Engage in PR

Nod to Michael:

Last week I was discussing my work at a Boston tech trade show where we were working with the show coordinators to drive media/analyst attendance and help in overall show branding and buzz. When we started the relationship we stressed the importance of social media in building and sustaining engagement with the show attendees and exhibitors. I wanted to share with you some details on the techniques we used in a two part blog posting. I realize that this is not as in depth a social media program as others have done, but we are really excited about how it worked and I’m looking forward to comments, critiques and questions.

Client: TechMash 2007, a co-located trade show encompassing Embedded Systems Conference, RFID World and SD Best Practices. The show is put on by CMP.

Audience: Software developers, embedded systems engineers, software architects, semiconductor manufacturers, IT administrators.

Goal: To help drive attendance at the trade show from attendees and exhibitors while also creating a sustainable community to engage with throughout the year. As all of you know when you go to a trade show you typically don’t hear from that show again until the next year when they want you to register again. CMP was excited about the opportunity to communicate and directly interact with this community throughout the year. This would lead to more direct impact from attendees on the show agenda, as well as help reduce the amount of marketing they would need to push towards registrants.

Social Media Strategy: The strategy used two main facets of social media; social networking and microblogging. The first thing we did was create Twitter profiles for the Embedded Systems Conference and SD Best Practices. We chose those two after extensive research on Twitter showed that their audiences were predominantly using the microblogging platform, whereas RFID World’s audience was not.

Secondly, we wanted to drive people to a social network. At first we thought about creating a Facebook profile for each show, but we concluded that doing this was in breach of the transparency we wanted throughout this process. Instead what we did was create Facebook groups for Embedded Systems, SD and RFID World.

For three months we Twittered news about the show, led people to the Facebook groups, put out press releases over Twitter and Facebook, added video/pics to the group and more. We also made sure that all of the URLs were included in emails from CMP to show attendees and exhibitors, invited our friends in the media and included all links within news releases.

During the actual show, we were live Twittering, linking to attendees who were Twittering and linking to bloggers at the show. We also took video and stills and posted to the Facebook groups continuously throughout the week. Additionally we created “Social Media Business Cards” that gave each attendee the URLs so they could continue the conversation online.

Tomorrow….the results and some analysis!

/kff