Social Media|People-based, strategy Vs. Media-based Strategy

How brands should be using social media? The starting point for any business, is ensuring you know what you want to achieve – increased brand awareness, customer retention, a feedback mechanism and so on. “Next, establish who you want to engage – new or existing customers, a certain part of your customer group or more general. Then work out where these people congregate and what will engage them best.” The biggest mistakes companies make, he says, are implementing a tool-based, as opposed to people-based, strategy and simply choosing the best-known communities. “It may be that you just won’t be able to engage people in, for instance, Facebook,” he says, adding that sustained engagement is also key.

Working out why you want to use social media is an important step for any brand getting started in social media. Rather than just jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, or racing into Facebook it’s important to take a step back. Listen to what people are saying already about you in social media. Think about what you want to achieve. Then experiment with a passion and have a clear process for evaluating what has worked. And what hasn’t.

The four steps any brand should do when they are getting started in social media. We will look first at buzz tracking and how you can understand what is being said, where and by whom in social media. We will then look at how you should establish aims for your use of social media (and how you could measure these). Only then will we encourage you to experiment (with a passion). And finally we’ll look at measurement and ROI (and how you will know what’s working and what isn’t).

The aim is to give any brand who is looking to use social media (or indeed to use it better) a framework to work through, some ideas and also a lot of questions and decisions that will need to be made. 

When brands are getting started in social media, they really benefit from understanding who is currently talking about them online, what they are saying, to whom and where. After auditing what your brand footprint currently is, you can begin to make decisions about where you should have a presence, the issues of interest to people in social media and the discussions and debates that your brand can both benefit from and contribute to.

A thorough audit of your current presence in social media (or perhaps just the presence of your brand through customers, fans and others) is the first step for any social media strategy. Whilst Google Alerts provide a useful source for the latest items that are indexed by its search engine, to understand properly what is being discussed by your brand it is worthwhile investing in some detailed buzz tracking.

The best results come from using paid-for services such as Radian6. These conduct and analyse real-time, deep searching into what people are discussing in public forums and social media online that is analysed according to the reach of the posts and discussions and the influence of the people discussing your brand. You can drill-down into your keywords, understand which discussions are prevalent across different social networks and online communities and identify, measure and track your main influencers online.

As with most of our advice, however, a good first step is just to have a go. To do this you need to first establish what your keywords are and then use some tools (paid-for or free) to see what people are saying. Your keyword list is critical here and time should be put into building a list of terms about your brand, organisation, market and customers. Then you are ready to go. And if you don’t want to invest in a thorough, paid-for service right, and you are willing to put in more work and use multiple services, then there are a number of good free tools in the market. Some of these are listed below.

Only when you’ve got a clearer view of what people are saying about your brand and how it is represented online can you start to really develop a strategy to get started in social media.

Some free buzz tracking tools

Earlier this year Econsultancy produced a list of free buzz tracking tools which provides a great starting point for any brand looking to explore what is being said about it in social media. The list republished below:

1. Addict-o-matic – Allows you to create a custom-made page to display search results.
2. Bloglines – A web-based personal news aggregator that can be used in place of a desktop client.
3. Blogpulse – A service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics. It analyzes and reports on daily trends within the blogosphere.
4. BoardTracker – A useful tool for scanning and tracking within forums.
5. Commentful – This service watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts and similar content such as Flickr or Digg.
6. FriendFeed Search – Scans all FriendFeed activity.
7. Google Alerts –Daily or real-time alerts emailed to you whenever a specific keyword (chosen by you) is mentioned.
8. HowSociable? – A simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web.
9. Icerocket – Searches a variety of online services, including Twitter, blogs, videos and MySpace.
10. Keotag – Keyword searches across the internet landscape.
11. MonitorThis – Subscribes you to up to 20 different RSS feeds through one stream.
12. Samepoint – A conversation search engine.
13. Surchur – An interactive dashboard covering search engines and most social media sites.
14. Technorati – Search engine and monitoring tool for user-generated media and blogs
15. Tinker – Real-time conversations from social media sources such as Twitter and Facebook.
16. TweetDeck – Not only a great way to manage your Twitter account, but the keyword search means you can see what people are saying about you.
17. Twitter Search – Twitter’s very own search tool is a great resource. Can be subscribed to as an RSS ffed.
18. UberVU - Track and engage with user sentiment across the likes of, FriendFeed, Digg, Picasa, Twitter and Flickr.
19. wikiAlarm – Alerts you to when a Wikipedia entry has been changed.
20. Yahoo! Sideline – A TweetDeck-esque tool from Yahoo. Monitor, search and engage with the Twittersphere.

