Can I Get A Woo Hoo For Virtual Events?

February 7, 2011

Introduction

At department stores and supermarkets, I’m often asked to make a small donation to a charity at the cash register.  Truth be told, I often choose not to donate. The other day, however, I encountered a scenario in which 100% of customers donated – and, I went to the checkout counter asking if I could donate.

How They Did It

The store was able to accomplish this with a fairly simple tactic.  After each donation, the cashier would get on the loud speaker and proclaim, “We just got another donation to the American Heart Association! Can I get a woo hoo?”  The request was then followed with a loud “woo hoo!” from a number of people.  While shopping, customers would hear these announcements every few minutes.

How could I possibly relate this to virtual events? Well, like an email promotion for your virtual event, the donation was a call to action, in which potential donors needed to understand the value of taking action. Let’s consider some of the particulars.

Be Different

Announcements over the loudspeaker have been done before, but the use of the “woo hoo” was different.  Every time the “woo hoo” was announced, I got a chuckle out of it and other customers did as well.  While requesting a “woo hoo” for your virtual event may not be effective, consider ways in which your marketing and promotion can stand out from the many emails in everyone’s inbox.

Reward Users

Give value back to your users.  For the donation, the reward was very basic and yet, customers continually opted to receive it.  When I approached the cash register, I told the cashier that their “system” was quite clever.  Her response was, “So, do you want your woo hoo?” The donation, while important, become secondary to the acknowledgement.

Involve Your Team

At the store, managers had party horns – when a “woo hoo” was announced, the managers would yell “woo hoo!” and then blow the party horns.  It felt like a New Year’s Eve party and the horns added to the awareness and fun.  For a virtual event, encourage your team to share and promote the event within their social circles, both offline and online.  With the vast reach of social networks in the online world, your own team can make a big difference.

Make Participation Infectious

This can be challenging to achieve – after all, you just can’t “make a video go viral”.  That being said, I believe that our natural inclination is to “follow the herd”, which is one reason the donation did so well.  People donated because everyone else was.  But, it had to be easy (the donation was simply added to your purchase at the register) and it had to be well promoted and shared (the loudspeaker).  With these elements in place, along with “being different”, the store got every single customer to donate.

Conclusion

Instead of doing the same thing over and over when marketing your virtual event, consider new and creative ways to involve your audience, reward them and keep them coming back.  If you can achieve infectious participation, you won’t need to send out as many email blasts.

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Posted by Dennis Shiao

To Promote Your Physical Or Virtual Event, Think Outside The Inbox

November 21, 2009

Source: flickr (User: Mzelle Biscotte)

For many, email is a constant stream, an endless loop – we receive too much of it, both “important” emails addressed directly to us and marketing emails that are sent as a result of opting in (or not) to past content, webinars, white papers and marketing lists.  Outbound, push-based email promotions face the following challenges:

  1. Imperfect delivery rates (mail server outages, spam filters, etc.)
  2. Decreasing open rates
  3. Perception of spam – if recipients don’t remember opting in to your list (even though they did), they’ll ignore your email – or, opt out from your list
  4. List fatigue due to overuse of marketing lists
  5. Decreasing click-thru rates (CTR) – once you’ve made it past delivery and open, recipients are clicking less on your embedded offers

Adding to this mix is the fact that many users now interact with brands (and by extension, promotional offers from brands) via their social networks, instead of email.  A user is more inclined to respond to an @reply or direct message (on Twitter) compared to a conventional email blast from a marketer.

Given all this, it surprises me that email is still a primary vehicle for promoting physical and virtual events.  Event marketers have much to gain by thinking outside the inbox.

Social media and social sharing

Your first step outside the inbox should be in the direction of social networks.  Build a presence in social communities and you’ll find that you naturally generate interest and awareness to your event.  Previously, I wrote about leveraging Twitter to promote your virtual event.  As Ian McGonnigal (GPJ) astutely pointed out, those same tactics apply quite well to physical events as well.

In addition to Twitter, consider the following:

Create a LinkedIn Event entry for your event

  1. Create a LinkedIn Event for your event – a LinkedIn Event page allows you to post relevant information about your event on LinkedIn (e.g. date, event content, etc.) – LinkedIn members can then indicate whether they’ll be attending, not attending or “interested”.  This can be quite useful, as folks often attend events based on knowing whom else will be attending.  By creating a LinkedIn Event, you’ll receive the benefit of having LinkedIn auto-recommend your event to other members, assuming their profile is a “match” with the profile of your event.  Members may also utilize search and find your event.  More info can be found on the LinkedIn blog page announcing the Event feature.
  2. Post videos to YouTube – it’s the #2 search engine after all (behind parent Google), so having event videos posted on the site will generate traffic from the millions of folks who visit YouTube.com each day.  Record videos of your host, keynote speaker, group publisher, etc. talking about your upcoming event – if your keynote speaker has a prominent name, your videos will attract interest from users who search on that name.  When you have a critical mass of videos, create a YouTube channel.  About.com has a neat guide on how to do just that.
  3. Create a Facebook Fan page for your event – with a fan page, you’ll generate interest for your upcoming event – and, you’ll build an ongoing community that you’ll be able to continuously leverage!  The All Facebook blog has a nice guide on how to build a Facebook fan page.
  4. Leverage blogs – author a blog posting on your corporate blog – or, if you don’t have one, ask a relevant industry blog site whether you can author a guest posting.  Alternatively, leave a comment on postings from relevant industry blogs with a pointer (link) to your event.  The key here is not to over-promote your event – your first goal is to provide useful and relevant content/commentary with your event being a secondary (and subtle) mention.

SEO and in-bound links

If you pay attention to search engine optimization (SEO), your event page(s) will receive “organic” traffic – that is, traffic that finds you, rather than you finding the traffic (i.e. the “pull” from users searching, rather than the “push” from your email promotions).  Think about the search keywords that you’d want to associate with your event [e.g. when users are performing searches] and make sure the content on your event page is rich in those keywords.

To increase the page rank of your event page, increase the number of inbound links that point to your page.  A few simple ideas:

  1. For all of your social media efforts (listed above), make sure they provide links to your event page – shazam, you’ve just created a number of inbound links
  2. For event staff (especially those with large followings on Twitter), ask them to temporarily point the “web site” URL in their Twitter profile to the event page
  3. Ask partners, associates, even clients to post a URL from their web site(s) to your event page
  4. Add a “Share on Facebook” capability on your event page – this may result in page rank benefit as search engines begin to index Facebook wall posts – until then, what this really does is generate awareness and outreach of your event to users’ Facebook friends.  If a potential attendee visits your event page and shares the page with her 100 Facebook friends, then you’ve just received 100 free advertising impressions

Advertise

Some affordable options to consider:

  1. Facebook advertising – purchase targeted ads on Facebook.  For a physical event, you can target by geography (e.g. starting with users who are geographically close to your event site).  For a virtual event, geography is less important, so you may want to target based on attributes in the users’ Facebook profiles.  You can pay per view (of the ad) or per click (on the ad), so the terms are flexible.  eHow has a good overview on Facebook advertising.
  2. Content syndication – purchase web syndication with online publishers in your industry – get your event listed in their directories, content sites, etc.  They may charge you per click or per lead (completed registration).  Not only can this generate registrants for your event, but it also improves your page rank by generating more inbound links to your event page.

Hopefully I’ve covered a few “outside the inbox” options for you to consider – certainly continue to promote your event via email – however, use some of these options to lighten the load a bit on your email marketing lists.

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Posted by Dennis Shiao

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