The use of social media to enhance and amplify consumer events is well documented. So the internal and B2B events industries need to embrace it too.
People who know me will already know that I am a huge fan of twitter, and it's a great place to start! It is a very powerful tool in terms of pre event promotion and an incredible tool for engaging with audiences during an event. It appears that using channels such as Twitter in the corporate event environment actually liberate staff to speak out when they would normally shy away from asking questions or offering commentary.
I spoke at a conference last year and an audience member suggested that it was dangerous to allow freedom of speech in such a public way and such practices could open up a can of worms, and heaven forbid - what if the commentary was negative?
Well, in my opinion you cannot make change and improve if you do not know all of the facts and you do not know how your staff feel. If you have the negatives you can turn them into positives. Recently, a client of ours embraced a proposition we made to resolve an internal communications issue. We opened a Twitter channel for internal communication, posed the question and thus opened the debate. The fact that answers could only be a maximum of 140 characters was a benefit – it ensued that employees thought about what they said and how they said it. This mechanic also allowed Direct Messaging for an immediate response and commentary was archived. The business has a massive network of out of office staff but they are all on blackberry so access to twitter offers an easy communication and content sharing option.
So in my opinion, we need to embrace social media – it's a great tool and it is definitely here to stay. .