Once you have an understanding of what is currently being said about your brand in social media, you will be much better informed about the issues of interest to people, the opinions they have, who your influencers and advocates are and where you can start to engage with people in social media. The next step is to work out what you actually want to achieve.

For too many people, social media is seen first and foremost as a technological solution. People decide they want to ‘implement social media’ and then work out what they want to do with it. This kind of enthusiasm is great and people who want to harness and use social media for your brand should be embraced. However, for any business there is a critical question you need to answer first: “what are you trying to achieve”.

There is much talk about measurement and proving the ROI of social media. One way to ensure that you are able to show the impact that your use of social media has had is to make sure you have clear and measurable aims in the first place. Maybe you want to increase customer loyalty, reduce the cost of your current customer service channels, increase customer satisfaction, get new ideas into your business or reduce the cost of your customer insight spend.  

A clear understanding of what you want to achieve should be the first step for any brand looking to get started in social media. This may be a detailed decision process or it may be simple, but no brand should try something without at least some aims. A simple three-step process for any brand is:

1. Think about your current business strategy. Consider what would make the biggest difference to your business. Evaluate where you can contribute in the short-, medium- and long-terms.
2. When you have thought through this you need to evaluate and refine your aims based on what is achievable using social media. Not everything is and not everything should be.
3. Finally consider each of the aims and objectives you have left and how you can measure the impact you are having. Think about what you should expect from social media, what return you should see and what return you would expect for the investment you are putting into your activities.

This is a simple but effective process. The most important thing is to critically evaluate what you want to achieve as a brand and then work with people with experience of using social media to understand the full and diverse range of things you could do, tools you might use and engagement methods you might employ to contribute to these. This is often an iterative process and will help you to refine what you are looking to achieve and make sure it is realistic and achievable.

At FreshNetworks, we have worked with brands who have started working in social media. They are doing great things and it’s great to see them experimenting. But without having thought through what they are trying to achieve, why and how they will measure it their social media efforts will more likely than not fail. If you are not clear in your mind why you are doing it, you can be sure that your users will not understand what they are supposed to be doing in your social media site.

There are too many stories of brands having tried and failed to use social media effectively. It may have been a disaster or, more usually, just not have had the impact and return on investment for the brand as it might have had. The most effective way to avoid this is to make sure that when you are getting started in social media you have done some effective planning first. Listen to what people are saying about your brand in social media so that you know what people are saying about you and where they are saying it. Then think about what you want to achieve with your social media strategy. Only by doing this will you be able to develop a clear and focused plan and, perhaps most importantly, measure the benefit your social media efforts are having.

Once you’ve got a clear plan it’s time to start thinking about technology and tools that you can use, and most importantly to start experimenting. This is where it gets fun.

When you are working out how to use social media tools, which to experiment with and how there are four main things to think about to help you get going:

1. Use your buzz tracking to understand where people are talking about you.Compare this with the people you want to engage in social media, those who will help you meet your aims. This will give you an understanding of where the people you want to engage and the conversations you want to join are. This obviously only gives you half the story as you may also want to engage people in a new place or in your own space online.
2. Decide which of these tools will help you to meet the aims you have set out. If you want to capture potential new customers, for example, using Twitter or Facebook may not be the most useful tool as these will not give you the contact details you probably want. If you want ideas into your business, there may be better ways of doing it than a forum or blog. Think carefully about what you want to achieve and the full range of tools available to you.
3. Get cracking. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking and planning so far. Now it’s time to just try some things out. One of the benefits of social media is that it can be relatively low cost to experiment. Start small and try a few tools. If you need blog then put one up quickly and invest time in getting it creating content and encouraging and growing engagement. Experiment with a small number of tools and evaluate how effective these are being, switching on more tools over time.
4. Work hard to get the engagement. Getting the tools up and running are really just the first step. The tough work starts when you start to engage people in social media, whether that’s in Facebook, on Twitter, in blogs, forums and other sites or indeed on your own online community. Engagement is hard and it needs a clear plan and dedication to make it work. The benefit of experimenting and having a go with different tools, and growing your use of social media in a controlled way is that you can see what is working, amend your techniques and try new things. If you have the right measurements in place you will know if you’re reaching your targets and if not you need to evaluate if you are using the right tools and if you are engaging people in the right way.

