Using Instagram to Make Events Interactive

Recently, I received note from an organizer for Provender Alliance’s annual conference. He was looking for a way to make the conference more visual using Instagram. The photo-sharing site is a natural fit for getting people to share photos. Below are my top three tips for making any event more interactive using Instagram.

Create an official event hashtag

Create an official hashtag for the conference and encourage people to use it when posting photos on Instagram. When people post photos, they will include the hashtag. This will create a feed of all the photos that use the same hashtag. People can follow the feed to see what other people at the conference are posting.

Display the Instagram feed

Tools such as Eventstagram allow you to display a live feed of all photos that include your event hashtag using a television screen or projector. The projector of photos could be setup during any downtime at the conference, such as meals. The appeal is the same as getting on the Jumbotron at a sporting event. The person posting gets a few moments of conference-wide fame.

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The Advantages of Personal Blogging

Personal Blogging offers many unique advantages.Company blogs are great for thought leadership or sharing helpful information with customers. For some content creators, this definition is too narrow. For these people, personal blogging can be a great option.

Here are a few advantages of personal blogs.

Content can be more personal
It’s the content that distinguishes a company blog from a personal one. A personal blog can be a great place to post reflective posts that may seem out of place on a company blog. This can also be a great place to talk about hobbies or other details about your personal life.

Content can be more varied
Content on company blogs should be focused and clearly directed at current and potential customers. It is also important to keep content consistent in terms of style and format. With personal blogs the main theme is the person writing it. The topics and format of the content can vary from post to post.

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Curating Your Own Content

Content creation can be a demanding chore. One way to cope with the challenge is to repackage your best content.

We recently combed through our blogs, which are dutifully freshened at least weekly, and were startled at the gems we discovered. We offered advice, shared case studies and provided insights as valuable today as when the blogs were originally written.

Instead of letting them gather digital dust, we've decided to resurrect, repackage and repurpose our best blogs into one or more e-books.

Think of it as curating your own content.

The resurrecting, repackaging and repurposing of our blogs also allows an opportunity to refresh their content — adding new examples, refining insights or expanding our advice.

While our content talks about managing issues, selling things or getting to the bottom of important questions, you probably have content that can be salvaged from the bottom of your archives that is just as useful. It may be in the form of white papers, demonstration videos or old advertising. You could turn these into an interesting retrospective, a starting point for new and improved advice or a timely reminder.

In the rush to produce content, many of us forget content can have a significant shelf life and, therefore, enduring value.

Jay Baer has a new post featuring a series of 6-second videos produced by Lowes, the home improvement company. The videos were designed specifically to have a long shelf life. They center on practical tips, such as how to extract that pesky stripped screw or creating a watering can out of an old milk jug.

This kind of long-term thinking may seem at odds with the quick pace of digital media. But in reality long-term thinking should thrive on the Internet, which can make content written a minute ago or a century ago equally accessible.

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Growth of Social Media Advertising

Social media ads are becoming a staple of integrated marketing campaigns as marketers look for ways to surround their target audiences. And people are taking notice of more ad traffic on their social media streams.

A survey by Vizu confirms advertisers are embracing social media ads as a way to drive traffic to their websites. A report by BIA/Kelsey predicts native social media ads will grow from $1.5 billion this year to $3.9 billion in 2016.

But marketers aren't abandoning other tactics, such as online display, TV and print ads. Instead, social media ads seem to be the latest great idea to take their place as just another outreach tool to audiences, much like mobile apps.

Social media ads are proliferating, explains Ryan Holmes, CEO at HootSuite, because they produce results — at least better results as measured by numbers of clicks than stale ideas such as online banner ads. 

Advertisers, he adds, like social media ads because they can be created and pushed to global audiences almost immediately and at minimal cost, in sharp contrast to spendy print and electronic media campaigns.

Patricia Redsicker, in a blog post for Social Media Examiner, says the success of social media ads depends on the vitality of a company's social media presence on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and, increasingly, Pinterest and Instagram — neither of which, to date, allows for promoted posts, but those probably loom in the near future. It is hard to promote on social media sites that are duds, she says.

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Giving Consumers Help, Not Hype

For consumers, it's no longer enough to have brand identity or a clever ad campaign. Consumers are attracted to brands that solve problems, answer questions or provide useful service. Online marketing guru Jay Baer calls them brands with "youtility." 

Baer says marketing today is harder than ever before. "The challenges faced by major brands are substantial — and getting bigger," he writes in a guest blog for IBM. "Successful marketing has been more difficult, as consumers are adrift in a sea of invitation, with companies of every size, shape and description trying to reach them through an always expanding nexus of media, both traditional and newfangled." 

As a result, consumers are "weary and wary of message and mechanism." 

Many brands have resorted to a "science of silly" strategy," Baer says, "dressing up their naked appeals to buy now with quirky characters, outlandish situations and non-sequiturs."  

"Consumers don't want hype, even hype disguised with a veneer of wacky," he insists. "We want help."

This involves, he says, shifting from creative campaigns that delight brand managers to content-rich platforms aimed at "solving consumer problems and improving their lives."

"Brands have the wherewithal to provide this assistance," Baer claims, "to create marketing that's actually wanted by consumers instead of marketing that is needed by companies."

Youtility should be the driver of marketing strategy.  Youtility, Baer explains, is "based on a commitment to helping, not selling."

"Doing this well requires a combination of customer understanding, nimble content creation and marketing execution," Baer says. Marketing execution translates into giving consumers useful, unique and irreplaceable experiences that draw and maintain interest in your brand.

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