Twitter followers – 3,100 | Facebook friends – 1,300

How many event planners offer this great communication tool to their clients?

It’s an easy way to make “real time” updates and allow your attendees a way to actively participate in your event. Your attendees will get more value out of their next event with a tool that encourages a higher level of networking.

Creating a twitter group for your event is easy and can even be part of pre-conference marketing.

It’s simply a plasma connected to a PC running any number of free applications.

Here is a free app that worked very well at an eLearning Guild conference last fall – TwitterCamp.

During this campaign, other social efforts were reduced and new customers expressed that they found this client via twitter.

In a subsequent 8 week period, 3 pieces of business were awarded and subscription rates increased from 79% to 92% as a direct result (based on customer input).

Effective twittering is more than obtaining followers.  Real effort has to be extended to find followers and “garden” them.  Many organizations fail on their social media efforts because they believe that users will build the community.  While users do add much content, that content and its contributors must be fed, watered, and weeded by the organization.

In this example, with our guidance, about an 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week was spent over a 4 week period aggressively seeking out “friends” (people you follow) to build a base. Online applications such as twitoria.com, tweepular.com, mytweeple.com, and twitter.grader.com were used as the “gardening” tools.  Once the base was established, about 5 minutes a day is needed to sustain steady growth.  An occasional hour every month will help continue growth.

For this client, very little tweeting was for done for promoting services.  Twitter provided a platform to “humanize” the client and build emotional ties with prospective customers.  The results above speak for themselves, and in this case, this was their most effective social media platform.  The client has a Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogging presence but Twitter returned the greatest benefits.

daily hits to each

It is the first commercial LEED building in the state of New Hampshire and part of Newmarket’s commitment to being “green”.  The hospitality industry has been embracing “green” meetings as a result of customer requests, being the right thing to do, and also because it is profitable. Customers understand that some green practices incur more costs and are willing to pay additional expenses.

As the globe becomes more “green” in business practices, costs will level out.  Some of that is simply due to logistics and infrastructure.

An important aspect of making “green” meetings and events more mainstream is raising awareness. At Newmarket, we help our clients by providing tools that make it easier to incorporate green practices in their day-to-day operations and offer green meetings and events to their clients.

Update: as of July 21st, there have been over 8,000 combined hits to this (Second Life traffic plus Flickr – Second Life traffic counted as an avatar being within 8 meters of the object for over 12 seconds)

Newmarket Sponsored Green Awareness in Second

This will be viewed by 5,500+ people a month

Your customers will see more and more virtual world use and will ask you about it. Be proactive.

To embrace what virtual meetings can do for your event offerings means looking at it as an additional resource you can offer.  Just like a plasma or any other resource.

For many sales departments this is an unknown entity and inspires some anxiety. We are here to tell you that there is no need to see virtual worlds as a threat or a big undertaking.  The media did a good job two years ago of painting worlds, such as Second Life, as “the thing” to be in BUT at a huge expense. But it does not have to be that big of a cost if structured properly and should be an added revenue stream.

Starwood and IHG received a lot of press with their efforts in Second Life and IHG currently offers bookable virtual meeting space.  They offer places to have small meetings complete with audio visual tools.

That’s one approach.  We like to look at virtual space as simply another function space for you. And one you can sell as an add on to your current packages.

We’ll discuss this more in the coming weeks and encourage you to do a little internet searching and get a background on what others in hospitality are doing right now (such as Virtualis).

Newmarket hosted eBay and Cisco for an elearning discussion

It’s nice to see that our hospitality friends and followers do not engage in these tactics. These tactics tend to clog your tweets with “I just got 100 followers today”, “get 1000 followers, check it out”, and so on. This defeats the purpose of tweeting. Instead, we find that most hospitality related tweeters chirp out good information such as great package deals, incentives to come to their property, and even special events in their region.

Those properties, meeting planners, and others are probably finding a true return on their Twitter efforts.

We have been experimenting with many social networking platforms such as Google Groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, blogging, Twitter, Flickr, Blip.tv, YouTube, CafePress, Wikipedia (as editors),  del.cio.us, plurk, technorati, and websites.

