Effective marketing tools—for free? For those who have invested possibly millions of dollars in proprietary media and systems that facilitate meetings, it is hard to believe that something offered gratis—which is the single common feature of such diverse Web creations as YouTube, MySpace, and Second Life, podcasting, blogging, and forums—can be anything more than a fun distraction. "It's early days for most of this," says Deborah K. Gaffney, director of conference planning at Washington D.C.-based Tax Executives Institute. "As an association planner with mostly boomer members, we are not anywhere close to using any of this."

Echoing a number of planners who were contacted for this article, Sandy Biback, of Toronto's Imagination+ Meeting Planners Inc., shrugs, "Who has all this time?" Nonetheless, Biback, a frequent poster to listservs and forums, has dabbled in YouTube, Facebook, and blogs, and has a Second Life avatar. Why? "My students told me to!"

Kimberly Ruby, meetings and events manager at the Philadelphia-based engineering and construction firm Day & Zimmerman, also believes that social media best fits the norms of Gen Y and beyond, while professional trade show consultant Candy Adams, based in Vista, CA, underscored the generation gap even more bluntly: "It's difficult for us old farts to comprehend how ingrained these [resources] are for those much younger than us who know nothing different."

But social media networking isn't just a generational fad, it's a cross-generational, cross-pollinating phenomenon that's changing the way we think. And meet. And market.

Generation Gmail

You would expect to find David Ohana, a Yeshiva University accounting student who lives in New York City, using Facebook and the invitation-only network Doostang to help him select conferences and seminars. But then there's Richard Markel of the Sacramento-based Association for Wedding Professionals International: At 64, he's definitely a boomer; but Markel has a MySpace page that he uses to network with prospective wedding planners, and a YouTube video to generate anticipation for his conferences. Markel, who set up his MySpace page in midyear 2006, says, "We are finding it a very cost-effective method of informing people and businesses on many subjects."

"We're all living in a digital age," notes Max Kalehoff, vice president of marketing for New York-based Nielsen BuzzMetrics (a division of The Nielsen Company, of which SM is also part). "Our marketplaces are digital, our communications are digital, our entertainment consumption is digital, our interaction with other people is ever more digitally linked." BuzzMetrics measures the online activity that occurs when people blog, podcast, post to forums, or network on sites like MySpace and Facebook. These social media transactions (also known as "consumer generated media" or CGM) are the most trusted forms of information, says Kalehoff: "Peer recommendations [like CGM] are highly linked to behavior and are connected to major decisions that we make in our lives."

"These online tools are what's changing things the most now," comments Corbin Ball, a technology expert and speaker based in Bellingham, WA. CGM is putting the force of the Internet behind traditional word-of-mouth. Denise Suttle, assistant director of convention services at the Albuquerque CVB, receives advice from hundreds of experts on industry-related forum groups like MiForum (which is administered by the Nielsen Business Media) or MeCo—mostly from people she's never met. "MiForum gives me immediate access to a trusted source of information whenever I need it, anytime, on virtually any topic related to my work," she says.

Mouthing Off

There's no lack of opinions on the Web. "Nine months ago," says Kalehoff, "we did a survey of 50,000 online households. We asked them a series of questions about their adoption of CGM-type platforms to get [an idea] of behaviors that signify content creation, and . . . we identified three quarters as being content creators." The conclusion? "We're all becoming content creators."

Conventional wisdom says that each word-of-mouth recommendation influences the perceptions of 10 people. The difference between CGM and traditional word-of-mouth is sheer volume: If you multiply 75 percent of BuzzMetrics' 50,000 households—37,500—by 10, you have a potential marketing reach of 375,000 households.

But, for better or worse, not all those mouths are saying the same thing. "One of the misconceptions out there," according to San Diego-based Rick Calvert, CEO and cofounder of the First Annual BlogWorld & New Media Expo, "is that this is a unified community—it's not. It's thousands of separate communities that use blogging and podcasting as tools to get out whatever their message might be."

Calvert is launching his event this November, and he expects to attract 20,000 bloggers and new media users to attend within the next few years. "What we're trying to do," he says, "is create a marketplace for this new world of commerce and ideas that is being born right before our eyes." Calvert has listed BlogWorld with Yahoo's Upcoming, on Meetup, and on Zvents, is running ads on various blogsites, and, he says, "We are creating Facebook and Twitter pages now." Still, as a seasoned trade show professional (he is a CEM and producer/director of sales for the Association of Woodworking and Furnishing Suppliers), Calvert believes he knows what attendees want: They want to go to Las Vegas.

Location Is Everything

"Our intention," says Calvert, "is to be a national—then international—event. Since Las Vegas is the number-one trade show city; we thought it was the place to start." So far, the blog chatter that BlogWorld captures on its website with Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds from other blogsites that mention interest and/or participation in the show bears him out (two randomly chosen bloggers agree that Las Vegas is "better than Wisconsin in November" and "better than Ontario, CA"). This not only generates excitement for the event, it adds to the show's "curb appeal" along the Information Superhighway; and that attracts search engines like Google.

"If you can get up in the Google rankings," says Jon Mandell, New York City-based COO of the recently launched Confabb website, "you're going to drive a lot of traffic to your site." Social media and blogging have a lot of links that go back and forth, he continues, "and that's what the search engines love. So the more active the attendees and the organizers are in using the site, it'll be that much easier for people to find it and for you to get the news out there."

