KEEP IT SOCIAL

As with any conference these days, the key is to encourage broad participation outside the conference walls. You know you’ve been successful when people who aren’t at the conference feel like they are missing out as their Twitter and Facebook streams fill up with highlights. The difference with an online conference is that if you can build enough buzz in the first few sessions, people still have an opportunity to register and join for the rest of the day. We saw several instances of this as “on the spot” registrations started to pick up because of social media activity.

Throughout the day and in the days following the Summit, more than 2,000 tweets were recorded using the official conference hashtag, #MDS11. In fact, the Twitter presence was so powerful that a subgroup of participants created a weekly #millennialchat to follow up on topics of interest from the Summit and turn it into an ongoing conversation.

Here are some suggestions to help you keep it social:

1. Designate social media correspondents. Social media correspondents were tasked with keeping the communications happening in real time during the conference. They highlighted interesting quotes from speakers and participants and helped provide additional context for people who may not be at the conference. This ended up being a great role for our interns, as they were able to identify interesting moments throughout the day and help keep the conversations going on both Facebook and Twitter.


2. Create, publicize and use an official hashtag and Twitter handle. We found that Twitter was one of the most powerful tools to bring the conversation to the public and beyond those who were watching the Summit live. In fact, in some cases we received “on the spot” registrations from people who wanted to join the Summit based on the great Twitter traffic they were seeing.

   

3. Blog, Blog and Blog some more. We’d suggest finding bloggers who have an active presence in the space you are highlighting and can rally their readers to get engaged in the conversation in the months and weeks leading up to and following the conference. A few of our designated bloggers also provided live reports from sessions on their blogs as a way to take the conversation beyond the conference participants.