10 Types of Content We All Crave

When I saw this infographic on Facebook the graphic had lost its attribution, but it wasn’t hard to source it back to InfiniGraph’s Facebook page, linked here.

All event producers are Content Marketers.  We attract buyers by our content, exhibitors by our buyers.  It all starts with our content.

Content takes lots of forms.  Conference sessions, certainly, but also contests, exhibitors, conversations, demonstrations, parties, keynotes, discussion rooms…  It is our content that makes our events must-attend.

This graphic gives us a probably unscientific but excellent checklist of ways to delight with your event’s content:

1. Content that reveals secrets.
2. Content that reminds us that dreams can come true.
3. Content where David defeats Goliath.
4. Content that reminds us that we matter.
5. Content that confirms our assumptions
6. Content that has unexpected twists.
7. Content that tells us a story.
8. Content that challenges our assumptions.
9. Content that inspires us to action.
10. Content that makes us laugh or smile.

Let’s use this list to critique our events and inspire our new initiatives!

I particularly like numbers 4 and 9 because the most powerful thing events do is help us be part of something larger than ourselves.  This gives our lives meaning, and inspires us in our careers.  And it is very hard to get this emotional high outside of the national industry event.  It can be your key unique selling proposition against local events, the internet, publications, and, worst of all, inertia.

 

Community management

As social media develop, whether used by consumer marketers, business to business marketers, or associations, it is increasingly clear that real success hinges on the idea of Community Management.

While there is a certain amount an existing employee, perhaps a junior marketer, or someone in the content realm, can do in their “spare time”, a vibrant online community needs a level of nurturing and development of a professional Community Manager.  If you are the person at your association or for-profit event that handles your Facebook, LinkedIn and/or Twitter presence, you are by default this person.  And whether it is your full-time job (congratulations!) or you’re trying to fit it into your “real” job (the norm still), there are tricks to the trade to guide you to the support of your organization and an active community that fulfills your organization’s goals.

There is an interesting web community for such people, called The Community Roundtable, “a virtual table where social media, community, and social business practitioners gather to meet, discuss challenges, celebrate successes, and hear from experts.” They have  a great blog to subscribe to, and hold various events to help community managers with both their external strategy, but also with the internal politics and sales process to bridge the various silos required to bring an online community to life.

Their thinking about community management is highly structured in the Community Maturity Model and provides a useful benchmark for where your organization is, and what your next steps are. Many of my clients are stuck in Stage 1: which is a great start, but without a road map they are not clear on what the next step is or how to get there.

Each phase of the model is exemplified by certain behaviors. “The Emergent Community suggests that there is some usage and experimentation…going on–whether formally or informally. Having defined budgets, community management resources, and policies are a hallmark of having an established community.”

Details behind what members of their community are doing in each phase are outlined in their great whitepaper, The State of Community Management 2010, which can be downloaded free.

Some of the Key Takeaways:

• One of the biggest struggles for community managers is how to communicate and build support for their strategies–not in building the strategy itself.
• Difficulties in developing social media and community strategies often expose issues with core business strategies, particularly as they relate to cross-functional approaches.
• Community managers must be experienced facilitators and translators, continually encouraging empathetic and balanced perspectives as long as participants are within the community’s guidelines.
• All social initiatives derive their value and benefit by enabling relationships between individuals, but this does not happen at scale without human intervention.
• A common misconception is that community management is a position best suited for a younger employee because they natively understand social tools.
• Evangelism for the community, both internally and externally, is a core community management skill.
• Community management is increasingly a distinct and separtae role that is explicitly responsible for interfacing across many fnctions to ensure continuity of care for community members.
• A goal of 100% adoption should not be a community’s primary goal.  Ensuring that those that are participating are getting value is a far more valuable goal.
• Let conflict brew if the participants are maintaining a healthy and respectful dialog. Conflict encourages engagement…
• Instead of directly repurposing content from one format to another, create associated content.

It all comes down to active management: no community is self-starting or self-managing.  Every organization needs to continually seed the online community with great content and strong moderation and leadership.

