Panel Moderator:

• Meghan Murphy, Community Programs Manager, Social Media Marketing, Twilio

Panelists:

• Brianna Haag, Marketing Manager, Eventbrite
• Lauren Sherman, Marketing Manager, Taskrabbit
• Emily Castor, Community Manager, Lyft
• Tony Mataya, Developer Relations, Twilio

Meghan Murphy not only lead the discussion but also organized the event. She wrote a fantastic recap, with the help of my passion for note taking. Here are some of my thoughts:

‘Your budget should drive everything.’ It sure does!! That’s an easy statement to make but it really takes an experienced event professional to put together a great budget. You need to consider every little detail from the very beginning. The budget really builds the framework for an event, it helps you understand what you can afford.

‘Sponsorships are nice because you don’t have to plan the event but can access the attendees.’ Sometimes full marketing budgets don’t allow for you to plan your own company event. By partnering with a company, sponsorships give you a chance to achieve your marketing goals without all the headache of planning your own event. Invest in a process of how to participate in events as a sponsor and figure out what your criteria is. What is the sponsorship value? A few things to consider are:

1. What are our goals? How will they be achieved by this sponsorship?
2. What is the quality of the projected attendees? Is this your target audience?
3. Relevancy–does this make sense for my company?
4. Does the sponsorship exhaust the team?
5. How is this event going to help our brand?

Know when it’s a bad opportunity. You can get a sound first impression from the event organizer or sponsorships sales associate. Are they willing to work within your budget to create a unique experience for your company? Does it feel like a partnership or a dictatorship? You can also give credits or other barter services rather than declining all together.

Community managers constantly attend events and have their own constructive feedback that you can learn from as well. Always consider what you don’t like about events, what stood out among the rest, and what you cannot live without. These things will help drive you to the overall success of the event.

I encourage you to reach out to your community and start your own event meetup. Ignite your own discussions about events, discussing what you have learned from them, what your biggest challenges are, and what obstacles you hope to overcome.

The post When doing events, Mom always said, ‘Think before you act’ appeared first on Reinventing Events.

This month, our friends in the Northeast endured a different type of event, a historic winter storm. Storm Nemo produced record snowfall, power outages for over half a million customers and halted travel in and out of the region. All events require pre-planning and more so when you’re expecting a natural disaster. In either situation, they bring people together as you plan and prepare as best you can. It’s a team effort to pull knowledge and resources to take on a 600-person conference or to recover from a storm that brings 24 inches of snow.

As event professionals, how to do we balance the needs of a community recovering from a storm while also figuring out how to move forward with an event that has been in the works for months? Last Fall, Hurricane Sandy barrelled through the Northeast devastating New York City and the surrounding region.

The New York Times article, Marathon Presses On Amid Backlash, describes the tension bewteen a city in need of resources and the decision to not postpone the world’s largest marathon. As the event grew near, the NYC Marathon was rebranded as the Race to Recover in to raise money for relief efforts while others decided to take a stand and support the community by volunteering rather than racing. Although there is no easy course of action, the people came together for one common purpose–rebuilding community.

As natural disasters loom, I am reminded of my experience evacuating Hurricane Ivan, which luckily spared my city for that hurricane season. As I sat in bumper to bumper traffic on my way north to Little Rock, Arkansas, I replayed the hours before evacuating and wondered how I could have better prepared while trying to shake the nauseating feeling of what the storm could bring. Driving back into the city, I was thankful for my neighbors and co-workers who offered valuable insight so that I could properly prepare my home before leaving town and, of course, so I wouldn’t jump into the car with one water bottle and half a bag of M&Ms. The pre-planning is crucial but it’s the post storm that showcases the support and love of a community. As we embark on the second half of this month of love and friendship, spread the love to your team or community and, of course, check your emergency preparedness plan!

The post For the love of…planning appeared first on Reinventing Events.

It’s the beginning of 2013, which means that conference season is coming up quickly. As we start to plan for this year’s upcoming events, it’s important to remember key tips and tricks for speakers to help alleviate the planning headaches.

Being a main keynote speaker for a conference is not easy. Execution is key and it’s always smart to learn how to better do so. I recently stumbled across this informative blog post from Mike Brown, Founder of The Brainzooming Group. He gives tips on bettering your keynote performance from the perspective of the attendee in the back of the main keynote hall:

