This is going to be fun as many of you, including myself, have so many questions about driving Registrations, interest and buzz around your Events.

As a baseline for this post, I am asked so many times, how do we do this? I hear things like “I can’t get anyone to register for my Event” or “I can’t seem to get people interested in our Events”. I get it, and hopefully this may help you to generate buzz, awareness and registrations for your Events.I assume you have some experience of the tools I am mentioning here, and if not, let me know and I can guide you on who can help.

I have also provided this as sections, with some explanation as to why you would want to do this.

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Reason: Pre-Event Plan

Influencers typically talk about a few subjects passionately. They have also built a very tight community that want to hear about the topic they speak on. They also listen to these Influencers as an expert, and what they say is taken as credible most of the time, because they have built themselves up as a trusted source.

1. Finding the Influencer

- Find the Influencers who talk about your keywords, products or services as well as Competitors.
- If you don’t know your keywords, use your Brand or Competitors names into Google’s Keyword Tool
- Look on Listorious, type in the keyword and see who comes up as a prominent person who discusses this topic
- Look at their Twitter Profile, go to their website they have in their Bio, click and look to see what type of Community they have built. Is there engagement? Are people commenting about the topic or keywords? If so, put them on the list of Influencers.
- Repeat this process by “Followers” on Listorious to see who may have the reach of an audience that follow them that may be close to your topic

2. Connecting with the Influencers

- Look at the Communities they have conversations, such as LinkedIn Groups, Twitter and Facebook Like Pages
- Connect with them in these Communities
- Mention to them in these communities that you are now connected, with something of interest around the topic or keyword
- Become a RSS Subscriber or Email List Subscriber to show the love
- Retweet their content around your topic or keyword that your audience will find useful
- Share information you find helpful that they may share with their audience, such as White Papers, articles or Blog posts you have written

3. Motivating the Influencers

- Once the Influencer has some idea of who you are, and because you followed the steps above, consider sending the Influencer a trial or a product with no expectation of getting anything in return or requesting it either
- If your product is good and adds value, they may just write about it to their Community
- If you are really lucky, they may push this to their Social Networks and get you even more buzz

4. Building Buzz and Interest

- Take advantage of the content that you, your company, or the Speakers have written to generate buzz and allow the audience to understand more as they decide whether they should spend their dough with your Event or someone else’s.
- Make a Outreach Plan that outlines what content you or others have that would be of interest to highlight the Event
- Ask questions, like on LinkedIn Groups, within the Groups that are on topic around the Event about what they want to know about the topic
- Post the links to Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and LinkedIn Groups
- Create a LinkedIn Event and send to your connections asking them to send to theirs
- Look for anyone who has ReTweeted your links, possible Influencers here
- Create 1-3 minute Infomercials around the topics or speakers that will be at the event to give the audience a preview of the speaker, their style and quality of their work and upload to YouTube and SlideShare
- Mention Influencers on Twitter with a link to special “VIP” only pre-Event stuff so they can talk about it with their Community
- Create Hashtags for the Event and place on any posts, updates that are related to the Event
- Setup a Listening Channel on your favorite tool, such as Seesmic, HootSuite that are focused around the topics and engage with the audience to share some of this content with them-they may share with their audience
- Create a list that you can easily refer to with links, Twitter Profiles of the Speakers for easy reference
- Create Teaser Videos, and Slideshare presentations of the Speakers so the audience has a chance to get to know them
- So many more ways to build buzz

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Reason: During the Event

During the Event there are great ways to drive traffic to your site, hashtags and build awareness. By leveraging the Social Tools available, and a few creative ways to get the content, you may just get to #1 position on search engines if you do it right. The point here is to discover the many ways you can think about how to generate links, mentions, friends and new connections.

5. Kodak moments

- Setup Photo slots during your event with some of the speakers for the attendees. Many are too shy to just go up and ask, so create the environment that makes it easy. Think about this one for a moment… they take a picture, share it with their friends-awareness.
- Take your cameras and phones with you at all times, never know when a good moment is to take a picture with one of the Influencers you reached out to shows up at the event
- Post these pictures to Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, PhotoBucket, and your website or blogs with mentions of who is in the pictures. Don’t just take a picture, ask them whats going on now in their world, what’s new in their business and write it down for your future post, tweet or articles
- Tag these pictures in Facebook
- Post them to TwitPic if you use an iPhone
- Make sure you keep them in some way so that you can easily reference these when you get back to the office and use these to reference on blog posts, tweets, articles, etc…

6. Flip Camera Crazy

- I will assume you have prepared some questions for the Speakers and attendees prior to the Event, so you are ready when the time comes
- Videos are a great way to drive content that your audience likes.
- Interview the Speakers for some insights about the Event, what they like and their excitement about the event
- Ask attendees to give testimonials about the speaker, the event and what they loved about it
- Write Blog Posts about the Speaking Event, highlights of the Event and then add in these testimonials from the attendees-people love testimonials and the search engines love video content
- Add the videos to your Event or Company Channel on YouTube for reference about future events. Remember that people use these as Ratings and Reviews of buying decisions.

7. Tweet and be Tweeted

- Send the attendees a Guide prior to the Event that shares the hashtags you will be using, the place where you will post updates and a place where they can share their comments or opinions about the Event
- Use the hashtag during the Event
- Mention the Influencers during the Event around their topic with interesting tidbits they may like to share with their audience
- Mention the Speakers

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Reason: Post Event

In order to maximize the entire budget that you spent to have this Event, you want to get the most bang for your buck. Keep the buzz going by engaging the audience and people who wanted to attend but couldn’t with these ideas:

8. Emails-yeah they still work

- Be sure to send follow up emails to all attendees with a Wrap-Up collection of presentations in case they were in the bathroom and missed some great tips
- Have the Speakers send emails with Post Event follow up homework, if appropriate, that keeps the learning experience going – the audience will love you for this and see value
- Ask them to join you on Social Networks and be sure to include this in all the emails to drive followers and friends to the brand
- Encourage the attendees to take part in feedback survey’s wherever possible in case you missed anyone with the Flip Camera. This will help you understand how to build a better experience next time
- Ask them what they want or missed and see if you can deliver this to them-true Word of Mouth marketing here as they share this with their network of influence

9. Survey Says

- Encourage the attendees to take part in feedback survey’s wherever possible in case you missed anyone with the Flip Camera. This will help you understand how to build a better experience next time
- See who is willing to share their thoughts on possible Research, many of the attendees have vast expertise in the field you invited them to hear about-ask and you shall receive

10. Measure and Refine

- If you truly did all the steps above, you should have an incredible amount of information to use for the next Event-listen to the audience’s feedback
- Create an ROI to show the Boss, that includes metrics like a) ReTweets by Influencers b) Unsolicited mentions of the Brand or Event c) Reposts by Influenecrs, Speakers or attendees x their RSS Subscribers or Traffic
- Look at what went right and what went wrong and how you can address these issues for an even better Event next time
- Thank all of the people who had anything to do with the success of the Event
- Get the senior leadership team to send an email or a post or mention on a Social Network about how thankful they were to get the feedback and experience from the attendees and speakers-this tactic will show that it’s not just the marketing group that does Events, but Management is involved as well

I now this was a long one, but today alone I had 3 people ask and 1 that I offered help on pushing an Event. Do you need help in getting ROI out of your limited budgets-I can help.

Did I hit the mark here, did you learn anything new? Please comment below and let me know your thoughts.

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