At last month's Sun Microsystems-hosted JavaOne Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, the company used several social networking technologies to help build attendance, gain exhibitors and sponsors and increase the event's lifecycle, while also keeping the event budget flat compared with 2008.
Sun Microsystems' experimentation with various digital and social media enabled the company to draw more than 15,000 attendees and 95 exhibitors to the annual paid event.
To supplement the company's targeted e-mail newsletters and online marketing campaign, the event marketing team aggressively used such emerging media as BlogTalk Radio, podcasts and Twitter to generate sponsorships, entice new exhibitors and enhance their pre- and post-show marketing value.
For the application and software community that attends JavaOne and similar conferences, user-generated content is becoming increasingly important in adding value to the experience of attendees and exhibitors.
"That is the direction that the community is taking, and our audience is definitely gravitating toward that in terms of how they promote the event and get the attention of their customers," said Sun Microsystems senior marketing manager Betsy Hansen, who oversees Sun's large events, including the free-attendance CommunityOne, which runs concurrently with JavaOne and the company's Customer Engineering Conference.
Through the JavaOne Twitter handle, Sun announced new exhibitors and sponsors with links back to the main JavaOne Web site. Sun found that its Tweets promoting exhibitors and sponsors drew more traffic to its Web site and Twitter handle. "When we Tweet about them, they reciprocate the Tweet and we seem to have built buzz with the viral effort of that tool," Hansen said.
Twitter use enabled the company to greatly increase its pre-event marketing reach. JavaOne Twitter followers numbered 500 in the early marketing stages, but by the time the show started, the handle had 2,500 followers and more than 2 million "second-order followers" recorded through Web-based Twitter data tracker Twinfluence, said Scott Schenker, vice president of client services, program strategy and experience design at George P. Johnson, which assisted the Sun team with JavaOne planning and marketing.
"With six to eight months worth of work, we went from essentially nothing to a magnitude of 2 million people who we can touch through a single Twitter based on the re-Tweeting that takes place," Schenker said.
Emerging technologies like Twitter also can provide planners and event marketers with an aggregated database of attendee and exhibitor demographics and profiles and track their interaction with the show's content. For JavaOne, Sun used data aggregator site Twazzup and learned that visitors came from 694 cities, and 72 percent were from outside San Francisco.
Schenker said the new technologies enable planners to go to an environment where "the global impact of being able to figure out where your audience is makes you realize that a lot of it extends virtually and it's not just in the traditional forms of marketing."
Technology also enabled Sun to give its exhibitors enhanced visibility. European mobile communications and media provider Orange, for example, ran a contest that Sun promoted on the JavaOne Web site, to which attendees submitted more than 100 applications.
Sun's pre-event marketing work extended outside of social media and into search engine optimization. Hansen said that the paid contextual word searches on Google gave Sun the "ability to totally hone in on a specific technology or area and do some targeted advertising."
Originally published July 27, 2009