online community building

Finding Your Rock Stars: Why a Community Outreach Program is Important

May 26, 2010 by Kari Rippetoe

Photo credit: DavidDMuir
How do you use PR to reach your buyers? Do you issue press releases and pitch to your media list of journalists, hoping to get a write-up or some sort of media exposure? Or do you reach out directly to the people who are actively buying and evangelizing your products or services and influencing hundreds or thousands (hundreds of thousands, even) other buyers via blogs, forums, social networks, news sites, podcasts, and other consumer communities – your rock stars?

Let me ask you another question: which one of these methods just mentioned do you think is more effective?

HOW TO: Use Foursquare for a Conference (or an Exhibit Booth)

May 19, 2010 by Kari Rippetoe

Tuvel Communications is the online PR firm for the NAB Show, and in addition to being the “voice” behind the show’s social media outposts (Twitter, Facebook pages, LinkedIn group), we also devised and implemented creative pre-show and on-site social media promotions to engage attendees, drive registrations and generate excitement.

This year Foursquare became a major player in the social media game, and although we did not implement a full-scale location-based program, we did monitor how people were using Foursquare at the show, plus we came up with a last minute on-site contest that utilized the geo-location social network. What we learned was quite interesting and makes all of us here at Tuvel very excited about the possibilities Foursquare presents for the event marketing and conference business(s).

11 Lessons Learned: Social Media & Event Marketing

May 10, 2010 by Kari Rippetoe

Here at Tuvel Communications, we have executed conference and expo social media programs for clients like the NAB Show and 1105 Government Information Group. We’ve learned several lessons along the way, and I thought it would be useful to get these thoughts down on digital paper to share with you so can be better prepared when it comes to social media marketing at events.

Start early. It takes time to build a relationship. You don’t want the first communication from your event to be about passing a promo code along! We always try to keep in mind the old Internet adage to give and then take. We typically like to begin outreach efforts 6 months prior to an event.
Create excitement! Content doesn’t create excitement, people do. We were recently charged with driving attendees to an expo. People love to win, so we created Twitter raffles and contests. People got really excited about winning a conference ticket. We also ran a recent Facebook promotion where ‘likes’ (aka: fans) were asked to post photos from past shows. People got excited about posting and seeing each others photos (especially the ones from shows 15 or more years ago).