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Gary Hayes’ Social Media Counter shared through Creative Commons license.
Today, StoryCorps, an independent nonprofit whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening, is celebrating the National Day Of Listening.
In honor of the National Day Of Listening, consider how you listen to your conference attendees onsite, during the conference?
How do you listen to your customers, members and conference attendees?
We’ve all experienced it. The hallways of the conference are buzzing with chatter about the event. Attendees are discussing what’s working, what isn’t, why the organizers planned it this way, what they are happy about and what’s discouraging them.
As meeting and event planners, we often wish we could be a fly on the wall listening to everyone’s discussions all at once. With today’s social media tools, we can engage in discussions with our registrants before, during and after the big event. Now, we can capture those hallway conversations and respond in real time. So, where do you start?
1. Create and encourage a culture of listening.
Listening is something that every staff member can and should do, and the organization’s principals should lead by example. Staff should listen in the hallways, invite feedback on evaluations and encourage attendees to provide comments and concerns to any staff member both face to face and through the social media tools available. The event is all about attendee, not you the meeting professional.
2. Develop a system for capturing feedback and ways to respond.
a. Setup an event presence in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social media tools.
In today’s web world, people go to several different sites to find information about an event. They no longer turn only to your organization or event website. They turn to their friends, colleagues and compadres. They also turn to the social media tools they use and you can help them by setting up “listening and chatting posts” within each social property. Twitter Tip: When using Twitter, identify one person to manage each event account and encourage them to list their name in the profile. For example Jeff4CVG09 meaning Jeff for CONVERGE 2009.
b. Decide who will be the champion for each account, keep the information updated and communicate to people within that network about the event.
Encourage the champions to provide outstanding customer service and do the right thing for the attendees when challenges arise. Let your team members know that you will back them with their decisions to provide outstanding customer service to the attendee.
Read the remander of my post, The Art Of Listening And The Science Of Responding on Event Manager blog.
Happy Listening!
Have you heard about the Dallas social media salad mêlée?
(Yes, this post has nothing to do with associations, events, or meetings. And yes, I’m a few days from a major event but I wanted to take a break from meeting minutiae. However, this post does illustrate how two businesses took take advantage of the social media sphere!)
Back to my story.
Did you hear about the social media salad struggle? Two rival salad restaurants got into a social media scuffle over who could get more traction from Twitter and Facebook offering salads named “The Joe.”
The Joe? Yep, “The Joe,” in honor of Joe Flowers, my co-worker, @unhatched who also tweets for work as @JoeNeedsDental.
Joe is a Gen Y, geek lovin’, design dashing dude and confessed foodie-holic. He loves his salads and frequents two local salad eateries on a regular basis: Greenz and Snappy Salads. He’s also a snarky Twitter Tweep with some clever tweatise
The Backstory According To Joe
Joe’s been working with the owners of Snappy Salads trying to convince them of being a little more aggressive with their social media marketing. He’s even offered to do a Tweetup at Snappy Salads and guaranteed to get a crowd in their door on a typical night of their lowest sales. Snappy Salads has been slow to respond or take Joe up on his offer. I would even go as far as say that Snappy Salads isn’t drinking the social media kool-aid…yet.
This week, Joe tweeted from his personal account a “Did You Know Tweet.” Did U Know That Snappy Salads would deliver to offices for lunch?
Greenz Restaurants was monitoring the web and intercepted the tweet. They responded to Joe that they also delivered.
Did you catch that organization leaders? They were monitoring the Twittersphere watching for people in Dallas who used the word salad. They saw an opportunity to engage with a person about salads and watch what happened…
Joe, being one never to miss an opportunity to engage in social media rivalry, responded with a one-upmanship of tweets:
Ooooh, it appears we have a battle between @snappysalads and @greenzsalads for group orders. . .first one to name a salad ‘the joe’ wins 
Snappy responded with:
Both restaurants took him up on the offer although @greenzsalads beat @snappysalads to the harvest. Greenz immediately offered their traditional southwest shrimp salad called “The Joe” for 15% off on Wednesday, September 9, one day after the discussion began. Snappy said they would name their next feature salad “The Joe.”
