Marketing Your Meeting or Event Through Social Media

September 23rd, 2009 by Nadine Burns

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, what do they all have to do with meetings and events? A lot if you know how to use them to drive people to your meetings or events.
Ok, but who has time to be on or maintain all those sites, emails and Tweets?

The key might be to do a bit of market research among your current members or attendees. Why not send out a survey using some of the free survey tools available and ask you members what social media they are using and following? Then concentrate on those areas first.

Look to your board or members to ask if they might help monitor a specific channel of communication to help share the workload. That way you can capitalize on their following and knowledge about that particular form of social media as well.

Lastly learn to use filters, groups or hash tags to tighten the amount of communication that is pertinent to your organizational goals.

And by all means, use EveryMeeting.com to reach most of those outlets with your meeting and event information with each listing with just the click of your mouse.

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Ten Must Do’s When Planning a Meeting

September 23rd, 2009 by Nadine Burns

Whether a meeting is a gathering of Marketing professionals, a local charity board or an group gathered to bounce ideas off one another, there are several key factors, not often mentioned, can make that meeting more productive, and just as important if not moreso, engaging to those attending.

So we have put together 10 tips to think about when putting together a meeting in order to help ensure it’s success. These are not the end all, be all, but I am sure everyone can relate to one or more of these issues missing at the last meeting they have attended.

1. Invite the right people. When setting up a meeting, be sure the people you invite are integral or have an interest in the meeting topic, and give them enough time to properly respond to the meeting.

2. Give potential attendees an agenda or discussion list. A list of topics, speaker bios, objectives all will help invitees to make a better decision about whether or not to attend, and know what to prepare for the meeting so they can add value. That agenda or discussion list would also indicate the method of dress (casual, business attire, formal, etc.) as well as if food or beverages will be provided.

3. Make the venue fit. Everyone has probably attended either a meeting where they were adding more chairs while the speaker was beginning or had a handful of people in an enormous venue. Be sure the venue not only fits the crowd size, but that it reflects the ambiance of the subject matter you wish to cover.

4. Confirm attendees. Review the invitation list regularly between the date the invites are posted and the date of the meeting to insure the appropriate number and quality of individuals will be present to make the meeting beneficial for all.

5. Review the room – even a team meeting can be more affective if the seating is correctly positioned, and this is even more important in larger gatherings. Take a seat in several areas and check to see if you can see the speaker and hear them. Also review the temperature the room should be set at (a bit warmer in the AM, cooler after lunch or a meal.)

6. Start with some basic housekeeping and ground rules to be sure your attendees know you care about their personal well being. You might consider a pre-intro speaker for larger meetings that will outline the safety items in the room, exit doors, how many and what time breaks will take place, if Q & A is allowed during the presentations or should be held until the end, if presentations will be available, if photos are allowed, cell phone ringer reminders and any other messages or rules you would like to convey.

7. Breaks are necessary! Every two hours your meeting should have a break just to give people the chance to attend to lavatory needs, check email, stretch their legs, or to network, since that is one of the most common objectives for most meetings.

8. Be sure speakers are engaging! Nothing is worse than a boring meeting or a speaker who reads their slides. You might also mix engaging speakers in with those less practiced or start with those less practiced to amp up the engagement as you move forward. Be sure all your speakers have practiced and reviewed their materials. Make sure slides have graphics and statements as opposed to paragraphs of text and keep size of items like charts and tables in mind, if they can’t read it, pass it out.

9. Do not allow audience members to hijack the meeting. Keep comments quick and table full audience discussions for afterward or a follow-up meeting.

10. Be sure the attendees know what the next steps are, either as a follow-up contact or even just a thank you. If they spent the time, you owe them results.

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Welcome to EveryMeeting.com

September 23rd, 2009 by Nadine Burns

Any good business idea begins as a solution to a problem. So when we sat on the board of various professional associations and hobby groups the issue we encountered most often was HOW TO MARKET OUR MEETINGS and events.

And our lives are so busy, how do we find the RIGHT professional meetings, charity events or informational seminars that help us as opposed to bore us horribly.

For instance a local chapter of an association wants to attract new members and decides to conduct a meeting about how GREEN tactics are changing their industry, but does not have a huge budget, is composed of members with professional positions other than the association which take priority and they are not the biggest association in the area. To promote their meetings they post it on their website calendar of events, send out emails to past participants, list a mention in the local paper and tell a few people about it. They tend to get about the same number of people as they did for the last meeting, if not less. If someone is new in town and does not know their association exists, but might be interested in the GREEN topic, how do they really find out that this meeting is happening on Thursday about 14 miles away at 6PM?

EveryMeeting simply tries to connect those interested with their topic of interest to meetings and events that target that interest.

We also want to keep the site simple and easy to use, but we want to incorporate as many technologies as we can. So we have enabled meetings to be linked to social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Digg at the click of a mouse.

Originally we wanted people to be able to post meetings for FREE, but our attorney had some issues with that as we want to be sure all meetings are legitimate. So instead we made the cost very low, an annual membership to post as many meetings as an organization wishes (by a single assigned user) is less than the price of a logo’d golf shirt. We will use the proceeds to keep the technology up to date, and to add new features, but most importantly to help market and promote your meetings and events.

We also wanted to help associations and organizations make their meetings more functional, enjoyable and interesting, so we will provide tips from meeting and event professionals to help liven up those meetings.

But first and foremost this site is about YOU, the user. Thank you for entering our community, feel free to kick the tires and tell us what you think, and we will try to incorporate your comments in order to make the site better and delivering upon your needs.

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