Once you have tools up and running the final stage for any brand getting started in social media is to make sure you are tracking and measuring your success.

For any brand getting started in social media, the most important thing is to be able to show the impact you are having. To be able to evaluate and assess what is working and what isn’t having the results that you might expect. To show the return on investment that your efforts are having and how this compares to other methods.

There is a lot of talk about social media measurement and it is true that in isolation it is difficult to know where to start. But for businesses with a clear social media strategy, it is actually much easier than many people think. We stressed earlier in this guide to Getting Started in Social Media the importance of thinking about the reasons you are using social media before you jump in to use any tools or to engage people. We talked though a process to define clear and measurablebusiness objectives and aims for your use of social media. It is important that you make these both clear and measurable. Typical objectives that a brand might consider include – acquisition of new customers, retention of existing ones, number of new insights or ideas into the business, or number of customer problems solved. These are just some of the objectives that brands may have for using online communities and social media, and all of them are measurable. At the simplest level they either save money for a brand or they generate revenue.

In the online communities that we manage at FreshNetworks a lot of time is spent defining the objectives and then working out first what metrics should be measured against these, and then monitoring and reporting on these to make sure we understand how the community is performing. It is important to establish a set of metrics that you can measure to assess how you are performing against your aims. In many cases you will want to measure a mix of things for each aim, but overall you should be able to show and prove what impact you are having.

Example: If you want to use social media as an efficient way of resolving customer queries, for example, you probably want to measure the number of unique customer problems you have on the site, the number of problems that are solved by other members of the community. You can then put an equivalent cost that it would have taken to service these queries through other channels and measure the actual reduction in, for example, call centre costs that you witness over time. This is what Dell did, and this is how Dell managed to work out that one member of its customer support community saved them $1m a year in support costs. That’s real ROI.

So the final stage to getting started in social media is to make sure you are ruthless about measuring what you are doing. It’s the only way you will know what works (and what doesn’t) and prove the impact you are having with social media. To do this you need to have clear objectives and these need to be measurable. Then you can measure the actual impact you are having on business aims. The actual benefit your social media strategy is bringing to your brand.

Febreze| " it’s a breath of fresh air"

Febreze: a fabric odour eliminator from P&G operates in a rather unsexy segment. The allure of the fragrance is dramatized in these set of spots.

Dawn| Cleaning up

View the current television commerical for Dawn and you’re nothing if not intrigued.It depicts wild animals caught in oil spills being washed with Dawn dishwashing liquid. The visual images are powerful and the folksy sound track lends the feel of grass-roots activism to the commercial. There is no voice over. Only a few words of explanation appear, including the line “Tough on grease yet gentle.”
A close-up of a Dawn label says “1 bottle = $1 to save wildlife.” The consumer must visit http://www.dawnsaveswildlife.com and enter a product code from the bottle to activate the donation. The brand is committing US$ 500,000 in donations to wildlife causes to give the campaign credibility.

The campaign’s website walks the consumer through the donation process and demonstrates Dawn’s commitment to saving wildlife. There is educational information, some of it surprising: “Dawn dishwashing liquid has been a vital tool to wildlife conservation organizations, with thousands of donated bottles cleansing – and saving – over 75,000 animals in the last 30 years.”

The website includes a lengthy page of wildlife organization partners, and the opportunity to participate in Dawn’s “Everyday Wildlife Champions” Facebook page. Actress Minnie Driver is the campaign spokesperson. The promotion comes full circle with “Special Edition Dawn,” featuring three labels, each with a different photo of wildlife.
While the current campaign brings renewed relevance to an aging product (Dawn came to market in 1973), it may never have happened were it not for a charity’s persistence. The International Bird Rescue Research Center first discovered that Dawn worked on birds caught in oil spills in 1978. But Dawn’s maker, Procter & Gamble, “ignored requests to donate cases of the product, then finally agreed to do so in 1988,” says The New York Times (“Tough on Crude Oil, Soft on Ducklings,” Sept. 24, 2009).
Still, it was the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 that propelled Dawn to the forefront of wildlife conservation. Parent company Procter & Gamble has been active ever since. “Dawn has highlighted wildlife in advertising campaigns intermittently since 2002 but never tried so actively to engage consumers [as with this campaign],” says The Times.
Campaign aside, Dawn is a classic case of Procter & Gamble’s prowess in brand extension. The world’s largest brand marketer, Procter & Gamble began as a family-owned soap and candle company in 1837. Today it markets such well-known brands as Tide (laundry detergent), Crest (toothpaste), and Charmin (toilet tissue).
Procter & Gamble’s brand portfolio typically features an anchor brand with numerous variations added over time to grow the brand into a family of products. Tide, for example, started as a laundry detergent in 1943 and is now a multi-faceted group of products including powders, liquids, stain release boosters, “Tide To Go” pens, and even accessories with the Tide name, such as lint rollers. The rationale is that the consumer who trusts a brand name will buy additional branded products, even paying a premium price for them.

