AM: Of all the social media tools and resources out there, which are being used most effectively for conferences? Should you do everything — LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and blogs — to try to meet your members/attendees where they like to hang out, or do you pick one or two media and concentrate on those?

GRANT: It's always a good plan to meet your members and attendees where they hang out. This is where the listening piece is so important. We usually start with the big three: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Find out if your members are using one or more of these, and concentrate on them. LinkedIn and Facebook can be really useful for organizing groups before and after a conference, but in our experience Twitter is by far the most popular social site for on-site engagement by virtue of its ease of use with mobile devices and its quick-fire, real-time communication method.

DREYER: Another strategy is to choose a tool that lends itself especially well to the type of content you are capturing on site. If your members love photos, you might want to try Flickr. If your presenters love PowerPoint, Slideshare might be a good place to explore. If you are able to capture short videos of speakers, YouTube is a natural fit. All three of these tools are easy to share in blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or anywhere else your members might be.

We've only talked about outposts (social sites hosted by third-parties). Associations also have a lot of good options for their home base — everything from an event or association blog to a full-featured online community hosted on your organization's Web site. Outpost strategy and home-base strategy can work in conjunction. Generally speaking, it's easier to build a presence in outposts where your members already are, and then work to pull those members back to your home base.

AM: Once you've built it, how do you get your attendees to use it?

DREYER: It's a Catch-22, isn't it? If no one is there, no one will come. This is especially challenging with groups who choose to invest in their own online community, where the temptation is to pre-populate the space with the entire member directory, forgetting that a database record is not nearly as interesting as an actual person using the tool. There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Some groups have members and attendees who have been begging their association to build it. Even in that case, you need to start small and good. Get the most excited members to give you feedback or beta test your new tools. As interaction in the community grows, you can start to scale it by bringing in more people.

GRANT: You also need to manage expectations. Keep in mind that participation in online social spaces follows the 1:9:90 rule: 1 percent creates content; 9 percent interacts with that content through commenting, sharing, rating, or reviewing it; 90 percent are spectators. That's normal and quite healthy. The trick is to manage your social spaces in a way that makes it easy for people to move from spectator to commenter to creator.

AM: How can you tell if your social media strategy is working?

DREYER: There are so many ways to measure social media, but it's difficult to actually measure results. That's why it's important to define measurable objectives that your social media efforts can reasonably impact. For example, increased attendance could come from any number of sources. Increased online mentions of your event, on the other hand, are much more measurable and very likely to come from your social media work. If the mentions are positive and other factors (economy, location, health of the industry) cooperate, you'll see an increase in attendance as a byproduct of the buzz.

GRANT: At first, measure what's easy, like your number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers, and keep track of anecdotal evidence and feedback from members. You'll get a sense for whether it's working or not, based on the energy you see in your social spaces. As you get more comfortable with social media and begin to understand more about what it can do for you, you can delve into more meaningful metrics. Just remember to measure what you need to know in order to see if you are successful! Align the metrics with your objectives and use that information to try different things, or to prioritize projects that are going really well.

Sidebar #1: How Do Associations Use Social Media for Meetings?

80% of respondents use some type of free social network

35% have a custom-built social network system

19% have a social-network site for their conferences

60% offer wireless Internet access at their largest events

The top three benefits from a conference-based social network:

1: To create pre-event interest and enthusiasm

2: To facilitate interaction among conference participants

3: To increase attendance

Source: July 2009 survey by Omnipress of 325 associations on how they use social media for meetings

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