Using tech to create buzz for events

Illustration of social media marketing. Emerging technologies have had a huge impact on the way events are planned and implemented. FILE PHOTO

What you need to know:

  • Studies have found that the use of event technology can create up to 20 per cent increase in attendance.
  • Livestreaming expands your audience beyond event capacity. If you haven’t already, it’s time to learn how to livestream.
  • Technology provides a powerful platform to influence, not only the people who attend your event in person, but beyond.

Events such as workshops, meetings and conferences have become big business in Africa, thanks to growing economies.

Conferences are regular occurrences in academia, professional fields and religious groups.

A well-planned conference has a long to-do list. There is the conference venue, participants’ management, materials, technology and refreshments to think about.

On their part, audiences have higher expectations than ever before. They are looking to be engaged and gain personal and organisational value.

How are organisers getting smarter in applying integrated tech-tools to simplify events management?

PUBLICITY
Emerging technologies have had a huge impact on the way events are planned and implemented.

Studies have found that the use of event technology can create up to 20 per cent increase in attendance, while reducing related costs by up to about 30 per cent.

For events drawing speakers and participants from different cities or countries, technology can provide important forums for engagement and advertising.

As a matter of fact, communication with the speakers about what is expected of them is critical.

Speakers want to clearly understand the nuts and bolts of the event so that they can tailor their message.

But rather than just communicate with your speakers via phone, email and texts, an audio-visual interaction produces better results.

SKYPE
With tools like Google Hangout, Skype or Zoom, you can have multiple people on a video conference.

Use this to build rapport between the speakers and the entire event team so the conference projects a truly unified and cohesive image.

For events with diverse speakers, it would help to ask them to provide a pre-event video where they talk to the attendees about the upcoming event and what to expect.

Post these videos on your social media to generate publicity and encourage people to register.

In preparation for the event, the organisers can tweet about the event and add status updates on both Facebook and LinkedIn.

LIVESTREAMING
When the conference gets under way, give the participants a good experience.

Make sure they have reliable internet to e-mail, tweet, chat and other functions.

It is also common to stream events live so that other interested people can follow.

Livestreaming expands your audience beyond event capacity. If you haven’t already, it’s time to learn how to livestream.

Encourage attendees and staff to share the livestream with friends who can’t attend in person.

They can invite people to join Facebook Live events and tweet links to their followers.

DRONES
To augment virtual participation, camera drones are becoming an incredible technology to capture and relay aerial videos and pictures. These help create a holistic experience of the event.

If the conference is open to the public, ensure that you have set up a Twitter hashtag, which users can type to share snippets of information and documents.

Make the hashtags known to attendees. Encourage the attendees to use Twitter for their note-taking, using the hashtags as they tweet.

The rallying call of every event, especially a conference, is to bring people together and to influence them.

Technology provides a powerful platform to influence, not only the people who attend your event in person, but beyond.

But first, you have to know how tech-savvy your audience is.

The writer is an informatics specialist. [email protected] @samwambugu2