In similar fashion, today’s Dawn is more – much more – than a simple dishwashing liquid. Now there is:
• Dawn Direct Foam, a pump that “turns the liquid into powerful foam”
• Dawn Simple Pleasures, a dishwashing liquid bottle with built-in air freshener
• An entire line of Dawn PLUS products that have added cleaning agents, such as bleach alternative
• Ultra Dawn, a concentrated version of the product
• Dawn Pure Essentials, dishwashing liquid without dye or extra ingredients
• Dawn Botanicals with blended scents
• Dawn Power Dissolver for “the toughest greasy food soils.”

Dawn is the dishwashing liquid market leader, with over 35 percent market share, according to Information Resources. For years, though, Dawn has been in a horse race with second place Palmolive, the dishwashing liquid made by rival Colgate-Palmolive. Palmolive has followed suit with similar brand extensions of its own (Palmolive Antibacterial Soap, Palmolive Dry Skin with Aloe, Palmolive Oxy Plus). That’s why Procter & Gamble continues to innovate with Dawn.
Dawn and Palmolive both may have seen sales slip during the recent economic downturn. To save money, consumers may have turned to less expensive store brands for commodity items such as soaps and dishwashing liquids.
This could be another good reason for the timing of Dawn’s eco-friendly approach. The notion that Dawn helps save the lives of animals just might make a fickle consumer remain loyal to the brand.

Viagra 10 years anniversary

Brand: Viagra

Brand Owner: Pfizer  

Title: The candle

Agency: BDDP & FILS

Intern Sweatshop: Boobvertising!?!

We just want to say that our intern came up with this topic all on her own, after doing extensive research, and had no prompting from any of us. Although we did discuss the title with her at length. All kidding aside, she does delve into an issue close to her heart, while drawing attention to an interesting campaign being run right here in our own backyard. Enjoy.


So that’s the trick to capturing this audience’s attention. Now things are starting to make sense. When exactly does objectification of the female body cross the line of morally acceptable and ethical advertising?

I have found busty ads that I consider controversial and one that takes a completely new and unique approach to advertising focused on “the girls.”

Does the slogan “Life’s Short. Get a Divorce” ring a bell? This billboard, featuring a scantily clad duo in provocative positioning, created quite a stir a few years ago. The ad was conceptualized by Chicago divorce attorney, Corri Fetman.

Fetman created so much buzz with the racy advertisements that she was forced to take them down. She then resorted to plastering the images on box-trucks to be driven around Chi-town. Fetman also claimed to have been the busty woman in the ads; it was no surprise she was later approached to pose in Playboy Magazine. Shockingly, she accepted the offer.

Another advertisement, for a procedure some consider inappropriate and many consider a great contributor to the objectification of women, is this one centered on breast implants.

It is not the content of the billboard that is the problem here, and sure, the imagery used is, well…a little risqué. But the real issue here is that this billboard was placed directly outside of a military base in Morongo Valley, Ca—a base populated mostly by males. Yeah.

I suppose it is assumed that while soldiers are leaving the base headed home, this advertisement would motivate them to purchase their girls at home a lovely set of…well…girls. I can’t wait to welcome back my soldier with a loving hug, a warm, home-cooked meal and my new efforts at becoming a Pam Anderson look-a-like, DDD’s and all. “Welcome home, honey. Thanks for the gift.”

The sheer concept of targeting this billboard towards men, positioned in a place where mostly men would see it, seems to be what I like to call the “bissue” – the big issue. Alright advertisers, let’s think this one through. How do you suspect a man would propose the idea of implants to his girl? “Oh honey, I saw this ad today for a boob job on my way home from work and immediately thought of you.” SLAP! Now ladies, if you want to enhance your bustline, go right ahead. I am all for it. But if your man is the one making the suggestion, well, your fist hurts even more when holding a roll of quarters.

