On Friday, I’ll be in New York City, with Julien Smith , David Maister, and Charlie Green, to hold the Trust Summit at the Harvard Club in Manhattan (proper dress requested, please- no jeans or sneakers). In getting ready for this, I realized that things have changed in the world of inviting folks to an event. I thought this might prove useful in understanding how social tools can come together to bring the physical experience onto the web, and back again.

One note of caution: go gently when promoting. In the new world, that line between “hey, good to know” and “man, you’re annoying” is pretty thin and easy to step over.

How to Market a Real Time Event

Always a URL. Always

If you’re going to wire up people and connect them to an event in the real world, you need a web page of some kind or another. People need all the details. They need some kind of intangible tangible that they can pass around to point out what’s what. Give them a web page.

If it’s just a one-off, use an event system like Eventbrite. If you’re going to do this over and over, consider setting up pages on your own website of choice, and then maybe double-up with an Eventbrite to manage the signup.

Extend onto Event Sites

Here’s where you can really get things moving. If you want this event to really spread, use sites like Upcoming.org and Eventful, to name a few. If you’ve got a Facebook group, put up an event notification there. If you’ve got a LinkedIn group, and the event matches, put it up there, too.

Status, Status, Status

Without being “that guy” (and never forget, I mean this for either gender), mentioning your event is easy across your Twitter, your Facebook, your LinkedIn status, and all the other social sites that make sense to promote. A word of caution: this gets close to what feels like carpet-bombing, so go gently. In fact, out in front of such a promotional effort, make sure you’re doing your good deeds and promoting others, and sharing other good information. People don’t like a tireless self-promoter, but they don’t mind someone who shares the good stuff, even when some of it’s their own.

Email Marketing

Do you maintain an email list? Don’t forget to drop a gentle note of your event into there, too. Again, the goal is subtlety and just a gentle pointer to your URL.

Flickr and YouTube

Want to amp up your event’s pre-buzz as well as give it some love on the day of the event? Here are two things: use photos and videos for pre-event invites and promos. Then, encourage people to take photos and videos AT the event. If at all possible, make it easy for the folks who might be into making media to have something to take photos and make movies about. (A side note: if you’re bothering to throw an event with a lot of web presence, use a tag – metadata – to denote the event, for people’s blog posts, for Flickr and YouTube, and for Twitter. For instance, we’ll use #trustsummit for our event in NYC.)

Blog Posts Matter

You can do much worse than to find local bloggers and bloggers who care about the subject matter to cover the event, should they find it useful. If you’ve a budget to do so, invite some to attend in exchange for blogging anything that might be of interest to them. Realize that in the new world, bloggers are rarely obligated to do whatever you ask, and yet, if you make it interesting and worthwhile, folks love to tell a story.

Getting a few posts out about the event ahead of time, and/or after give you a lot more traction and appreciation before and after. Again, make sure the event’s worthy of coverage. If it’s just a straight product pitch or the like, that’s tricky to justify.

Twitter on the Day Of the Event

To me, Twitter’s the magic sauce in making your NEXT event really light up. It’s too late for your event by the time folks start tweeting about it, but it’s a great way to really warm up your future events. If people are tweeting that they’re having a fun time, that they’re learning, that there are still a few hours to get down to the event and have fun, magic can happy. That’s why Twitter’s the Serendipity Engine.

What else? How else are you promoting offline events in the online world? Share your best ideas here.

I like the simplicity of the idea, plus the opportunity to freeze an interesting flow of data in time. Worried that there’s junk in the capture? No more. The tool lets you pick and choose:

It’s simple, clever, and potentially very useful.

Seth participates in Twitter in his own ways. I like this one quite a bit. Good on ya, sir.

Check out TwttrList

What it CAN be about:

What the naysayers see:

What you and I see:

When your boss can’t see it, it’s because you and I haven’t told the story well enough. We haven’t shown the right examples. We haven’t delivered the benefits that we see as obvious because we’ve seen the tools used well.

You and I can still work to improve on that, don’t you think? We can keep finding more Case Studies and filling out our storytelling ability. We’ll keep telling the story until they see it better than we do, until our ideas have handles and they take those ideas and make use of them.

We can do that, right?

Marcel LeBrun, CEO of Radian6, was probably the first person I heard use the “social media is a phone” analogy. In his case, he was talking about the need for companies to realize that some of their customers are “dialing the social phone,” and that they’d better have some “operators standing by.” (I swear, if I had extra time, I’d write an ebook out of my talks with Marcel.) He’s not wrong, and that’s why I tend to stretch the analogy even further when discussing social media tools to audiences.

Social Media Tools Aren’t The Revolution

A phone can be used to talk to Mom, talk to the grocery store, talk to customer service at your bank, and a phone can be used to give a teleseminar, to dial for dollars, to market a new product or service. This is the same with all these tools like blogging, podcasting, social networks and the like. The tools themselves are just different (better?) ways to communicate. They involve more nuance.

This Part is the Revolution

The revolution comes in how we use them. At once, these new tools allow us a one-to-many opportunity similar to what publishers and TV producers and other large scale media used to own. And at the same time, these tools have created allow us to be much more personable, more nuanced, more one-to-one in how we reach people who share the same interests as us (or our customers).

