Exhibitor 2010: Morning Session Notes from Echelon

OK, so today marked my first ever Exhibitor show and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the level of engagement among the other attendees.  Also, I have to applaud our competitors, a few of them at least that exhibited at the show with what I felt was a genuinely original approach to reach the many trade show coordinators, marketing managers and event professionals in attendance.

Eric and I represented Echelon by participating in several of today’s conference sessions.  Below you will find a few notes that I took during the session.  Forgive me because I’ve left my notes largely unedited.  I’d prefer that you experience what I was thinking during the presentation and encourage you to key in the conversation at any and every section that you’d like.

Session: Marketing Communications to Social Audience Engagement – The Changing Event Landscape (On Twitter here, #EX10SM)
Speaker info:
Paul Salinger (@psalinger)
Desiree Lehrbaum (@lumendesiree)
Kelly Graham (@KellyAGraham)

DS: Seek first to understand than to be understood (from 7 habits of highly effective people).

KG: Give clients platform, tools, and education.  Create a certification program.

PS: Create communities of people and facilitate peer-to-peer sharing. Defining success in the social sphere:

• The people that are actively talking about your brand and actively engage them.
• Building advocacy through those relationships.
• Add in to the conversation when it’s appropriate.
• Building r/ps takes dedicated time.
• Small companies that commit to building brand and personal r/ps through social media find most success.
• Social marketing b/c part of your job — requires a cultural shift.

KG: getting over the hurdle — social media is a/b transparency.

KG: starting a program to do list:

• Who is your audience?
• What are they talking a/b?

PS: More on transparency:

• Publish to all channels simultaneously to encourage sharability.

• The idea that social marketing jeapordizes intellectual property is a misnomer, once something is out in the public domain — it’s public.

DL: how do you deal w/negative comments?

PS: negative comments are opportunities to build r/ps. Main thing is that you respond to people.

DL: it’s a/b being heard.

KG: social media is online word of mouth advertising.

DL: tools for measuring social marketing success:

KG: still searching for ROI.

• One way is measuring active conversations (i.e., how many people using the hashtag for an event).
• Pre, during and post event related conversations.
• Length, amount and quality?
• Influence: how far has the conversation gone?

My overall takeaway:

This session wasn’t the most insightful presentation that I’ve seen on social media but can say that I feel the panel was just getting into something more substantial when the time ran out on our session.  Unfortunately, Eric and I had already committed to another session; otherwise, we would’ve stuck around for the second part of the session.  It’s my understanding that the panel was to lead the audience through a team/brainstorming session.  Did any of you happen to catch this session???