Virtual Event Success

I was reading a post by Roger Courville where he encouraged virtual event hosts and presenters to encourage multi-tasking during webinars. In particular, I like this point that Roger made supporting the multi-tasking idea:

“You can keep an eye on it.  If you establish the Twitter hashtag or other locale, it gives you a chance to see an respond.  Arguably this is better than being unaware of the audience whispers.”

This is by far the biggest benefit of encouraging attendees to “pass notes” during your virtual event. Attendees will comment on what’s going well and on what could be improved live.

By far, Twitter is the best platform to use. Create a hashtag, ask attendees to add the hashtag to their tweets, then let them go to town.

Get Pressing Questions

As a host, I’ve used attendees’ tweets to gather questions that I could ask the speaker during the Q&A segment of the session. After hosting a dozen sessions back-to-back, the mind stops working and seeing tweets from attendees with thought provoking questions has really helped to save the day many times.

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I’ve blogged many times on the ways you can use Twitter to fill your virtual event here and here. Plus, I shared a video by CeCe Solomon-Lee on the very same topic. Dennis Shiao, a colleague of CeCe, also weighed in on the topic and while I loved all his points, one stood out that caused me concerned.

Dennis wrote about the frequency of using your event’s hashtag in your tweets and warned that you shouldn’t use them excessively. In particular, he wrote:

Be careful not to over-promote to the related hashtags, as constant promotion of your virtual event will surely turn off the followers of that hash tag – you’ll even receive backlash from them.

On the one hand, I see his point. However, there’s a way to use your event’s hashtag on Twitter that will help you avoid this backlash and allow you to tweet out updates from your virtual event.

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This is a wonderful video that Cece Salomon-Lee, Director of Marketing for InXpo, put together explaining how to use Twitter for virtual events.

The first part of the video focuses on Twitter basics, such as signing up, following people, retweeting, blocking people and sending tweets or direct messages. So, if you consider yourself to be an intermediate or advanced Twitter user, you can skip the first 5-minutes.

Cece starts to explain how to use Twitter for virtual events at the 5:50 mark. Some very valuable advice, so click on the play button below to hear her tips.

I also blogged about how to use Twitter hashtags to fill your next virtual event.

If you’re using Twitter, you may get automatic direct message (autoDMs) from people who you follow for the first time.

I hate these autoDMs. If someone is contacting me for the first time on Twitter using an autoDM that contains a URL to a blog, squeeze page, gift, bonus, video or some other freebie, I not only unfollow, but I also block that person.

Here’s a gem I received recently from someone who had less than half the followers I do:

Here’s another from someone who wants to share with the me the easy ways to make money online (containing an affiliate link, of course):

Here’s another one. If the person really got to know me, she’d know that I’m so not into using ads to make money online:

And here’s one from a lady who wanted to make sure I saw her autoDM, so she sent it 6-times in a matter of seconds:

I’ve been on Twitter since 2007 (check this website if you doubt me) and I refuse to let the spammers win. So, here’s a few tools I’ve been using to lessen the number of autoDMs in my direct message box on Twitter:

SocialToo

Spammers typically follow people then quickly unfollow them to boost their numbers, so SocialToo allows you to unfollow people who unfollow you within a certain time period. SocialToo will only work if the person whose autoDMs you want to stop are also using SocialToo.

TweetLater

This website also allows you to opt out of receiving people autoDMs. Like SocialToo, it will only work if the person is using TweetLater to send autoDMs.

fun140

If you’ve been getting DMs asking you “Which Michael Jackson song are you” or “Which Harry Potter character are you”, you can use fun140 to opt out of receiving these autoDMs asking you to take the quiz. I found out about this site through Sarah Robinson when she tweeted the link to the site.

Are there any other Twitter opt-out sites that you’d like to share? If so, share the link in the comments area below.

I was reading a post written by Dennis Shiao on Virtual Event ROI. Dennis participated on a panel at the 2009 Virtual Edge Summit talking about the return on investment on hosting virtual events.

His post got me thinking about all the ways I measure the return on my virtual event investment (ROVEI?). I’ve used both the phone and webinar technology to host my virtual events and you may think that these 2 tools lack a way to measure your results.

In one sense, yes. But where there’s a lack, I use other tools to help me measure what I’m doing. For example:

• I use Cartville to manage my affiliate commissions, clickthrough and sales. The image below is a screenshot from my 2008 Social Media Telesummit, an 8-day virtual event I hosted entirely over the phone. My affiliates used special links to share with their network to help me promote the event. The screenshot below shows which sales were referred by my affiliates and the total commission I paid out to them.