Confabb, which now has 35,000 listed conferences worldwide—and hopes to ultimately accrue 60,000—"layers" a social networking interface over a database. "Not only can you find the shows on Confabb," says Mandell, "you can interact with the organizers and with the people attending a show; see details about a show; see ratings and reviews of everything down to the networking, the venue, the sponsors, the speakers—even the swag." Also: "There's a blog or discussion for each conference in our database that can be used by the attendees to ask questions and to interact with other people. There's an events tab for people who are planning a little side conference or a cocktail party—networking scenes that aren't really part of the main agenda. Most importantly, there's what we call our media tab. We pull in blog feeds from Technorati, videos from YouTube, photos from Flickr, tags from del.icio.us, and news through Google and Yahoo."

BlogWorld is listed on Confabb; so is the 6th Annual Asian Diversity Career Expo, which was recently held at New York's Madison Square Garden. According to show organizer Won Kim of New York-based executive recruitment firm, Asian Diversity Inc., "This was the first time that ADI employed social media to promote the show: We had a couple of interns post on forums and create event groups on various social sites." Although Kim bases this year's high caliber of exhibitors and attendees mainly on the fact that "our brand is reaching the higher-ups in the Fortune 500 sector," he perceives a greater potential for social media, and he plans to hire an event coordinator who will utilize social and media networks in a viable way. "I believe we may get even better candidates by exercising our reach in such novel social media as Doostang, Zoodango, Facebook, mediabistro, and popular blogs."

And now, the down side

If social media is so great—and it's free—why isn't everybody using it? Well, they are, and that can problematic.

Even Ohana, the accounting student (who attended the Deloitte National Leadership Conference in Arizona last summer and searches social media for more networking opportunities) warns, "With everyone promoting online for events and conferences, people may disregard these invitations as spam and just consider them obsolete." Yes, says Kim, "A user can be so inundated with ads and other marketing attempts that the last thing they want to read about or click on is another 'visit me' ploy."

"The Internet is now huge," says Kalehoff. "Consumer attention is extremely difficult to pin down. Consumers are elusive; trust in traditional institutions is declining—that includes government, corporations, academic, and editorial."

What You Pay For

In the meetings industry, "traditional institutions" means associations, hotels, and CVBs; and these are being scrutinized by their consumers—the meeting planners—who are indeed having trust issues. "As I requisitioned the check the other day for the dues for the professional association to which I belong," says Gaffney, "I thought to myself, 'Geez, the [MiForum] list is a hundred times more valuable to me at this point in my life than this association.' " Adams agrees: "Not one association that I'm a member of offers anything close!" And Suttle, who belongs to a large industry association (to remain nameless) says, "[It] charges me more money for dues and to attend the annual convention simply because I work for a supplier." By comparison, she adds, "On MiForum, we are all cherished colleagues, without this artificially imposed hierarchy of importance or respect that, I believe, the association's pricing structure implies."

Of the planners contacted for this article, only a handful could mention any social networking resources or other tools that were brought to their attention by associations or suppliers—which is not to say that these segments are ignoring new and social media and its implications. Meeting Professionals International, which recently convened its World Education Congress in Montreal (July 28-31, 2007), kicked off with a keynote speech by Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, and held several educational sessions that covered Web 2.0 programming and social networking methods. "MPI is developing blogs on their website," says Corbin Ball, who also spoke at WEC, "as well as ways of engaging people in self-forming groups that don't follow the standard chapter structure." McLean, VA-based Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International (HSMAI) has added social and new media categories to its Adrian Award program for marketing.

But, since social media trades in information—give up your name, address, likes/dislikes for free e-mail, Web pages, etc.—from the suppliers' point of view, it represents a potentially serious loss of income for membership organizations and others that maintain databases of "leads." And some suppliers, like Marc Reede of Los Angeles-based Nationwide Speakers Bureau, are openly skeptical of social media's professional viability. "Some of those YouTube videos look like they were taken with a cell phone!" he says. "If you're a corporation looking to book a speaker and you see a video made with a two-camera shoot, and then you see a speaker on a YouTube video—well, the YouTube speaker might be a better speaker, but the two-camera video is likely to give a better impression." Having said that, Reede is currently promoting a speaker who got his start on YouTube: "Jeff Henderson—they call him 'Chef Jeff.' He's got a best-selling book out, called Cooked. Will Smith is going to star in a movie about Jeff, which will probably be out in a year or so. When I first met Jeff, he had taped himself, had put it on YouTube, and was getting bookings from that."

"F2F 4EVR"

"Within six weeks of the MIMList debut (the listserv that became MiForum), people wanted to meet," remembers Joan Eisenstodt of Washington D.C.-based Eisenstodt Associates, LLC, who served as the administrator of the MIMList and now MiForum. "And so we did, at many of the industry meetings." Even social media's strongest proponents like to meet up in the flesh. When Confabb's Mandell was contacted for this article, he chose to schedule a face-to-face meeting because his offices are nearby and, he says, "I don't think anything can be as effective as a face-to-face meeting." Likewise, BuzzMetrics' Kalehoff says, "What's the primary reason that people attend events? I would say: It's networking and meeting potential customers. Least important on the list is to go see new products."

However, both Mandell and Kalehoff agree that new and social media's advantage is prolonging relationships beyond the face-to-face encounters. "I think that social media is creating a new idea of continuous perpetual events," says Kalehoff. Adds Mandell, "We're giving attendees a place where they carry the conversation on from year to year. It's not, 'Oh, the conference is over—see you next year,' it's 'Let's carry the conversation to online—can't wait to see you again next year.' " g
This page is protected by Copyright laws. Do Not Copy