Put herd mentality to work for you

People care what others like them are doing.  Sometimes it is to get a sense of belonging.  Sometimes we compare ourselves to others to compete.  Sometimes it saves us time to know what others have tried or recommend.

In any case, this fact is really helpful to marketers.  Lots of exhibitors base a decision to enter your event based on whether their competitors are there…either consciously or unconsciously.  Your attendees do too, which is why many events let you see if not names, titles and company names of other registrants on their website or emails.

Look below for a great example of using information to change behavior as studied in the utility field.

Studies in Norway and Finland found that when customers received neighborhood comparisons, together with frequent electric bills and meter readings, they reduced their energy use by 5%-10%.

–Home Energy Magazine Online, May/June 1997

What if you received 10% more registrants because you announced who else was coming?  Or used audience segmentation to tell your CIOs what classes other CIOs signed up for, and to tell your purchasing department managers what other purchasing department managers did?

Having trouble getting people to travel?  Tell the prospects in California how many other Californians are planning to attend.

 

Rock concerts are events too

Great post by Keith Johnston on his Meeting and Event Thoughts blog on what event professionals can learn from the Dead.  (Previously known as the Grateful Dead.)

The best ideas come from Intersectional Innovation: combining ideas and practices across disciplines to come up with ideas that are truly new…not just the next incremental step.

Keith lists several things he learned by attending a Dead concert recently.  Among them are creating an experience rather than a concert, love your audience, change it up, choose best of breed suppliers.  My favorite, though, and the most counter-intuitive is:

Give it away and don’t care, it will only make people want more. Since the bands founding, the Grateful Dead have always encouraged concert goers to record, reproduce and share the material with anyone and everyone (as long as you do it with an open heart and for free). This is an important thing to note in this time of copy write laws and lawyers….you should give away all of your conference materials to anyone who wants them, even those who did not attend. It is good to reinforce the message for those that were there, and it makes those who were not there wish they were. Don’t be scared, try it, you will find that you are not hurting anything, you are only encouraging people to spread the word for you. You can’t buy that kind of publicity.

I couldn’t agree more.

 

Social media on Skittles

A Tweet recently sent me to www.skittles.com, which has a unique layout for its social media content.

Too few events and associations use social media to provide content for their websites…and it is surprisingly easy. Delicious is one way to tag articles relevant to your event or organization.  Then a simple applet/widget on your website automatically collects them for constantly refreshed content.

Skittles.com is basically a path into Facebook Updates and, separately, Tweets that use the word Skittles.  The Skittles portion of the website looks like a pop-up box: the meat of the site is the Facebook page and the Twitter page.

An opportunity for intersectional innovation here, for events and associations to learn from a consumer brand.

 

Godin says: Kindle as Community

Have you tried the widgets on Facebook and LinkedIn that track your reading interests and share them with your community? They recognize that reading is actually a social experience, where we recommend, critique and discuss what we’ve read with others. (My favorite is the ability on Facebook to throw a book at a friend.)

How much cooler would it be if we could include authors and publishers into that community? Where an author can say, hey, if you liked that book of mine, let me give you this other one. Publishers can promote a new unknown author through affinity marketing based on knowing what else on his list you’ve read.

Great blog post from Seth Godin goes into some detail based on asking: what if the Kindle were seen as a way toward engaging a reading community, instead of simply as a product?

 

Networking vs Community Building

The new The Intersection Blog has a post that sums up my frustrations with event networking tools like BD Metrics, Leverage Software, etc.  Obviously 21st century events should use technology to help link people together at the event–since talking with their peers is always the number 1 reason people attend face-to-face events, right?

I hope the software will work to facilitate appointments.  I root for it.  But I put a participation clause in the contract; because I know they never do get a high percentage of participation.  Everyone simply ends up frustrated.

Paolo Zeppa points out that the problem is that the value of participating doesn’t outweigh the cost. Its a hassle to register, and what do I get out of it? Instead, he says,

Imagine your event as just one touchpoint in a year-round, multifaceted dialogue that your company is having with its customers.

Now your attendees get value out of their participation, on many more levels, yet the “cost” of participating is so much lower.  Plus, the event gets reciprocal benefit by having a community to consult to help build a better in-person experience.