 

Museums also exploring audience engagement and online

I was interested in read “The Met’s Plans for Virtual Expansion” in The New York Times last Friday.  We don’t always think about the event industry and the museum business having that much in common.  Unless you’ve ever Googled “Exhibition Industry” and realized that the term applies to both.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is a behemoth of art galleries, and shares with other museums two core values:

• Attendance: Drawing an audience into the museum
• Outreach: Making its collections available to the world at large

Much as most associations seek to draw attendance to the annual event, as well as share information with the larger community it serves.

To meet these values, they share many more specific goals with event professionals:  attracting the young, enticing those not quite in our community to join it, getting visitors to come back for multiple visits, and to do all these things, to create a memorable and valuable experience for attendees.

So what can we observe and learn from the Met?  They are embracing two new and related concepts:  “visitor engagement” and the digital world.

The Met has created its first app, to accompany the guitar show. It is embarking on the daunting task of wiring its huge building for Wi-Fi,…, so that patrons will eventually be able to read and watch videos about art museumwide on their phones and tablet computers. And it is venturing as never before into the rapidly evolving field of what museum administrators call “visitor engagement”: a social science aimed at trying to reach every patron, from the first-timer to the seasoned scholar.

The newish (two years) director of the Met, Thomas P. Campbell used a phrase I’d love to hear from more of my clients: “responsibility to our audience.”  This is in contrast to the previous way of thinking that was closer to “if we build it they will come”.  Which may have been true for them in the past.  And certainly it was crowded when I was there this past weekend.  But as I AM hearing frequently from my most savvy clients: things change. Industries change. The economy changes. The needs of our communities change. And we who serve our communities, whether art or an industry community, cannot be complacent continuing to do things the way we always have.

Bonnie Pitman, the director of the Dallas Museum of Art, considered a leader in the field of visitor engagement…classifies museum patrons as either “observers, participants, independents or enthusiasts”

Is this true at your event as well?  How many more attendees will come back, and tell their colleagues to come if they are participants instead of observers?

Therefore, Mr. Campbell views “the museum’s next frontier to be less physical than philosophical and virtual: a change in the Met’s tone and public face, making it a more open and understandable museum, largely by thoroughly rethinking the way it uses technology.”

Some of Mr. Campbell’s innovations include:

• Numbering the galleries and providing better wayfinding (basic navigation can never be overlooked)
• Wi-Fi throughout the “building” (actually 21 reasonably independents structures)
• Smart phone apps for specific exhibits (starting with the current guitar show)
• Launching a re-vamped web site this summer
• Creating online records of every one of the 1.6 million objects in the museum
• Creating “Connections”, a platform of audio and slide shows with museum curators talking about the art on a personal level

Here’s my big take-away: we often, usually unconsciously, build our content, our navigation, our promotions, and our websites for the cognoscenti.  The insiders, like us, who already know a little bit about our show, our industry, the art.  And then we wonder how to attract the newbies.  Rather than starting with a blank slate and the fundamental question of “what is our responsibility to our audience?” in the broadest sense of audience (not those who come, but those who should come), and follow where that leads us.

 

Virtual event vs physical event wars heat up

On24 caused a bunch of drama in January over an issue most of us thought was settled.  In virtual events vs physical events, the industry has pretty much said “both”.

The interesting questions are no longer “which?” but all the other question words.

• How to best integrate the experiences?
• What business model(s)?
• When to hold the virtual event relative to the physical?
• Who will come to the online version?

We thought the vendors of virtual event platforms understood that, when On24 went after the Consumer Electronics Show’s claims about the efforts they were making to hold a green event.

The main quote from their January 3, 2011 Media Advisory was:

The idea that lots of people attending a major conference like CES can be positioned as reducing the industry’s carbon footprint is the epitome of ‘spin,’ in my opinion,” said industry analyst Paul Ritter, Vice President of Interactive Media Strategies.

Followed up by detailed statistics about the carbon footprints of events.