On the flip side of all of this, I found an ad campaign that is entirely focused on women’s breasts but is done in a tasteful and professional manner. It purposefully causes some excitement, but that’s only temporary until one learns who is behind this campaign.

I was driving through Baltimore city when I noticed a sign similar to the one above. I was completely shocked. So, I went home and googled the tagline. Bingo, I responded in exactly the way viewers were supposed to. I succumbed to this example of effective advertising. And here is what I learned.

This new campaign is implemented by the Maryland Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. Signage like the one above has been placed all around Maryland trying to rally support. The organization has also released other forms of advertisements to get the word out.

According to a press release from the organization’s Development Director, Lenore Koors, the campaign is “based on the premise of ‘telling your story’ and the physical and emotional connection to local breast cancer survivors and co-survivors.” These pro-bono marketing services were provided by PUNCH of Sykesville, Md., says Koors, as an attempt to let the “Thousands of Maryland breast cancer survivors know they are not alone in their fight and to offer them the opportunity to tell their stories – firsthand accounts of their struggles with this disease, their treatments and their successes.”

This concept was to include ten local survivors who were chosen based on their stories submitted to the organization’s website. These women provide real life case studies to be used in the campaign. They were also photographed and filmed for PSA and webstory materials. Koors adds that these women are the “Faces of this campaign, and the faces of hope.”

The organization also has a facebook page where other women can share their own empowering stories and submit pictures of themselves, yes indeed, supporting their own local breasts for a chance to win some fun Komen prizes.

http://www.facebook.com/komenMD

Check out some of the ads seen around town:

I personally like this campaign and the organization’s approach to capturing attention. With these innovative headlines and strategically centered images, Komen Maryland is driving the point home that breast cancer support is the most important thing to beating this horrible disease.

But I have to wonder, is this campaign acceptable to me simply because of the nature of the organization and because this is a good cause? Or is this a creative, tasteful and well thought out spin on what so many beer companies and car magazines having been doing for decades? After all, in advertising there is such a thing as too much boob. But as far as this campaign goes, those girls at Komen have this girl’s support.

-Amanda Gazi, Creative Department Intern

BIC Pens| An entire magazine re-written with Bic pens in Uruguay

Ad Geniuses| Paul Silburn

Londoners use to say their city is the greatest in the world. And, let´s be reasonable, when it comes to advertising, they are right. Just check out Paul Silburn curriculum. In any other place in the world, he would be the best advertiser ever, but in UK he is just, let´s say, in the top 20. He has won over 20 lions, including legendary campaigns like "No nonsense" or John West Salmon´s "Bear Fight" and, more recently, "Life´s for Sharing" for T-Mobile.

Paul has worked in a row of agencies that include Lowe, TBWA Leo Burnett, BBH and Saatchi & Saatchi, we could say, half of the best London agencies. He has also made a small adventure at Fallon Minneapolis, but it didn´t last long. Pat Fallon fired him and, since them, things haven't been working at the classic agency.

Different of other creatives, its hard to identify his strong point. He has done funny physical comedy, sensitive subjects and down-to-earth advertising. He has been awarded in alternative media, film, print and outdoor. One thing, although, it´s easy to notice. His ads all look real. If he had done any scams, we don´t know, but their biggest award campaigns are pretty real.

Ad Genius 17: Paul Silburn.
Countries: UK, USA.
Agencies: Lowe, TBWA, Leo Burnett, BBH, Fallon, Saatchi.
At Cannes: Over 20 lions, 7 Gold.
Strong Points: Versatility.

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12 Twitter Tools Every Event Marketer Should Know About

Twitter has about 18 million active users, which is forecast to grow to 26 million active users in 2010. In a recent survey by Champion Exhibition Services, it was found that 54% of association event marketers use Twitter. Of these, 82% used Twitter to create a buzz before an event, and 68% use Twitter to support PR efforts. Only 36% use direct messaging, and even fewer (23%) use #hashtags. This survey points out that even for the simplest Twitter purposes in events, adoption is still quite low. Despite all the buzz, Twitter is still a relatively untapped resource on the social media landscape. As such, we’ve only begun to understand how we can best use it as marketers, and have just scratched the surface of its application as a complement to event and experiential marketing.

