June 22, 2011

Live events, either online or face-to-face, are tremendous tools for building trust, gaining credibility and even closing deals.

Whether you host these kinds of educational events for your business, produce conferences or simply present information at the request of a sponsor, the tools below offer some advanced ways to create social engagement during your events and allow attendees to network, share and connect.

Blast Follow

The tool enables you to follow Twitter users who share your interests all at once. Now, while you can simply use it to follow people based on a topic, you can also create a hashtag for a conference and then follow everyone using the hashtag en masse. This could be a great way to show all of your attendees at an event how to follow each other all at one time.

Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists have been around for some time now, but I still don’t think conferences use them very well. Create a Twitter List of all of your attendees and make it very easy for people to view the entire group’s Twitter activity in a saved search using tools such as HootSuite or TweetDeck. This alone should spark a great deal of networking before, during and after the event.

KeepStream

This tool allows you to collect, organize and curate Tweets, Facebook posts and links based on search, or even through a bookmarklet. Then you give the stream a name and can embed it on a Web page. This is a great way to pull lots of related content or buzz surrounding you and your presentation and post it live with your slides.

CoverItLive

This free live blogging tool is a great way to create virtual coverage of an event for people that want to go much deeper than you can on Twitter. You can upload images, slides and video and make it very easy for people to participate in something very close to the real in-person experience.

Paratweet

Showing a live tweet stream from a conference is very cool, but comes with some downside potential: people that simply want to disrupt the stream may use the hashtag for off-topic conversations or worse. Paratweet gives you the ability to moderate what’s shown in your live stage stream and is also a great way to offer the audience, both in-person and listening virtually, the ability to ask questions that are selected for viewing by a moderator.

Poll Everywhere

If you’ve ever attended a workshop or seminar that features polling hardware, you know how cool it can be for a presenter to ask a question and then have the audience click their handheld controller to vote or make a choice. Poll Everywhere allows you to ask your audience a question and then offer the responses via text message on their mobile devices, and then watch as the results populate your PowerPoint slide. For an event, this technology requires that there is a web connection available, but you can also use this in print or other environments to collect data.

PowerPoint Twitter Tools

This novel little PowerPoint plugin from SAP allows you to tweet live from your slides as you present. You simply add your tweet text into the notes field in PowerPoint, and when you advance to that slide a tweet is automatically published to your account. This is a great way to highlight the sound bites out that you want retweeted and keep people on Twitter engaged as they follow your presentation.

Today’s event attendees want to share and connect and use you’re their mobile devices to do it all. Employ one or more of the above tools and your next event may receive a flood of social exposure.

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John Jantsch, Article, business events, blogging, Microsoft PowerPoint, Duct Tape Marketing