Interesting stuff...

Social Media and Digital Amplification

In recent weeks I have spoken at a number of industry events about the power of Experiential marketing in todays pressured economy. Aligned to these presentations i have been expressing the importance of brands embracing social media to amplify experiences and events.

current Sledge clients are embracing this with the use of Twitter and Face Book to support both internal events as well as consumer experiences. I was surprised this week to see many audience members at Event UK surprised that i encouraged corporates to use social media to engage their staff and enhance interaction and communication through a variety of social media channels.

So I have been doing a little more digging around and have enclosed some content below that should prove the value of social media channels, its should also become clear that in these times of restricted budgets these channels help to stretch the budget and spread the word.

In addition, here are a few tips around Twitter.

How to embrace Twitter and use this social media phenomenan to enhance your live events

1. Use Twitter to survey your niche audience… You can pose questions about site selection, content, speakers or other details about your event. A great way for immediate feedback prior to setting up event or feedback after the event.

2. Use Twitter for Hub of Info Updates… this will help create buzz and excitement around your event.

3. Create a chat around your event or topics around your event… This again creates buzz and excitement and can help grow the number of people who know about your event. Use the #, set up a time and have preset questions that you can ask. It will allow your attendees to give you feedback but even better is that it will get them to interact.

4. Promote on every signage, website, email etc… what the Twitter Handle is and the #hashtag.

At the event


1. Have the attendees tweet about the event… Have screens throughout the event showing a live stream of what the attendees are saying. It will be fun and engaging for attendees.

2. Use it as a way to ask questions to the speakers… This can be done by attendees at the event and ones who could not make the event.

3. Use it as an “info central”… for any updates, changes to the event to keep attendees informed up to the second.

4. Organize a TweetUp mixer around the event… This can be before the event, at the event or after the event. Embrace the tweeple.

Now get out there and use Twitter for your events.

Lets take it a step farther and talk about how to use it to increase exposure, attendance, and engagement at your events… Twitter’s power shines in promoting events. Why, because it is a communication tool and enhances word of mouth. It is an easy way to share before the event, during the event and between attendees.

There are several things we need to do to begin our sharing.

1. The first thing we need to do is determine our audience… Who are you targeting? Who is your unique audience? How are they going to find this info? Who in that group has a huge influence in your target group and can help you spread your message?

2. Create a # Hashtag… which we learned earlier is a way to aggregate info about a topic, which is basically a keyword that ties everything together. I have several but I am the head of Atlanta Bloggers and we use the #atlblog – so everybody that communicates about the event uses that # so that you can search for it and see all the conversation that surrounds the events.

3. Do a search on Twitter http://search.twitter.com (I prefer the advanced search so I can search by area) for certain keywords that may encompass and surround your niche market. Type in keywords and see what people in your niche are talking about. Who they are and follow them. Engage them and let them know about your event.

4. If the event is big enough and ongoing. An option may be to think about creating its own Twitter Handle.

5. Get your current network and followers to RT(forward) and share the invitation with their followers. Give them a discount code to share with their group. It gets them involved but also added value to their network.

Ian Irving to leave Sledge...

It is true ladies and gentlemen i will  be stepping down as commercial director of Sledge and will be leaving to pursue new ventures at the end of September.

After 11 years, the time is right for me to leave Sledge and to pursue new ventures. These are very interesting times and I am currently looking at new challenges within the experiential industry.   I’ll be remaining with Sledge until the end of September ensuring a smooth handover and helping the team to hopefully celebrate successes at the forthcoming Event Awards!  I’ve had a great time at Sledge and have been privileged to work with a fantastic team of very talented people.

Nic Cooper, Sledge CEO, said: “I’d like to thank Ian for the tremendous contribution he has made to the Sledge business over the years and wish him every success for the future.”

At present, there are no plans to replace Irving.

You can read more on this story at Event Magazine.

Experiential is growing fast but how can clients be sure that they are getting a decent return on investment?

We find that in difficult economic times there is an even greater demand for research to prove to advertisers that they are getting a return on every marketing penny they invest. This is especially true of niche or emerging marketing activity such as experiential.

Continental Research has evaluated the impact of over 50 experiential campaigns to date so are able to comment on ways of measuring impact. Different types of experiential activity call for different research approaches, but generally our preferred method of measuring impact uses a two stage approach:

At stage 1 we send recruiters to the event to enlist potential respondents from the crowd of event attendees, and collect their contact details. Stage 2 takes place approximately a fortnight later when we conduct telephone interviews with the attendees who we recruited.  We leave a fortnight before interviewing to allow respondents time to purchase whatever product or service was being promoted – something we like to measure. Also bear in mind it would not be feasible to conduct the interview at the event itself as the brand experience is usually so immersive that to ask respondents, for example, whether they have heard of that brand would be slightly ridiculous!

We also conduct interviews with a sample of people who did not attend the event. These are matched to the attendee sample on demographics and key behaviour, thus allowing us to compare the two samples and attribute any uplifts in brand awareness, positive perceptions of the brand and purchase solely to the experiential activity.

Due to the large number of campaigns we have measured we have been able to build normative data (i.e. average scores) on some key brand metrics. This has the added benefit of allowing us to put clients’ results into broader context by comparing any uplift on their brand’s metrics against the average uplift.

The research has found that the impact of experiential marketing is truly phenomenal. Even two weeks after being exposed to the activity our norms show that typically someone who attended an experiential event is 89% more likely to cite that brand spontaneously than a non-attendee and 303% more likely to recall advertising spontaneously. This compares very favourably indeed against the impact of other advertising media we have measured.

Much of this can be attributed to how positive respondents are about the event – on average 85% will score the experiential event either ‘good’ or ‘very good’.

In terms of the impact on longer term metrics we would look at experiential’s impact on brand equity: Earlier this year Continental worked with Sledge – one of the leaders in experiential marketing – to evaluate some activity promoting the NIVEA Visage range.

If we compare perceptions of the range between the exposed and non-exposed samples it’s clear that the experiential activity has had a significant effect on perceptions of the brand (the red arrows denote statistically significant uplift):

Furthermore our normative data shows that 60% of people who attend an experiential event talk to other people about the event – on average between 4 and 5 other people! And 51% of people exposed to experiential marketing go on to recommend that brand typically to 4 other people.

This positive impact of experiential activity on an attendee’s perceptions of the brand and their likelihood to recommend it indicates that as well as boosting the necessary short-term measures (such as awareness of the brand), experiential is also effectively building a deeper, more long term relationship with consumers by significantly and positively influencing the way they think about that brand.

I can confirm that clients are demanding both ROI and also firm proof of the ROI from their experiential activity. It is imperative that experiential is evaluated, but whilst we wholeheartedly encourage our clients to have an evaluation element integrated into their campaign, budgets often dictate that this isn’t possible.

We encourage clients to reserve some budget to evaluate their campaigns, but many clients just don’t have any money. It is a sad fact of these hard times that agencies have to work harder to deliver more creative work that in return delivers a higher number of consumers - but for less budget. So there just isn’t any money left to pay for research and evaluation.

We know that when experiential activity is measured and evaluated the results are simply phenomenal. The work that Continental Research did for us for NIVEA proves this.

Social media and digital can provide a cost effective way to measure the success of experiential work. For last year’s innocent Village Fete we created several social media platforms (using facebook, flickr, you tube etc) for visitors to leave feedback, upload pictures and generally interact and tell innocent and the innocent community about their experiences. These sites helped create a community and turn visitors into advocates, but they were also very effective ways of channelling feedback about the event and of course, the brand. 

This article was written in collaboration with my colleague Max Willey of Continental Research