When it comes to using them for meetings, are these social media sites hot-to-trot or going the way of the dodo?
QR Codes
“It depends on the industry,” says Amanda Wood, a director in the marketing and communication unit at SmithBucklin, an association management company. Companies with a print or visual focus — such as publications — may have more luck with QR codes because of the nature of their business and their audiences.
Jessica Levin, MBA, CMP, president and chief connector at Seven Degrees Communications, says they’re still very useful for large conferences.
“My favorite use is to put them on name badges with contact information so someone can scan them and get their contact information [directly] on their phone. At a conference that just works so well,” she says, adding that putting QR codes on speaker presentations or other conference materials can appeal to tech-savvy attendees while also cutting down on paper handouts.
Another interesting use? “At Disney, there was a reception and they had signature cocktails — and they had the recipes on QR codes right on the bar,” says Levin.
But the crucial thing to keep in mind, Wood cautions: “People are going to be using their mobile devices, so if you’re sending them to a site that’s not mobile friendly, that’s a big no-no.”
Google+
According to Wood, Google+ “really hasn’t taken off as much as was thought. We’re aware of it and there are some [companies] using it, but not as heavily as the other [tools].”
Manpreet Wadan, vice president of business development for Social27, a provider of event management, marketing and networking tools, says he no longer really uses Google+.
However, “it’s still viable,” Wood adds, saying that research suggests the audience for this tool is younger, tech-savvy males. So planners that are organizing meetings or conferences for this demographic may want to consider setting up a Google+ account and using it for networking and promotional purposes.
Slideshare
Slideshare is a free online service that allows users to upload and share — either publicly or privately — PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDFs. Wood says it’s a popular social tool for conferences.
“Something really cool to share is conference presentations after the event,” she says. “You can set up pages that almost act as an aggregator; you can pull in a feed from Twitter, you can show a blog roll, you can have the history of your presentations.”
This is especially useful if the conference has an education component, because sharing materials after the event helps reinforce the learning, she says.