If You’re In Marketing / PR / Advertising

Getting on the new tools and blasting out the old methods will fail (is failing). This isn’t rocket science, but it is art, and it requires a different set of approaches. It’s as different as comparing the phone book to a personalized invitation. To many of you, you’re rolling your eyes and saying that I’m preaching to the choir, but if that’s so, then we’re not all singing loud enough, because there are still many people in need of better approaches, in need of teaching, and in need of concrete things to do next. If you’re on my side of the fence on this one, and if you’re out there sharing the good gospel of the new social phone, then stop saying “join the conversation.” That’s like saying, “Now dial the phone!”

Instead, share with people the creative ways to dial. Remember when call waiting came out? Remember when we first learned how to forward our phones? Share these things with people. Show them the tools, and further, show them applications for them.

In preparing for the upcoming New Marketing Summit in a few weeks in Boston, I’m most certainly going to bring this message out loud and clear. In several speeches between now and the end of the year, it’s my goal to show that it’s HOW we use the social phone that will change how business is done. It’s part of what Julien and I are doing with TRUST AGENTS.

Will you help people understand this, too? Will you share your new dialing methods? Will you teach them the difference between a teleseminar and a call to Mom? Most importantly, will you show them how to listen?

Ring ring.

This post brought to you by RingCentral: Get your own Toll Free or Local Number with voicemail for as low as $9.99 per month

Photo credit, jumpinjimmyjava

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Social media tools are a great way to get the word out about your passions, your interests, the company’s latest products, but we tend to rush right into the “speaking” side of the toolbox without giving much thought to the “listening” part. Knowing what people are saying about you, your competitors, and your industry as a whole are just as important as blogging and making good video.

It’s interesting to note that companies will spend anywhere from $20,000 to $150,000 on a good website design, but will fail to implement even the most rudimentary listening tools to move their capabilities to understand the impact of such a site beyond the realm of hits and clicks.

As part of our social media strategy, let’s presume that all businesses will need a way of listening to their audience, their customers, their partners, and their detractors. Let’s start with the tools, and we will talk about the strategy for dealing with what we hear in a subsequent post. By the way, the guts and tech behind most every one of these tools is RSS. Click that link to watch a quick YouTube video by Common Craft, if you want a refresher on what RSS is/does.

Five Tools I Use for Listening

• Google Reader – I use Google Reader as my home base for collecting and reading all the various sources of information I collect. It’s web-based, fast, and easy to use. It allows me to blaze through content without thinking much about it. Use Google Reader by adding various searches to it (described in the next few bullets).
• Technorati – Go to Technorati, put your company ( product, brand, personal) name into the search bar, and see what people are saying about you. Note the little orange RSS subscription button in the upper right. Copy that link location (Right click the link and say “Copy Link” or however your browser words that). Now, dump that into Google Reader as one of your listening searches. Repeat this for your competitor’s name, brand, individuals, and some industry terms (if you can make them succinct).
• Google Blogsearch – Go to Google Blogsearch and do the same thing. Sure there will be some overlap, but it’s important to capture both. The subscription to searches link is on the left hand side about 1/3 down the page.
• Summize – If you’re thinking about using social networks and social media, it’s likely that some of your customers are using Twitter. If so, go to Summize and put in your search terms there, too. Cook as many searches as you need, grabbing the RSS feeds and throwing them into Google Reader. Build a strong catalog of searches, and then remove bad or ineffective ones after you trial them out a bit.
• Link Checker – Here’s an off-the-beaten path one. Go to SEO Pro and use their free link checker. (Note: it’s a bit slow to crawl for technical reasons, so don’t get worried if it takes a while to respond to your query). This tool checks who’s linking to your URLs, what the link text is (what’s in blue on the web page that people might click to get to you), and all kinds of stats that matter to search engine optimization experts, but might not matter to you. Why? Because it’s important to know what people are saying about you with their linking efforts.
• BONUS ROUND: Crazy Egg – If you want to see how people are looking at your website when they’re NOT commenting and talking about you, try out Crazy Egg. The tool is chock full of visualization data, including heat maps, that show you how people are interacting with your website. Sometimes, people aren’t saying something on your blog posts because they’re being distracted by something else. Here’s your chance to figure that out.

The Pro Stuff

If you want something a little more advanced than hacking search tools and sucking the RSS feeds into readers (which isn’t that bad, you know), you might try tools like Radian6 (note: I just completed a 3 part webinar series with them that we’re airing soon. Go to Twebinar.com for details) or BuzzLogic or a series of other tools in the same category (they’re all listening, so I’m sure they can swarm here and give links in the comments section).

There are values to the professional products, and if you’re a larger company and can afford the not-too-very-expensive splurge, you get a lot more dashboarding and reporting with such tools. But if you’re bootstrapping, stick with me, kids.

How are You Listening?

I’m curious to know who’s doing what in the world of listening. Are you doing something formal with your organization? Have you tried any of these tools for this purpose? What else might we be missing in our tool set?

Photo credit, tanakawho

Inspired by Jon Udell’s interview with Bill Buxton.