Greenz took the friendly rivalry to the bank and social media marketing space. They wrote on their Facebook fan page about the Wednesday special “The Joe.” They tweeted about it several times. Other Dallasites picked up the tweet and RT’d it. I posted the special on my Facebook page and begin tweeting about it too.
Where was Snappy Salads? Being a little pokey instead of snappy? Picking lettuce in the garden? Washing their spinach?
Well, many of us watched as the Twitter tussle continued. Although, Greenz beat Snappy Salad back into their farm fields.
As Paul Harvey Would Say, “The Rest Of The Story.”
Joe went to eat lunch at one of the Greenz locations in honor of “The Joe” salad. Look at what welcomed him at the entrance.
Amazingly, Greenz had the same welcome at two of their locations.
When Joe entered and claimed to be “The Joe” of “The Joe,” the people behind the counter said, “Yeah, right. You and five others today!” Interestingly enough, “The Joe” was a landslide hit for Greenz with many people, including myself, ordering it for a meal.
Moral Of The Story
Don’t knock social media until you’ve given it a whirl and planted it’s seeds in your garden. With the right offer and customer engagement, your customer will become your evangelist and you will reap a harvest.
Confession
Our office frequents both Snappy Salads and Greenz for lunch. And, I admit to being an avid evangelist of both dining experiences as well. I also did not get any free food for writing this post and I can boldly state that no gardens were harmed in the process of this writing.
I’m knee-deep in meeting details right now. AV minutiae, BEOs, exhibitor specifics, food and beverage guarantees, special hotel requests, speaker spreadsheets, signage, tradeshow dilemmas.
I admit it. The devil is in the details.
Some event professionals love the details stuff. I don’t but know that the details are the framework for an excellent and successful event. And, I am fairly good at the detail stuff. Personally, I like the strategic, creative and education side of meeting and event planning. I really dig the education design of an event.
Friends and family know that a couple weeks before each big event, I go into meeting hibernation and only come out for sleep and food. Don’t call me and ask me to meet for lunch. I can’t make it. Don’t expect me to answer all my Facebook and Twitter requests. I’m reviewing BEOs. I walk and sleep the meetings minutiae. I even have nightmares that I’m hosting a huge event and no one shows up!
Ultimately, it’s all worth it. It’s all about the attendee and their experience. That’s why I do it. Not because I like control. (Which I do!) But because I like to be a conduit for a rich experience for delegates and attendees. I like seeing the “Aha” moments when the lightbulbs come on and people get the right information for them. I like the “Wow” experiences when people have that moment of enjoyment during difficult times.
So, since my blog writing will be limited in the coming weeks. Here’s a great video from The Case Foundation called: The Click Daily Show On Social Media. It’s a great tutorial for all associations, nonprofits and eventprofs everywhere. You may have already seen it. And if so, just smile with me that I finally saw it.
If you’ve not seen it, enjoy. And see you on the other side once my big event is done.
We’ve all heard the jabs and criticism: “Social media is a fad and will eventually die.”
One of my favorite negative stabs came from a Baby Boomer at a corporation. He said to me, “Oh, all of you connected to your mobile devices and computers don’t get it. It’s a fad. It’s going to eventually implode and you’ll be left in a fetal position not knowing how to communicate.”
I smiled, winked and said, “We’ll see. I know change is hard.”
Another Gen Y employee in the crowd said to my critic, “That’s OK. You’re going to retire in five years and we’ll take over the company and run correctly any way. You’re a lame duck.”
Ouch!
Well, this isn’t a post about the clash of the generation titans at your organization. This is a post with some facts about the social media revolution. Welcome to the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution. It’s the Social Media Revolution.
Take a look at this video produced by by Erik Qualman author of Socialnomics:
Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)
1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser
For the source of the stats, visit Socialnomics Blog.
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