Don’t Do These Things

• Never turn all the lights off to do your presentation in the dark. Darkness may make your videos pop, but you’ve made yourself invisible to the audience.
• Use the microphone. You may think you have a booming voice, but don’t use all of your boominess only to not be heard in the back half of the room.
• Let us know what in the world you’re planning to talk about, even if it only means something to you. At least with some advance notice on what you’re covering, we may be able to think ahead and create some personal connection to your material.
• Spend less time on your credentials. You’re a keynote speaker. I’m confident the conference organizers picked someone qualified. The longer you take to justify your importance, the less I believe it, but hey, that may just be me.
• Even if you did just type your presentation this morning, don’t call further attention to your indifference regarding ensuring we have a valuable learning experience.
• We’re not talking while your video plays; you shouldn’t be talking either. When you insist on talking, there are two things going on that make no sense. One at a time is more than enough, thank you.
• Put your important point at the top of the slide, not in small type at the slide’s bottom. With this room’s low ceiling, none of us in the back are seeing any of your “important” points.
• We’re not interested in information so specialized that none of us will ever be able to do, imagine doing, or even learn something from hearing you talk about doing this work.
• Do us all a favor and get us involved in your keynote presentation – even a little bit. Maybe ask for questions. Maybe ask a question. At this point, people are already writing very vicious things on the evaluations. Making them raise their hands to answer a question could slow down their ability to write bad reviews about you.
• If you’re going to emphasize to us how important emotion is, you should actually show some emotion in your presentation. Funny might be a good emotion to introduce first. While you’re at it, maybe you could be a little humble and show some humanity. All three of those would be much appreciated.
• Before you get done with your keynote presentation, give us at least one thing we can take away and use from your session.

It’s crucial to have a run-through of all keynotes in advance. This gives the AV and technical director plenty of time to work out any kinks, surprises, or switching from multiple devices (such as laptop to iPad to iPhone). Invite keynote speakers to arrive a day early and host a speaker VIP dinner to introduce them to each other and other VIPs attending the conference. Get to know your speakers so you understand what their needs are.

Keynote speakers aren’t the only kind! Being involved in a fireside chat or a panel discussion involves a certain level of preparation and focus. As the producer, you need to provide panelists a clear understanding of the event format, types of questions that will be asked, and what is expected of the panelists. Introduce the panelists ahead of time so that they get to know each other beforehand. The more chemistry your panelists have with each other, the better.

Most important of all, send all of your speakers a detailed logistics email to ensure they have all the information they need a few weeks prior to the event and include the following:

• logistics
• dress code
• room setup
• expected attendance
• who is moderating (if applicable)
• panel theme (if applicable)
• type of questions
• panel expectations

Your goal in the email is to make them feel confident that the experience will be well organized and positive so they can focus on their own performance. I love Guy Kawasaki’s blog post on How To Kick Butt On A Panel and often link to it in the email to the panelists. It’s a great list of tips and tricks to achieving a successful panel.

It’s also important to assign a speaker handler to each person (keynote, moderator, or panelist) and CC them on the logistics email. The speaker handler also greets the speaker on-site, escorts them to the speaker ready room, and makes sure that any last minute details are communicated effectively. The speaker handler acts as the liaison during the conference or event.

Whether it’s a keynote, fireside chat, or a panel, make sure to include a little Q&A time for the audience to get involved and ask their questions. Also encourage speakers to participate in the event as attendees, if time allows. After the event, make sure to include questions in your post-event survey about each of the speakers. Share the feedback with the speakers so that they can learn from their experience.

What are your tips and tricks for speakers? We’d love to hear from you.

The post Speaker tips and tricks appeared first on Reinventing Events.

So your business has taken the great plunge into the world of social media. You’ve set up your company’s Facebook page and have even tweeted a few times, but where do you go from there? The first step to creating an effective online presence is establishing your online goals. What do you hope to accomplish with social media?

Emily Olson, co-founder and visionary behind Foodzie.com which was acquired by Joyus.com. At an event she spoke at, she shared that a business’s online presence is most effective when divided equally in three parts: promoting the business, interacting with others, and becoming a thought leader in the industry.

Inspired by Emily, we have defined our social media goals as the following:

FAME- Become known for thought leadership in the industry. To do so, we share ideas with our followers. We have tweeted pictures of cool centerpieces and blogged about our favorite productivity apps. To measure fame, we ask ourselves, “how influential are we? Are followers retweeting us, commenting on our Instagram pictures, and repining our photos on Pinterest?”

BRAND- Promote and establish Reinventing Events. To promote our brand, we update our followers about our latest projects, post pictures of our events on Instagram, and tweet about team outings. We measure if we are broadening our reach by gaining new followers and fans.

RESOURCE- We use Pinterest to gain new visions and inspiration. If we find a great idea for a cocktail, we will share it with our followers. We are constantly updating our boards with new ideas. If a client asks us for a unique lighting design, we can show them our lighting board as inspiration.  We strive to be of service to the community and the industry.

Keeping track of new followers, retweets, mentions, comments, likes, etc., will help you answer those questions and help you shape your plan so that it is effective in meeting your goals.

We use Hootsuite to help us to measure our online outreach. With Hootsuite, we can send and schedule Tweets, monitor mentions, retweets, and view favorited tweets. It also allows us to search Twitter using keywords like #Eventprofs and #ISES. It can manage multiple social media platflorms at once. We like it because we can view our Twitter and our Facebook on the same page.

If your business is looking to jumpstart your social media outreach, first define your goals. Then, find a helpful tool like Hootsuite to help manage the load. Finally, develop thoughtful posts and ideas to share with your online audience. We’re just getting started with our plan, but you can find us online at:

 http://twitter.com/reinventevents

 http://instagram.com/reinventingevents

  http://pinterest.com/reinventevents/

 http://www.facebook.com/ReinventingEventsLLC

The post Goals for Social Media appeared first on Reinventing Events.