ON24 has calculated the carbon footprint and environmental impact of the typical virtual event.  According to Persson, with expected attendance of around 125,000, a virtual CES would have the following results:
· Carbon emissions would be reduced by some 179,000 tons.
· That’s the equivalent of the annual impact of around 940,000 trees.
· Waste would be reduced by over 1.4 million pounds.
· 136 million air miles would be saved.
· Average number of pieces of paper saved by the use of digital documents: around 2 million.

So I see two problems with this.

First, CES was comparing the efficiency of attendees and exhibitors taking many meetings during their time at CES compared with the travel to individual offices required to conduct that business otherwise. A perfectly appropriate comparison, similar to the one proven repeatedly over the past few decades of the cost effectiveness of holding multiple conversations all at one place.  There are strong market-driven reasons people continue to prefer to meet face-to-face, and, when possible, save time and get more done by doing so at industry events.  The attack is silly and unfair.

Secondly, most associations and major media companies are looking at virtual events as an adjunct to their physical events.

Why would they want to work with a company that disparages their industry?

 

Charity efforts at events

Last week I was at the PCMA New England annual meeting, which started off with a workshop on charitable volunteering led by Brad Lewis, the Executive Director of the PCMA Education Foundation.

It has become a major trend in our industry to have some type of charitable opportunity or community outreach at our conferences and tradeshows.  It is a great way for informal networking and creating connections between attendees.  It appeals to the basic human instinct to give back.  It leverages large groups of people in one place at one time.

These events are also difficult to do and even harder to do well.  At the Association for Financial Professionals meeting in San Antonio last month they sent 60 attendees to a local community center where they spent a half day doing whatever the center needed:  they divided up into small groups who painted several rooms, cleaned up old storage areas, and worked on landscaping.  By the end of the day the center looked terrific.  It would have taken a year for them to get it all done with local resources.  The participants were excited and felt great about the accomplishment.

On the one hand, that’s a major success!  On the other hand: that was 60 people out of 5,000.  Should the goal to have more people participate?  If more people participated, though, what would they have done?  And while fixing up a community center is really helping a community, it doesn’t play to the strengths and talents of this particular group.  Is there a way for financial professionals to give financial expertise to the community?  Or for other groups representing other fields to give back in a way that uses their talents?

We put these and other questions to the guest speaker at the PCMA event:  Rick Wallwork, Associate Director, Boston Cares.  Boston Cares is an organization that knows the ins and outs of volunteer and charitable organizations in the Boston area and are experts in where the needs are.  They help events that come into the city, or organizations based in the community whose employees want to do community work, navigate how to find the right place to contribute their energy.  They function as matchmakers between supply and demand.

Rick identified several important points to consider:

1. The main need is to feed people. Whatever the talents of an organization, the main, most troubling issue in most cities today is malnutrition.
2. Most charities primarily need some help over extended time.  A food distribution center, for example, needs a dozen people a day…not 100 for a half day.
3. The community center example is a good one for ways an event can help with a large number of people over a short time.  Or a summer camp or school.  When the large number can be divided up to conquer specific tasks.
4. It costs money to donate time.  Many organizations do not realize that not only does the community center need people to paint, but they also need the paint.  So be sure to budget for the costs of all supplies when donating time.
5. Volunteering in ways that meet the organization’s mission or skill set is harder but not impossible.  Yes, they can probably place a few financial professionals in community colleges and evening school programs to teach family budgeting.  But perhaps a larger group could create materials to be given to be used in grade school classrooms to teach basic family budgeting concepts.

There are also organizations that specialize in matchmaking needs with volunteers that are “skills-based volunteer” organizations, like Points of Light.  Again, place a high volume, short-period of volunteers can be an issue, but they can help place programmers, marketers, and financial execs with organizations that specifically need them.  I work frequently with open source developer conferences, who are familiar with the idea of “hack-fests”.  A group of programmers together in one room for a day creating software and eating pizza.  I wonder what they could do for an organization that needs an application?

The best example that was given was of an architects organization that had a contest for creating model buildings out of canned food.  At the end of the event all that food was donated to a very grateful food bank.  It created buzz, involved the entire membership base, and specifically benefited the community in the way it most needed.  Fantastic.