One way to advance the conversation around using Twitter for event and experiential marketing is to leverage third-party applications. There are literally hundreds of Twitter applications available. A case could be made for using any and all of them for your event marketing program. I’ve spent some time reviewing some of the more interesting applications which can complement your events beyond creating buzz. In some cases there are alternate tools which perform the same function as those listed below. Feel free to explore. These are some of my favorites.

Twellow: The Twitter yellow pages. This directory searches the profiles (bios)of Twitter users when you enter a keyword. This application can be used to identify potential attendees, speakers, exhibitors, suppliers, etc. Its very simple to use, and ranks search results by number of followers.

Icerocket Twitter Search: There are several Twitter search tools out there. This is one of my favorites. Its a real time search engine and searches for keywords used within tweets. For events, Icerocket can be used to find trending topics, monitor hashtags, or find people of interest based on what they tweet. Bonus: Icerocket also searches blogs.

Tweet Later: This is one of my favorites for event marketers. If you plan ahead of time, you can schedule some of your tweets to coincide with the event schedule. Great for reminding followers of speaking sessions, or promoting your booth and other activities throughout an event. The perfect tool for press releases of new product launches, etc. I’ve used this tool for tweeting key points of my presentation while I was giving it. With rehearsal and timing it can work out pretty well. Keep in mind, while you can schedule some of your tweets ahead of time, its important to stay connected and be a part of the ongoing conversation live.

Tweetdeck: Monitoring the conversation around your event is critical. Tweetdeck makes this simple by allowing you to monitor several keywords, hastags, and people at once. Consider using Tweetdeck to monitor the conversation around your event in realtime. You can also set up Tweetdeck on large format monitors for attendees to see what content is buzzing in the twitterverse while they’re at an event. Bonus: Tweetdeck also integrates with Facebook and MySpace.

Tweetbeep: A very useful tool that monitors keywords and links and sends activity alerts by email every hour. Imagine having trending topics about your event, sessions, speakers, etc. delivered to you as they happen. Deploy Tweetbeep in addition to Tweetdeck to monitor hot topics.

Twtvite: a free event management tool that helps you organize and promote local Tweetups (informal social gatherings of people with like interests). You can use Twtvite to organize tweetups around your event. If you are using Tweetdeck or Tweetbeep to monitor conversations around your event, Twtvite can be the perfect tool to organize adhoc discussions to complement planned event curriculum based on what topics are trending.

Poll Everywhere: Need an audience response system on the cheap? Poll everywhere allows audiences to submit messages or answer multiple choice questions via tweet, SMS or the web. The best part: their feedback is instantly embedded into your live Powerpoint presentation. This tool has some amazing applications for hybrid events. Here you can get feedback from both face-to-face and virtual audiences during a presentation that is also streamed live via the internet.

Twtpoll: Simple polling application that allows you to submit a question to the twitterverse. You can choose form 17 types of questions and set a time limit for answers. This is great for gathering information for presentations before an event, or getting feedback after an event. Bonus: You can share Twtpolls across any social network.

Twitpic: This tool allows you to share pictures via Twitter – complete with geotagging. Share live pictures of your event with the world! Encourage attendees to share their event pictures as well. You might even incorporate a photo scavenger hunt into your event using Twitpic.

Twitvid: Like Twitpic but for video. Super easy to use. Share videos of speakers, entertainment, demonstrations, etc. via Twitter. Encourage attendees to participate. Bonus: autosharing to Facebook, MySpace and Youtube is integrated.

Twitcam: Create a live twebcast! Broadcast your event via this simple, instant streaming video application. This is great for speaking sessions, demonstrations, etc. Integrates with a twitter window so observers can comment / ask questions during the presentation. Its a good idea to have a moderator and a decent webcam / mic hooked up to your computer.

Tweetchat: Very cool application that allows users to conduct  live chat over twitter via #hashtags. I participate in the #eventprofs tweetchat as often as I can. You can organize tweetchats during your event on trending topics, or schedule these as part of you planned curriculum. Tweetchats can also take place off hours or for virtual participants.

These twelve Twitter tools will help you advance your event program beyond the profile, #hashtag and promotional tweet. If used appropriately these applications can drive community engagement before, during and after each event to create real relationships with your audiences across your event program. Use one, use some, use them all, its your choice. Understand your audience and objectives first, then pick the best tools to meet your needs. I’ve only scratched the surface here. Again, there are hundreds of third-party Twitter applications out there, and they come and go daily. If you find something that’s worked for you please share!