How viral marketing
promotes meetings
by Michael J. Shapiro
Photograph:
Breton Littlehales - June 1, 2010
A successful viral marketing
campaign was really a necessity for Buzz2009, a daylong event held last
July for association executives. The conference was about social media
for associations and featured a roundtable discussion about "creating an
environment for viral marketing success." Naturally, the event's
organizers, association newsletter publisher SmartBrief and social media
advisers SocialFish, were under pressure to demonstrate their own
expertise.
Using a word-of-mouth approach through select social
media channels, the buzz on Buzz2009 went viral extremely quickly. As a
result, the face-to-face event, limited to 80 attendees in Washington,
D.C., sold out in a few weeks; an additional 5,000 people attended the
roundtable discussion virtually. And all this was accomplished with less
than two months to market the event.
"It was a serious blitz,"
says Rob Birgfeld, a director at Washington, D.C.-based SmartBrief and
one of the principal organizers of the event. "We were deciding whether
or not we were going to do this, and then the second we signed up for
the location space, we had all systems go. It was an incredibly quick
turnaround."
Much of the marketing for Buzz2009 was accomplished
via blogs -- on the Buzz2009
site, as well as via the organizers' respective blogs, SmartBlog on Social Media and the SocialFish Blog. Even after the
event sold out, the organizers continued to build the chatter around
Buzz by offering a few scholarships for the conference; interested
parties filed their "applications" via blog posts of their own,
explaining why they were deserving of a scholarship. The most creative
entries were reposted and linked to other blogs, increasing the viral
nature of the show's publicity.
Of particular importance to the
viral steam of the event was the name recognition of the speakers,
well-known experts in viral and word-of-mouth marketing. The keynote was
delivered by Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How
Smart Companies Get People Talking. The roundtable discussion
featured sought-after luminaries such as Guy Kawasaki from the site AllTop.com and National
Geographic's Brendan Hart. Because these and other star presenters
already were widely read online, word spread rapidly among readers that
their presentations could be attended virtually. The buzz continued to
build right up until the event: According to Birgfeld, nearly 2,000 of
the people who attended virtually had registered that morning.
Goal tending Any group could potentially
harness the power of viral marketing. "Just like you would with
meetings, start with your strategy," advises Jeff Hurt, Dallas-based
director of education and engagement for the meetings-industry
consulting firm Velvet Chainsaw. "What is your intent? Why are you doing
this? Just because it's popular online right now doesn't mean you
should embrace it and run."
You may want to increase the buzz
around an event, or increase registration; those are distinct goals.
"Think about traditional PR methods, when you count how many times the
press has mentioned your event, how many eyeballs have seen it," Hurt
points out. "It isn't necessarily to drive people to come to the event;
it could be to drive home some of the messages of the event, or just to
let the outside world know, for instance, that face-to-face meetings
matter." Gauging the success of any venture, of course, requires first
clearly defining the objectives.
The next step is to determine
where the potential audience hangs out, suggests Michael McCurry, CMP,
Chicago-based strategic account manager for event-services firm
Experient. "Sending out a bunch of messaging to all the social
technologies to see what gets a response might not have a whole lot of
legs to it," he says. "If you're an association, for instance, take a
look at where your members hang out. Is it on Facebook, Twitter or
LinkedIn? Where do people convene? What's their community?"
Targeting
the proper communities helps you make the most of these platforms. "One
of the beauties of social media is the ability to leverage --
particularly in Twitter -- the follower path," says McCurry, who has
nearly 13,000 followers on Twitter. If he sends a tweet about an event
he deems worthwhile, and just 10 percent of his followers find that
information to be valuable, "that's 1,300 people who might turn around
and retweet to their followers, or post to a Facebook page," McCurry
notes. The chain of events is set in motion for the post, or the
information, to be spread virally. Such is the nature of social media.
Initial outreach "It's very difficult to tell
what's going to be viral," points out Jeff Hurt. "There's not a
scientific method to it yet." Even so, he adds, a number of approaches
have proven to be effective in his experience.
