Corporate Meetings & Conventions EVENT and LinkedIn strictly for business. “I have a big network on Twitter to discuss event trends and different resources in different cities that I can get help with,” she said. Jackson Marketing also posts videos on YouTube, linking them to the company website. “We posted a video of a motorcycle stunt on the deck of the USS Midway that we filmed at an event in San Diego. It’s a great way to draw traffic, to show what we do.” Other South Carolina event planners rely more on Facebook as their main social media tool. “We use Facebook analytics to get an idea of who’s talking about what and who’s interested,” said Debi Schadel, who with Tracie Broom runs Flock and Rally, in Columbia. Schadel and Broom not only create event pages on Facebook but also use their personal networks of Facebook friends to promote their clients’ events. “You can hit your audience much more precisely,” she said. Pulling traditional and reliable data from social media sources can be “tricky” at first, said Jordan Freeman, interactive marketing specialist at Trio Solutions in Mount Pleasant. When developing an event strategy Trio Solutions starts with a Facebook organization page to create interest and push out the information.
“I could pull out a big variety of demographics such as information on the users on the page: their interactions, gender and age, city they’re in, language they speak, whether they’re check the wall or responding to a question or looking at photos or the information page,” said Freeman. She can also see where subscribers are linking from and whether they found the page on Google or Twitter or somewhere else. “On the interaction side, I can tell what posts are getting the most feedback, how many mentions the event is getting, how many views overall,” Freeman explained. In addition, said Freeman, “you can build a fan base. The goal with the event is to drive people back to that organizational page anyway.” The means may be different, but
whether you extrapolate data via traditional analytics or social media feedback, the ends are the same, said Schadel. Even hashtags on Twitter are data mines because they allow all comments about an event to be grouped together. “Anybody who wants to check what people are saying in the moment can search on that hashtag and see all the conversations that are going on,” Schadel said. For the planner, this is both a real-time look at the perception of an event and a real-time way to push information. Freeman echoed other South Carolina event planners saying social media is a must. “Now that everyone is using social media of some type, when we go into planning mode we try to incorporate as many outlets as we can.” EVENT
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