Twitter users trend older than you think

The New York Times has an article all marketers need to read:  “Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity?  Not Teens”.

Did you think that Twitter was primarily a tool for young people to stay in touch?

Actually, only 11% of the Twitter user base is 11 – 17.  Young people don’t need it.  They got hooked on MySpace and FaceBook before Twitter was invented and see no use for it.  They want to stay in touch with friends, not the masses of anonymity in the Twitterverse.

There are two interesting ideas in this.  The first is that it turns the accepted notion that technology trends always start in the young on its head.

The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.

Second, that we marketers need to be more analytical in our thinking about new media.  How many event producers are missing out on key technology trends because they think they are only for the young, and aren’t being used by their demographic?  The worst error in marketing is to project from ourselves.

Though Twitter’s founders originally conceived of the site as a way to stay in touch with acquaintances, it turns out that it is better for broadcasting ideas or questions and answers to the outside world or for marketing a product. It is also useful for marketing the person doing the tweeting, a need few teenagers are attuned to. “Many people use it for professional purposes — keeping connected with industry contacts and following news,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive. “Because it’s a one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.”

Forget what you thought about Twitter.  The fact is that its main purpose is to connect like-minded groups of people to discuss areas they have in common.  Hm.  Sounds a lot like an event.  But year-long.

 

Planners prefer face-to-face events

J Spargo recently completed a pre-show survey of the members of  Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International (HSMAI) that showed that the majority of their meeting planners felt that virtual meetings would never replace face-to-face meetings.

Here are the key elements of the physical experience they reported technology cannot replace:

1. Socializing and networking spontaneously
2. Helping attendees best put names with faces
3. Allowing more free and open dialogue between attendees and vendors/presenters
4. Training effectively via live and personal interaction
5. Paying greater attention to others when face-to-face
6. Engaging in real-time conversation that is not interrupted by technical glitches

What virtual events ARE good at is to cost-effectively extend an event’s reach to a much larger audience.

 

MPI experiments with a virtual event

Congratulations to Meeting Professionals International for the leadership shown in extending their July World Education Congress (WEC) with a virtual event. Not only did it allow MPI to distribute access to some content and exhibitors to those who did not attend, or continued access to those who did, but, as an event organization, it provided information and an example to their membership.

The decisions they made in how they did this exemplify the issues we all face in facing this new opportunity. What to charge for? How much to charge? Will it cannibalize existing attendance? What to put online and what not to?

Similar questions marketers face with every new technology.

There are no perfect answers, and we should not wait for them. We’ll only figure out best practice by diving in,  making the best judgments we can, and comparing notes.

Some of MPI’s decisions:

• The full $625 access pass for the physical event includes the virtual event. (Good call.)
• The Virtual Access Pass was $299. (About half price.  Logical.)
• The General Assembly alone was $19. (Hm.  I’d be inclined to make this one free.)
• The virtual event is open for six months.  (I bet this is partly to allow a down time between ‘events’ to build interest for the following year.

I don’t have their attendance figures.  Generally the combo physical and online events this year have seen similar attendance figures to what they expected without a virtual event (down slightly from 2008), but a much higher total combined audience.

Did it cannibalize attendance?  No way to prove it one way or the other, but it certainly did not create a major dip in physical attendance that hurt the event.

Every survey says that people prefer the physical event: and some simply can’t make it whether you offer the alternative or not.

 

Optimism and advice on events during the recession

There is some optimism and advice in a new whitepaper from Exhibit Surveys called Looking past the recession: Exhibition strategies for the interim (written by Skip Cox).

Optimism:

• Sustained audience quality levels
• Enhanced perceived value of exhibitions as a marketing tool
• Hints that a turnaround may start late this year

Of course, results vary by industry, with automotive, financial and construction events expected to take longer to recover.

The attendee data is actually excellent news, that were summed up as:

…while budgetary pressures within organizations will naturally reduce travel…the reductions so far would appear to affect mostly lower tier attendees.  Key people in the purchasing and specifiying process who truly value and utilize trade shows are still being sent to them.

On the exhibitor side, the worry remains that we have not seen the worst yet, as budgets for 2008 were set before the downturn, and we’re only beginning to see the effects of budgets written during the downturn.

When will it improve?

CEIR historical data shows that as national GDP improves the exhibitions industry will improve and will regain its vitality, albeit with at least a six-month lag.

Advice:

“Truly make your exhibitors your business partners”

For example,

• Make exhibiting less painful
• Act as a partner in sharing information and working on solutions together
• Work hard at preserving attendance–and certainly audience quality

“Truly provide value to attendees”

• Content, Content, Content

I’ve only skimmed the surface.  Do read the entire white paper, as it is packed with useful information.

 

Interactive meeting tool

There is a real trend toward adding interactivity to conferences…from encouraging Q&A to whiteboarding, breaking out into table-sized discussion groups, or giving the attendees a specific problem to solve.

But for some meetings, the interactivity is not simply a learning tool. Or an opportunity to contribute to the industry.

Sometimes it is the whole point of a meeting.

Like when a company is rolling out a new strategy or vision, and needs immediate employee feedback–both to improve the vision and to ensure full buy-in.

The June issue of Convene includes the article Faster Feedback, highlighting the abilities CoVision’s meeting software.  The idea is that after the presentation, each table group discusses the ideas presented, while a table moderator captures the key points on a networked PC.  A “theme team” 3-4 people who are skilled at seeing trends in responses, synthesize the collected ideas into a usable summary that quickly goes back to the presenter.  After a break the full group is already discussing how to modify or act on the original ideas.

Interesting that CoVision takes the automation only as far as it logically goes, but no farther.  Some day you can imagine pattern-recognition software replacing the 3-4 people in the theme team.  But I  would worry about whether that was an advantage.

It can be daunting to manage the process of really getting feedback from a large group.  In this case, Q&A would not get you there…and how many companies have decided that a lack of Q&A when they rolled out a new strategy meant that everyone was on board…to disastrous results.

This reminds us…there is no excuse not to get the group feedback.  There are tools to help.