• I used a URL shortening service that tracked clickthroughs to a summary of the content I heard after the first day of the 2009 Social Media Telesummit. I just love budurl.com and used it to shorten my really long virtual event URL so I can share it on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Not only does it track clicks, but budurl.com tells you where it’s coming from. The screenshot below is a screenshot from budurl.com.

• To measure attendee engagement, I use a hashtag on Twitter. This helps me to monitor how engaged attendees are in what they’re hearing. The screenshot below shows a few tweets from attendees from one of my more recent virtual events. The Twitter hashtag my co-host and I used was #osmt.

There are certainly other tools that I use, but these are just a small sample of what’s in my virtual event measurement toolkit. This helps me to keep the costs low since most of these tools are free or low cost.

What other tools would you suggest to help virtual event managers measure sales conversions and audience engagement?

InXpo, a company that provides a platform to run virtual events and virtual shows, announced that Twitter is now integrated into an enhanced version of its software.

This is good news because attendees can now tweet their reaction to the event they’re attending without having to leave the InXpo platform. Instead of having attendees leave your platform to head over to the Twitter to publish their thoughts and feedback about the sessions, they can instead post them directly through the InXpo tool. This helps to diminish the need to login to several different systems and to minimize multi-tasking.

If you’re unfamiliar with how you can use Twitter to attract new attendees to your virtual event, read this blog post and this blog post on the topic.

I was reading an article in BtoB Magazine written by Charlotte Woolard on the growth of virtual events compared to in-person events. In her article, Charlotte reported that many companies are cancelling in-person events or considering  hosting virtual events based on the feedback of their customers.

The article also reported that attendee interaction is lost through virtual events and that relationship building is best at face-to-face events.

I beg to differ.

There are many ways to encourage relationship building during virtual events. I suggest using social media to do so. Here are a few ideas:

• Use Twitter to encourage attendees to share their reaction to what they’re hearing during the virtual event. I employ this strategy often and one person reported that every time she attends one of my virtual events, her list of followers grow.
• Start a private group on Facebook and send invitations out to attendees. No need to re-invent the wheel by launching your own forums. Plus, attendees won’t have to recreate their profiles on yet another system that they need to login to. They get to meet each other, see each others photos and connect in a real way.
• Offer virtual cocktail hours. Schedule some time in the schedule for attendees to network with each other. This can be done over the phone or online. In one virtual event I hosted, I used Second Life to enable people to meet each other.

A recent blog post about The Dark Side of Twitter on Marketing Profs got me thinking about this.

Another dark side of Twitter is that tweets aren’t taken in whole, especially when each individual tweet is part of a larger conversation.

How People Misinterpret the Bible

Growing up in a Christian church, many would take passages from the Bible out of context. People would pull one verse out of the Bible to prove their point and end the discussion right then and there.

But if you were to read the 3 or 4 passages before or after that individual verse, you get a totally different meaning.

How Twitter is Like the Bible

Individuals tweets can be taken out of context, just like verses from the Bible. And who can blame anyone. Each individual, 140 character tweet that you publish is indexed as its own individual page in search engines and gets its own URL in Twitter.

Recently, I got into a debate about ghostblogging. It went on for what seemed like hours on Twitter and went around in circles. The debate was between myself, Dave Fleet and Danny Brown.

I enjoyed going back and forth with the 2 gentlemen and stuck to my main argument which is that I see nothing wrong with delegating a task I dislike. Since writing is something I don’t like, I delegate it.

And I do. I delegate the content in my ezine that’s sent out weekly and the content in my training materials. And this is after I audio record my thoughts so that it can be written on paper in my voice.

But I have never outsourced the writing of my blog posts. Call it an ego thing, but my blog is my voice and I just haven’t felt right about outsourcing the text written on my blog.

Although I’ve been writing all the content on my blog since I launched it in 2006, this was called into question when Dave Fleet posted one of my tweets on his blog to show that I do ghostblog my blog. The tweet that I authored said:

how can “ghostblogging” be inauthentic? to me, i outsource the tasks I hate. since writing is one of them, I delegate it #pcto09

However, this individual tweet was part of a larger discussion which can be followed here. It was in reaction to something Danny Brown had said and I used a few tweets to prove my point, including the one above.

However, in trying to prove my point, it appears that I’m contradicting myself.

My Advice?

While debating an issue on Twitter, the collection of your tweets may be missed if one of your individual tweets helps someone prove their point or helps them highlight a contradiction in your argument.

Take the debate off Twitter by writing a blog post so you can elaborate on your key points. Using 140 characters to try and prove your point is like using morse code to debate an issue.

Each social media tool has its role in the conversation. Use Twitter for punchy, pithy information. Use your blog for more elaborate prose. Otherwise, you’ll get into a mess like I have where my points are not taken in whole.