While a few of these are not strictly social, they provide the opportunity to raise “brand awareness” in the overall social community.

All the channels we use do add to our visibility and the key is to use the analytics that most come with to gauge your efforts. Twitter does not have native analytics, fortunately, there are third-party ones with our favourite being Twitter Grader.

Our HoteLearning Twitter is relatively new for us, but I have experimented on my own and will use that to illustrate effective Twittering.  It is all fine and well to have “good” analytic results, but the real test is the ROI from it.  ROI is difficult to gauge on many social efforts.

Anectdotal results may be the most compelling.

Dell credits over one million in sales over an 18 month period to an active Twitter campaign. In my efforts, I have seen 4 new virtual land clients and one sizeable virtual world project in the last three weeks. I do not anticipate this pace to continue, but it was proof that what I saw in the analytics translated to real dollars.

It can be hard to “fine tune” Twitter. The approach used to build a good following that adds business is similar to what I see in the hospitality Twitter leaders we follow.

We started by following several hotels and event planners and then looked at who they were following. By looking, I mean reading their profile and looking at how “fresh” their tweets are. If they are not active tweeters (silent for 30 days or more), there is little value in following them (these factors are used in Twitter Grader).

Twitter Grader looks at many factors, much more than simply a ratio of followers to following. While the first profile in the image below has double the followers and less than one percent the following of the second one, you would think they would have a higher ranking. But it is much more involved than that.  Who your followers follow, who follows them, the frequency of tweets, the links, hashtags (# these act as tags like in blogging), the @ messages, and more.

Using tools like Tweepular‘s Build Tweepularity may be tempting, but it leads to followers that “game” the system and add no value to your Twitter timeline. They also lower your score and rank. Tweepular does have great tools, such as No Follow Love, and we also use UnTweeps to remove “stale” tweepers. We are also vigilent in removing the people we follow if all they do is post on how to get more followers.

Use Twitter as it was intended to be used and your rank will improve. 

What’s your take on all the social networking out there?

Is it just for the birds?

Grab all of their eBooks here.

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Business cards are one of the possible channels to get your name out there (true social media?) and there have been many novel cards in the past.

Remember the stainless steel card phase?

They were about a dollar a piece and you could get them die-cut and they certainly made an impression (maybe that you had too much of your client’s money to spend!).

Mini Moos have been out for a few years but are still rather novel.  I use them personally and we have also used them as promotional collateral.  They are a unique size and have a tactile texture that makes most people want to handle them.  One thing we like about them is that you can have as many images on the front as you like.  Say you order 100 cards (about $20 plus shipping), you can have one, four, or 100 images on the front.

Mini Moos

Here’s an eBook that featured tips from three of our team members and is a valuable (and free) reference for anyone creating eLearning.

It made our job easy – if the course functioned correctly in IE, then it was ready for deployment. We really had no reason to cross the compatibility bridge till we came to it.

Recently, some of our projects have become completely web-based, and only delivered on-line to an unknown audience, and we really have no idea which browser or operating system our users are utilizing. Browsers such as Firefox and Safari have seen a signifigant increase in adoption over the past few years, and must be taken seriously. Below are some general browser usage statistics as of March 2009.

IE 6.0+ – 57%
Firefox 1.5+ – 31%
Safari – 6%
Opera – 1%

For us to ignore roughly 38% of our audience would be to ignore 38% of our potential customer base, and that was just not acceptable. Our eLearning needed to be cross-browser compatible and yours should be too. It was time to cross the bridge.

So in an effort to try to make our content available to as large an audience as possible, we created a cross-browser compatible interface. In terms of development, it may have taken a bit more time. We found though that we really didn’t have to make many, if any, sacrifices to our design or user experience. Infact, our interface could be considered simpler and more user friendly.

So what is the point of creating a cross-browser compatible user interface? You’ll be able to reach more customers, and those customers viewing the content on different browsers will have consistent functionality and a consistent look.

Failing to plan is planning to fail.