Events V Digital Media

“There are very few live events that people now attend without wanting to document the experience in social media.” From small scale celebrations to global events it seems just as important to document being at it rather than just being at it. Some claim that our event experiences are being diminished as people care more about capturing the moment on their camera rather than living in the moment. This is not being helped any by the large increase in smart phones, people can reach all there social media sites from virually anywhere with the click of a button. This can also hugely affect the popularity of future events as it is so easy to inform the world on how good/bad the event is which may put people off going.

Oxegen 2011

“One such event that took place in Ireland in July 2011 was Oxegen. An annual music festival held at Punchestown Racecourse in County Kildare, Oxegen has grown to become one of the biggest music festivals in Europe, winning the Best European Festival Line Up at the European Festival Awards in 2011.”

O’Leary Analytics has analysed more than 34,000 mentions of the festival across the social media spectrum during a 12 day period – from July 1st to July 12th. It covers the build up the event, the weekend itself and the reaction in the days after. We also examined the activity of the almost 200,000 fans on the official Oxegen Facebook page during the same time period.

The keywords used for analysis were “Oxegen”, “Oxegen11″, “Oxegen2011″, “Oxygen11″ or “Oxygen2011″.

The graph showing the 12th day social media marathon is shown above.

Julius Solaris has written a detailed description on how to become a great success using twitter and the tricks of the trade. I am going to highlight some of the points as it is relating directly to help event professionals.

So firstly your event account, this must be created at least 6 months before your event is taking place for promotional purposes. Your bio should include a clear event description so the public know exactly what your events about without needing to ask any questions. Your link should be your events official website and the geo location needs to be where your event is taking place.

Selling tickets if your looking to shift a large volume of tickets twitter ads is the way to go, hundreds of twitter users will see them without much if atall any work needed.  They are a amazing promotional tool and they add a new demension to your event. He says without an advertising budget he doesnt see the point of creating an event account, this is because it would be a wasted effort as there is no massive highlight drawing in the publics interest.

Hashtags have become the official way to talk about events on twitter, they became clickable which opened new opportunities for event planners. This enabled the public to view the event page and if they then mentioned the event hashtag it would show up on the events wall and their own newsfeed. If you send multiply tweets in a short period of time this will clog up your followers timeline it is a very difficult task to make twitter interesting so try and only tweet when nessessary. When choosing your events hashtag its important its short and sweet, it allows you to see how much buzz your events generated giving you an idea how popular it is or is going to be. You must push your hashtag name and promote it with all your might, as it will be a main indicator on how your social media stragies are going. Social media monitering software may be something to think about aswell especially with twitter as it can give you loads of important information like:

- Influential users who tweeted about your event
- Best performing tweets
- Overall sentiment of those who tweeted about your event (positive,neutral, negative)
- Media spread of those who attended (Blogs, Twitter, Froums, Facebook, etc)

FACTOR168 Creative Events Company are masters in assisting any business in creating their prefect event with a sensational event experience. 

I have taken the following information from a slideshow concerning social media strategies adopted by FACTOR168:

They following is in this award winning companys’ opinion the four main social media sights to use when carrying out an events strategic media plan.

LINKEDIN

• Develop a 100% profile.
• Power of testimonials important.
• join and participate n linkedin groups.
• Create business linkedin profile.
• Share posts across groups.

FACEBOOK

• Separate Personal and Professional space through profession ‘fan’ page.
• Encouraging fan participation, fostering dialogue, polling.
• Promote through targeted advertisement and own broad based network linking.
• Complement company work page.

TWITTER

• Personal and professional handles.
• Limit to 140 characters but use less for RT comments.
• Employ hash tags for industry groups such as #ISES #Eventprofs.

YOUTUBE

• Create Youtube channel.
• Ensure you have permissions.
• Brand proprietary videos.
• Give credit and be prepared to replace soundtracks.
• consider VIMEO as a “mirror”. 

“social media provides virtually instant access to information throughout the world, thus giving businesses the ability to share news about their products and service with people that were once out of reach.”

Social media is one of the most rapidly growing forms of free information spreading technology available. Businesses used to be limited in how many contacts they could get in touch with and now they can share information with the world. Social media connections are those who are your friends on sites such as facebook, they interact with others who aren’t in with your connections thus expanding the network further. This gives you the opportunity to meet people online that you wouldn’t necessarily get to meet in person. You only need someone important to be mutual friends and get in contact and the opportunity to form a valuable business relationship is there. Social media can be utilised in the same way that face-to-face meetings are in discussions being held, offers promoted and even conferences organised. 

From 2003-2006 the organisation Bulletproof designed T in the parks event website, as they had attended the music festival multiply times they felt comfortable with their crucial task. They started off by encorporating all the events available activites on to the website, thus giving the public any desired information they may require. They made sure the brand was carefully and clearly shown throughout and that tickets were available to buy. Images and content on the artists performing where added to show the events character, latest updates where made available and the enormous list of T’s dedicated fanbase where contacted. Extra pages were created on the site to deliver news as it happened to the funs such as announcing headliners and the sale of ‘early bird tickets’. The website needed to be monitered and added to all year round with news, sales and just the enormous amount of traffic generated. This example truelly shows how much work is involved when maintaining a successful events identity.