting virtual events on second life? What will it do to the traditional education process? Who will we listen to? Do industries continue to become less valuable by spending per capital whilst companies who best harness new technology & their ability to process information (Google) continue to get richer?

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Why do some marketers still shy away from social networks?

Its funny how things can take such a flip turn in just a few years. I have seen how marketing concepts have transitioned along with the evolving internet. The greatest difference in the emergence of social media as a marketing medium is that 5-10 years ago marketers would be the ones with the lists. Marketing would be a one-way communication of messages from companies to consumers. They would work off a database of customers to find ways of penetrating them. TVCs, Radio Ads, Publications, Direct mail, Cold calling etc were all a core part of all marketing activities. The impact of the Ads was difficult to gauge.

Google search engines have turned the hunted into the hunters. Consumers now work off a list of merchants or providers and through a substantial supply of information to choose from. They decide who to listen to, trust and buy from. They are more empowered and in many ways less gullible. More access to information makes them wiser and better decision-makers.

This information gets to them via search engines and community based platforms. Search engines run algorithms to parse through information and show it to the consumers. On the other hand, community based platforms are enabled by elements of social interaction. Humans (not machines) filter content based on preferences and popularity. It is us who sort the information to protect our networks from poor choices.

Its the hunted who now have the power - the merchants must win over the prey if they want the prey to endorse whatever they are peddling & invite their social network to embrace it. To some naive marketers these facts represent a nightmare, which it is not. If you use social media effectively and not for spamming, a marketers cost of sales can drop considerably. Not only that, we now have the power to leverage mob-effects, community shifts, emotional linkages - all using simple social networking strategies.

If you are event marketers or promoters you can now directly interact with your audiences and get a direct feel for their thoughts and opinions. You can get early feedback. You can involve them in planning the different dynamics of the event. You can create groups and communities around your event to help build hype and excitement. You can let evangelists and fans promote your event for you. You can allow your prospective audiences to blog about your event. You can enable live twittering at the event. You can allow them to share photos of the after its over to build lasting memories and nostalgia.

Get creative.

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