A Better Conference Experience with an Online Event Community Webinar

Join me on September 30th as I makes a case how conference-focused communities improve an attendees' experience and their overall satisfaction with the event. I will talk about current event challenges and how to leverage LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to your advantage, instead of allowing them to fragment your attendees across many platforms. Plus, you'll get a sneak peak at our Conference 2.0 event solution.

New Sheriff in Town Part 2 of 3

There's a new way of servicing attendees:
* Facilitating interaction of/with all conference participants, before during and after the conference.
* Helping people network before the conference, solving the "wallflower" syndrome
* Making better use of time at the conference, and learning more
* Extending the conference to months before and after the conference dates.
* Acknowledging the need to give more value to sponsors/ better ROI
* Providing social tools and handouts, education and learning under one roof

Attendee Satisfaction Make higher quality connections with the right people before, during and after the event Meet more people Able to contribute ideas, knowledge and resources to the topics being presented by speakers Single place that aggregates handouts, social media and networking

Your Benefit Increased renewals Increased referrals

Social Media Marketing Attendees can tweet links to profiles Aggregates blogs and tweets Part of your social media marketing plan

Your Benefit Increased awareness Increased attendance Earlier registrations

Sponsorship Satisfaction Improved exposure to engaged community New marketing channel to reach their audience Easier to engage with attendees

Your Benefit Increased package sales Higher-tiered sales

Conference Wallflowers Part 1 of 3

I love going to conferences. I love the fancy foods, traveling to new places, and meeting cool people. What I don't like about conferences is getting to networking receptions a bit late where people are already talking, and I feel I'm butting in.

I'm no introvert, but if anybody says they don't feel awkward at a networking social...they're lying. I also feel like I didn't get to talk to enough people.

This is the old way of experiencing meetings and conferences. I'm tired of it.

Thankfully, conference organizers are becoming more and more aware of the old way of doing things:

• One way education
• Not being able to connect with other attendees
• No interaction with the speakers
• Not meeting the "right" people (hey, for spending $1500 to attend a conference, amongst 1000 people I need to be choosy!)
• Great ideas in the hallway and after sessions are lost forever
• The conference is only a 3 day experience.
• Relying on social media tools that only serve to fragment information across web 2.o.