For example, Hurt
says, "one of the easiest things to do is to encourage people you have
already secured -- speakers, important figures within the organization
-- to help create some of the viral content." They might record
something brief on a webcam, for instance, or on a Flip camera; the
message doesn't need to be longer than 30 or 60 seconds.
At that
point, suggests Hurt, inexpensive, easy-to-use tools can be used to put
together a slick video. It doesn't need to be fancy -- Hurt suggests
Apple Keynote, with which you can add music and graphics, or Animoto, a
free web-based application that creates music videos from a collection
of still photos or video clips. Hurt used this tool often for the
gatherings he planned for his previous employer, the National
Association of Dental Plans. "We found that our attendees liked that
kind of stuff. It was very appealing and eye-catching, and you could end
the video with your web address for the conference site. We'd also
publish the video on YouTube and then embed it in our conference blog,
along with a link to register."
In terms of creating buzz and
excitement about the brand, Hurt adds, it's just as effective to produce
such videos after, or even during, the event. "People like to see
themselves, and it's a great marketing piece that you could use for
another year," he says. And once posted on the conference site and
YouTube, attendees can easily share through other sites like Facebook
and LinkedIn.
Strategic distribution
Keep in mind that these sites are merely channels of distribution.
Ultimately, a strategically developed message and campaign is a
necessity. "Don't mistake leveraging social media or social networking
as a strategy," advises Louise M. Felsher, CMP, CMM, event marketing
consultant for San Carlos, Calif.-based Ellipses Strategic Marketing.
"This is a very common mistake. It's like getting a gym membership and
thinking by just having one you will become fit."
Felsher
describes the diligently thought-out approach she recently used to
market events for a family winery.
• Careful wording. Felsher
used specific words in public event postings and online ads that she
knew were likely to show up in common searches.
•
Targeted
locations. Ads were placed where they would find the largest
potential audience.
• Personal narratives. Ad
copy told
compelling stories, aspects of which were picked up by several food and
wine writers and bloggers.
• Photos. Pictures,
like one
showing the vintner's family dog greeting
visitors against a
backdrop of wine barrels, helped to convey the unique, personal
atmosphere of the winery.
"The links to the story and photo were
tweeted and retweeted and appeared all over the foodie and vinophile
sites," Felsher says. "Our postevent metrics showed that this viral
marketing actually tripled our attendance."
Felsher emphasizes
that the content and wording of the original posts and ads were crucial
to the program's eventual success. "You really have to leverage
technique and put forth effort for social media to have relevance to a
viral marketing campaign," she says.
Tweaking
for next time The structure of Buzz2010 will be slightly
different, says Birgfeld, though the marketing approach will be similar.
Instead of a daylong event, Buzz2010 will consist of three morning
events, one each in June, July and August. Because the topics will be
more association-specific than last year's viral-marketing roundtable,
and because the events will begin at 7 a.m. Eastern time, the online
component will likely not be live, but a recorded and edited webcast to
be made available later.
One new initiative this year is to
simultaneously build buzz and develop content by posting questions in
advance to attendees through sites like LinkedIn and Twitter. According
to Birgfeld, "We'll say, ‘we're putting on this event, we're going to
have this person in the room and we're going to be covering this
subject. What questions would you like to ask? What would you like to
see us touch on?' We'll be utilizing a lot of different networks and a
lot of different platforms. I think that's going to yield some very
interesting results."
As of the beginning of May, almost no
marketing at all had been done for Buzz2010. Yet, according to Birgfeld,
the demand is already there. "We are looking at significant sales and
quick sellouts as a result of the buzz that was generated from 2009," he
notes.
The success of last year's viral campaign, combined with
the exclusivity that resulted from the quick sellout, appears to have
built significant momentum for this year's event. Birgfeld mentions a
brief tweet he sent in late April, merely telling followers to be on the
lookout for coming details about Buzz2010. "People were retweeting it,"
he reports, "and they were like, ‘Yes, I'm ready!'"
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