You may remember that I posted a while back about the Ethical Corporation’s Corporate Governance conference, which is next week (16-17 June, in London – if you haven’t booked your tickets, it’s not too late…)
Apart from encouraging you to go, because I do think that this will be an interesting and very timely conference, I thought I’d point out how they’re using social media to promote the conference.
Ethical Corporation have set up a LinkedIn group where people can raise topics they want to discuss, and get to know each other a little before the conference begins. This has been up for a while now, so there’s been plenty of time to get involved. And – obviously a best practice here – the group is linked to from the main Ethical Corporation site, which both authenticates and promotes the group.
Ethical Corporation have a well established Twitter account, with Nick Johnson (head of conferences) tweeting. The account is independent of this conference, so Nick already has a following of over 1000 people (including me) to communicate with.
One of the many things he’s using this account for is to advertise the conference, and to offer a discount to those people following him on Twitter. This is a great concept, though not unique to @ethical_corp, as it targets exactly those people likely to be interested in attending the conference – his followers. @communicatemag used Twitter last week to promote their conference by retweeting to win tickets, and since theirs was a social media conference, this was an ideal mechanism for promotion.
Based on observing Nick’s tweets, he’ll be setting up a hashtag (#) for the Corporate Governance summit, as he did for the Responsible Business Summit (#rbs09) – this means that all the tweets about the Corporate Governance summit can be collated and followed by Twitter users. This way interested people can find out what people make of the conference – the backchannel – whether they are attending or not. And @ethical_corp live-tweeted the last conference themselves, so I’m sure they’ll be doing that too. Again, there’s a link to the Twitter account from the main site and back again – authenticating the Twitter account.
Ethical Corporation also have a Facebook page, which they’ve used in the past to promote their conferences.
Clearly they will have used offline promotion techniques too, but these seem like good ways of finding those of us who are online and interested in corporate governance. This blog post, too, is discussing their conference … it all helps.
Anything else? What other social media techniques have you seen companies use to promote their events?
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
Linkedln, Twitter, Facebook are most established and well known ones. My Space is under-represented and used scarcely, now and then by music people. In Ireland Bebo is popular among younger population but I personally think for something concrete and credible it is a waste of time. There is also HI5, but truthfully I have never heard of them before.
I have seen companies using Flickr and YouTube for event / service promotion, it could give a personal dimension and touch to your project. Additionally, there are a lot of so called “SEO experts”, no doubt they are capable of driving figures your way, however the number of a quality reader / target is very much in question. I hope that helps.
Regards,
Eduardas
Thanks Eduardas. I don’t know about HI5 either, but clearly a company would need to use the method/s best suited to their audience in terms of demographic and location. I like the idea of using Flickr and YouTube; you’d have to find a way of ensuring consistency of message across all media, and a way of pulling it all together too, perhaps.