The BusyEvent Blog

Chuck Zettle asked a really good question today, on LinkedIn.  What got me to stop and read it was the title: Ahh, Linked in . . Oh, and Facebook . . . Plaxo? No wait Twitter! Um, Myspace? YouTube! Naymz, Xing – AHHHHH!!!! Seems a bit overwhelming – what works for you?

And below, our response:
Chuck . . . what a GREAT title, about fell off my chair!

As a general philosophy, we look at all of these as communications channels which have their own strengths. And, much like I’ve heard all of my life, “pick something and pour your energies into it”, we’ve done that with the tools we use.

So, since this discussion is occurring on LinkedIn, I’ll share with you what our company does related to our social media focus and why we’re following the path I’ll describe, below.

Regarding general communications and out reach, we have two blogs:
1 – www.busyevent.com/blog focuses almost exclusively on items specific to our company. New product rollouts, “we’re hiring” announcements, general ideas, etc…
2 – http://busyevent.blogspot.com focuses on the events industry in general, and our general observations about it, the people in it and other industry specific topics. There may be some overlap from our company blog, but we try to keep them separated.

In both instances, our blogs are the ‘official and professional’ voice of the company. It’s written in a particular tone and focuses on specific items.

Our general outreach tool is Twitter. It’s the short blasting communications system that also is used to RSS the blogs plus, we have a Picture Of The Day (POTD) typically photos from events we’re running or clients we’re working with or sometimes a picture of the sunset. It’s definitely a more ‘personal and personality’ driven communications channel and offers immediate feedback unlike the blogs do.

Taken together, these two tools form the core platform of our social media outreach. But, as you’ll note, this is ‘outreach’ based and that then leads us to the ‘bidirectional’ tools we use.

LIVE Video streams are occurring at almost every event we manage as well as in our offices and even while we’re traveling from place-to-place. Sometimes these are password secured but usually, we’re live streaming in the open. Because the streaming video service we use has a chat feature, it’s fun to be able to share an event and get immediate conversations going. For some events, we’ve had as many as 200 people ‘viewing’ at once and the conversations were amazing. We also use video streaming when we conduct training as well as just turning on the cams and letting people ‘peer’ into our world on an any day basis.

Another 2-way system that we utilize are our Wiffiti tools but they’re more focused on at-event interactions. As such, while it’s a bidirectional’ tool, it’s only exposed to the people that are at an event and therefore has a limited audience. Take it for a spin at: http://www.tinyurl.com/busyevent-wiffiti

Finally, because of our industry, we participate in a variety of events industry specific networks, the best being Julius Solaris’ Events group on LinkedIn. Generally, this is a ‘push’ communications system for us, although, we’ve had good luck getting involved with conversations that have legs and we’ve learned alot from them.

So, because there are so many social networking tools out there, it’s easy to get lost in the menagerie but since we’re focused on a few and then really ‘work’ them, we’ve seen good general results.

Our next steps, and we’re actually in the process of hiring for that position right now, is to engage a PR/Writer/Social Media Pro ( http://www.busyevent.com/blog/?p=81 ) to increase our frequency and validity and perhaps spread our wings a bit into traditional media while keeping the core focus on the tools listed above.