This is a guest post from Shane Haggerty, a fellow Columbus PR pro and friend of mine. As a former educator and school PR pro, Shane’s company specializes in education — school districts, ed tech startups and events. Recently, his team led a social media command center for one of the largest education conferences in the country. Read on to learn more about setting up and managing a command center like this, as well as the value it brings the event as a whole. Then, go follow Shane on Twitter.
I have often attended large conferences and left the events feeling like I missed out on quite a bit. With literally dozens of speakers, displays and sessions to attend, conferences can often times be overwhelming.
My company, Great Heights Marketing and Communications, was charged with fixing that issue for the 15th annual Ohio Educational Technology Conference (#OETC13), the third largest edtech event in the country, held in Columbus each year. With more than 6,000 people in attendance, over 400 breakout sessions, hundreds of exhibitors, product launches, and a “living lab” where students, teachers, and organizations display real-life technology, the event is quite a spectacle. However, even with all of this great programming, eTech Ohio, the hosts, found that participants were disconnected and unengaged. While they had used social media in the past as a backchannel, they were looking to use online platforms in a strategic way to boost conversations, increase interest and awareness of the event, encourage user-generated content, and engage conference attendees.
That’s when we developed the idea of #OETC13 Social Media Command. Social Media Command served as the official headquarters and “hub” of everything social media-related for the event in order to create meaningful conversations and engagement with conference attendees and the edtech community.
During the conference our goals were to:
- Monitor keywords and hashtags online and social sites. Monitor sentiment and reactions throughout the event;
- Respond to attendees and other interested parties in the social/online space with pertinent and updated information;
- Provide channels for attendees to express issues, ideas, excitement, and reactions;
- Promote original and curated content through social channels that include interviews, videos, photos, live blogging, Twitter Chats, etc.
Throughout the three-day event, my team managed platforms that included Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, a Tumblr blog, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest. We also invited attendees to stop by our command center to ask questions about and receive training on social media platforms. We hosted a live show from the command center called “#OETC13 Live” via Google Plus featuring special guests. The biggest hit of the event was our Instagram photo booth, where attendees could use our props to get their picture taken and tagged on our Instagram feed, which streamed live on a giant screen at the command center using a software called BYO Booth.
However, the project didn’t just include live event management of a social media command center. We also built-in pre-event and post-event content marketing strategies, media outreach, and other engagement tactics to build “buzz” before people arrived in Columbus and to continue the conversation after the event. Our pre-event tactics included hosting Google Plus Hangouts previewing the conference, hosting Twitter chats on conference topics, and curating content from the edtech space to position eTech’s social media platforms as a resource.
While we are still collecting data and building out our measurement report to deliver to eTech Ohio, we can share some immediate results that include:
- An increase in Twitter followers by 621 people;
- An increase in Facebook page fans by 228 people;
- Nearly 300 photos tagged #OETC13 on Instagram during the course of the three-day event;
- Nearly 5,000 tweets with the #OETC13 hashtag recorded;
- #OETC13 trended locally in Columbus on the first two days of the conference;
- An overall positive sentiment score of 68 (50 is neutral) according to Topsy with 1,300 positive tweets vs. 230 negative tweets.
Overall, this experimental project was a success. While not perfect, we believe our team laid the groundwork for how to successfully utilize a blend of media relations, social media, and content marketing to greatly enhance the live event experience.