10 Tips for Promoting Your Next Event

"Event marketers are used to doing a marketing task and crossing it off their list," says BrightBull director Ricardo Molina. "Social media isn’t like that unfortunately."

Social media takes perseverance to pay off.

Molina offers 10 tips to help you reach the finish line:

1. Start with influencers. Ask them to share their opinions on a topic or discuss what they're reading at the moment.

2. Focus on your audience’s pain. Forget about amassing followers, and focus instead on engaging people by publishing relevant content.

3. Tell a story bigger than your event. Tap into industry trends and news. People will register for your event because your finger's on the pulse.

4. Automate, but don't go on autopilot. Unless you're engaged in online conversations, you're faking it. "Automation can be a great time saver, but unless your technology is enabling you to build better relationships online as well as making your life easier, it's suspect," Molina says.

5. Blog. LinkedIn posts have only hours to work, Tweets only minutes. "Great blog posts deliver traffic for years."

6. Don’t expect influencers to help overnight. Results will take months, and come only if you stay on task.

7. Stick to one voice. Inconsistency detracts. "There's nothing weirder than talking to someone on social media and one day they're all informal and jokey and their next post is like a corporate jargon-athon."

8. Enlist your team. Do more with more. "Even if all they do is retweet or give you a bit of a generic back slap for your content, it all counts."

9. Make social media a habit. "Social media isn't an add on 'seasoning' to an event marketing plan," Molina says. You must make a serious effort.

10. Invite followers. Inform, intrigue, instigate, incent; and eschew all me-talk. "If all you do is go 'me, me, me' it's not going to be the shocker of the century when people stop listening," Molina says.

B2B Becomes B2C. Welcome to Bizarro World.

"Hardly a week goes by without someone saying the worlds of B2B and B2C marketing are converging," Gary Slack wrote recently in this blog.

To picture the two worlds as one, he asks us to imagine a place where municipalities buy equipment on impulse, and manufacturers buy machinery and materials without due diligence.

"Were this all to start happening," Gary says, "pigs would be flying, too. 

"Consumer and business purchasers and purchases are just too different—always have been and always will be."

But what if… just what if, instead of businesses, consumers changed?

In that alternate world:

• All consumers would have split personalities (at least six, called a "team").

• Before every purchase, they would email an inscrutable document to at least 15 suppliers, and demand a response within 10 days.

• All consumers would postpone their purchases until their incomes are certain.

• AdAge would be repackaged as an insert in O, and B2C would collapse into B2B, forming a supercontinent named Omnicom.

Stranger things have happened...

In a pig's eye.

Does the Events Industry Have Any Political Influence?

Michael Hart contributed today's post. He's a business consultant and writer who focuses on the event industry.

Everybody’s heard at least a little bit of the political chatter over restrictions on LGBT people in Georgia and North Carolina lately.

A week or so ago, Georgia’s governor rejected a bill the legislature passed that would have allowed businesses not to serve gay people if it conflicted with their religious beliefs. About the same time, the North Carolina state governor said of a similar bill—this one creating a law about which public restroom people are supposed to use—“Bring it on!”

According to Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau CEO William Pate, the billion-dollar business the events industry brings to Atlanta every year had something to do with the Georgia governor’s decision. In North Carolina, a statement from the High Point Market Executive Committee made it clear customers are already starting to pull out of its event later this month—and North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory isn’t budging.

So, did lobbying on behalf of the events industry make a difference in Georgia, but not North Carolina?

The truth is that it’s hard to know. While those of us who run tradeshows, conventions and conferences feel like we’re pretty important people—especially when we bring a citywide to town—the reality is that, compared to other industries, we’re small change.

But our customers are the real thing. And the fact that companies like Disney and Coca-Cola feel a need to take a political position in order to retain their customers tells you something about how much the way they approach their businesses has changed over the years. They aren’t just merely responding to markets anymore; they’re responding to the sentiments of their customers in ways that go beyond whether they’ll pay a certain price for a certain product.

Nothing in business is as simple as it once was—and that applies to the events industry as well. Yes, there are show organizers who still get away with selling their quota of 10 x 10s every year and creating a lineup of PowerPoint presentations by sponsors that they then call a conference program. But their days are numbered.

As customers in every part of the business world change how they do business, so must event organizers.

Are B2B and B2C Marketing Converging? Hardly.

Gary Slack provided today's post. He is chief experience officer of Chicago-based Slack and Company. Ad Age named the firm as a runner up for B2B Agency of the Year in 2014.

Hardly a week goes by without someone saying the worlds of b2b and b2c marketing are converging.

For this claim to be true, nothing less than the following would have to start happening.

Boeing would have to start buying jet engines on impulse.

Police and fire departments would have to switch to other brands of first-responder radios on mere whims.

Coke would have to start reformulating sodas with new ingredients procured with little or no due diligence.

Of course, were this all to start happening, pigs would be flying, too.

Consumer and business purchasers and purchases are just too different—always have been and always will be.

It’s not that b2b buying is more rational than consumer buying. In fact, it may be more emotion-wracked—the emotion being fear of making a bad decision.

That's why tier 1 suppliers, a la the IBM of old, are so lucky. As the "safe bet,” they get a pass a lot of the time, while lower-tier suppliers have to try harder.

But CEB research shows there can be a more positive emotion involved, too—the pride of making a good decision and the career enhancement it can generate.

In fact, CEB says the personal value of making a good b2b buying decision is twice as great as the business value.

So b2b buyers aren't automatons—they are people, too, as our agency’s ad here explains.

But exaggerated praise, or puffery, the province of so many consumer marketers, won't work with b2b buyers.

With their careers and livelihoods at stake, they need loads of convincing and months and maybe years to take a chance on another supplier.

And that's the extra fun and formidable challenge of much b2b marketing—and why it'll always be very different.

Nunsense

Contrary to Sister Aloysius' teachings, some nonsensical statements can be unimpeachably grammatical.

Your dangling modifier can be ludicrous, yet your statement can be perfectly grammatical, as this Tweet demonstrates:
   

We develop tests for flu and other diseases that help patients.

You can ignore an absolute quality, yet your statement can be perfectly grammatical, as this web ad headline demonstrates:

Transparency you will see.

You can flout a determiner, yet your statement can be perfectly grammatical, as this newspaper headline demonstrates:

One-armed man applauds the kindness of strangers.

Your decision to recast statements like the three above is a matter of judgement, not grammar.

By letting them stand, you risk slowing readers, confusing them, or inviting them to think you're a dope.

But you don't deserve Sister's wrath.

NOTE: The examples you have just seen are true. The names have been withheld to protect the innocent. For more examples, read the final chapter of Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style.