Twitter can help you communicate with prospective attendees in several key ways. First, anyone who agrees to “follow” your event on Twitter will receive any message you send. It's like an instant message to all of your prospects. You can also have your blog posts automatically announced to your Twitter followers every time you update your blog. To respond to questions and support issues, you can establish a Twitter account as a help line for prospective attendees who have questions about your event. H&R Block, Zappos, and Comcast have also achieved successful results by allowing customers to send inquiries to them via Twitter, getting back to them with answers within minutes.

Keep in mind that communication is a two-way street. Asking for content suggestions, feedback, and comments can engage prospective attendees and improve conversation as well as reduce attrition.

Attendees will naturally communicate with each other about the event. These conversations are open to the public when they happen on Twitter and Facebook. During a typical event, social networks facilitate the obvious networking conversations as well as open topic discussions, brainstorming, collaboration, and scheduling. Twitter has been used successfully at events as a method of communication to, from, and between attendees. EMC, for example, set up a Twitter account for their EMC World conference and established a special tag that, when placed in a Twitter message, helped people filter out just the event-related messages and view them in chronological order. This stream of conversations coming from the event helped attendees stay in touch, allowed attendee wannabes to keep in touch with the event, and helped prospective attendees evaluate the pulse of the event as they made their decision whether or not to go.

Let Them Co-Create

Attendees are increasingly interested in creating content in the forms of video, photos, blog posts, and comments. Find ways to encourage this user-generated content and leverage it for greater viral reach. Event organizers must make certain that wireless Internet access is readily available, and many event organizers have gotten into the habit of seating bloggers at prestigious front-row tables at general sessions.

User-generated content will have a greater ability to attract future attendees if they can find it easily. Consider asking attendees to use consistent tags and, where possible, provide ways for attendees to post their content to the official event Web site, network, or network space. Macworld, for example, used a social network built on the Ning platform to allow attendees to network with each other, write their own blogs, and upload images and videos. Other events choose to build their own social media site so they can better control the user experience and data connectivity.

People are talking about your event, your association, and your brand. Find them and join the conversation. Once you find where your prospective attendees hang out, set up shop there. Social media marketing is fairly complex due to the sheer number of networks out there, but the effort required to build a presence and maintain it on each site is very low. Building these channels will pay year-to-year dividends in awareness, membership, and a growing pool of people ready to hear about your next event.

Rob Larsen is senior front-end developer, social media specialist; and Rob Everton is creative technology director, both with digital marketing and events agency Cramer. For more, check out their blogs: Larsen's can be found at roblarsen.org/blog, and Everton's Cramer's Marketing Technology Blog is at www.crameronline.com.

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