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Tips & Trends

<p>Your schedules are printed. Your slides are ready. Now it’s time to think about taking your event to the next level. After all, <a target="_blank" href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=587201">65% of people self-report as being visual learners</a>, which means appealing to their sense of sight will help make your meeting one to remember.&nbsp;</p>
<p>If you want to create an engaging experience that attendees won’t soon forget, focus on incorporating iconic visuals that go beyond the usual meeting media. Here’s some inspiration for your next eye-catching event.</p>
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<h3><strong>Set the tone on social media</strong></h3>
<p>Before your event even begins, ramp up the visual excitement with posts on social media. Try a color-block feed like <a target="_blank" href="https://www.instagram.com/thecollecteur/">The Collecteur</a>, bright multicolor shots like <a target="_blank" href="https://www.instagram.com/katespadeny/">Kate Spade New York</a>, or graphic quotes like <a target="_blank" href="https://www.instagram.com/britandco/">Brit + Co</a>. You can even dedicate all 12 squares of your grid to <a target="_blank" href="https://designshack.net/articles/inspiration/instagram-grid-template/">one big image</a> that simply can’t be ignored.</p>
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<h3><strong>Go bold with bright visuals</strong></h3>
<p>Take a cue from a conference made for design professionals. The <a target="_blank" href="https://mindsparklemag.com/design/aiga-design-conference/">schedules, notebooks, and wayfinding signs</a> from AIGA’s annual design conference a few years ago were so unapologetically attention-grabbing, with vivid colors and bold type, that attendees were more likely to keep them for inspiration than toss them in the trash at the end of the day.</p>
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<h3><strong>Get graphic with note-taking</strong></h3>
<p>During a presentation, it can be difficult to strike a balance between paying attention to the speaker and taking notes on the useful information they share. Chicago Ideas Week brought in a <a target="_blank" href="https://inkfactorystudio.com/visual-notes/chicago-ideas-week/">visual note-taker</a> to capture key information and quotable moments in graphic form. The artwork was then displayed for attendees to peruse. These notes can also be sent to eventgoers in PDF form or printed as a booklet.</p>
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<h3><strong>Color on the walls</strong></h3>
<p>During spring break campus events, the University of Texas at Austin encouraged students to leave their mark on a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.fancyfeatures.com/blogs/interactive-art-blog/texan-coloring-wall-at-ut-austin">giant Texas-inspired coloring wall</a>—essentially a huge coloring page. At your next event, invite participants to get creative and decompress between sessions as they fill in the blanks on a themed wall with paint pens.</p>
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<h3><strong>Create a shareable backdrop</strong></h3>
<p>Veuve Cliquot had not one, but <a target="_blank" href="https://www.shawnayamamoto.com/blog/2021/11/16/sy-amp-co-attends-las-hottest-event-veuve-polo-classic-2021">three backdrops</a> at a 2021 polo party, which set the stage for the event and provided a fun spot for selfies and photos. Opt for a branded, snap-worthy backdrop—think florals, balloons, or neon—and attendees won’t be able to resist posting about your event on social media.</p>
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<h3><strong>Entice attendees with interactive film</strong></h3>
<p>HP encouraged data scientists to hone their skills with <a target="_blank" href="https://www.hp.com/us-en/workstations/industries/data-science/unlocked-with-z.html">an interactive film</a> that promoted their Z by HP line. Participants watched a four-part film, then analyzed and worked through a dataset to try to solve the film’s mystery. While an interactive film may not be in your budget, consider kicking off your event with an engaging video that touts a new product or service.</p>
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<h3><strong>Identify attendees at a glance</strong></h3>
<p>Target used <a target="_blank" href="https://dribbble.com/shots/6577559-Target-Incubator-Badges">colored badges</a> to differentiate corporate employees, speakers, and attendees at an event for their incubator program. If your event involves people from various companies or industries, try going visual with badges. Think red for sales professionals and blue for product managers, or green for vendors and orange for attendees.</p>
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Global

Look no further: Here are seven ideas to make your next event a sight to behold.

The Five Senses of Meetings: Make Your Meetings More Visual

Promote

<p>You know what hashtags are, and you’ve used them before, but have you thought of them as a value-add to your events?</p>
<p>Abbey Hudetz, founder of social media, branding and web design agency <a target="_blank" href="https://www.oystercreativeco.com/">Oyster Creative</a>, knows to do exactly that. Prior to launching her company, Hudetz worked in hospitality, so she <em>gets</em> events. “If you want conversations online happening about your business, you should be using hashtags,” she says. Hashtags serve as a repository for collecting and accessing all content related to your event—before, during, and after. “User-generated content is gold,” Hudetz says. “It’s like the owned media of the internet.”</p>
<p>But striking gold isn’t as easy as just coming up with a clever tag—in fact, Hudetz says simpler is often better. Read on for some more of her top tips about hashtags.</p>
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<h3><strong>Think of Hashtags As Keywords</strong></h3>
<p>Hashtags can be seen as synonymous with keywords, Hudetz says. If someone is searching for your event online, what terms are they using?</p>
<p>“Make your event hashtag simple, make it the name of the event, make it the year if it’s an annual event, make it the location,” she says. “The less complicated, the better. Because it’s searchable.”</p>
<p>While using keywords in your event’s hashtag will enable people to find it more readily, before you settle on the tag, check to see if it’s being used elsewhere for something unrelated. If it is, go back to the drawing board.</p>
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<h3><strong>Contemplate Your Hashtag’s Purpose</strong></h3>
<p>The hashtag is a tool for you to promote your event, incentivize participation, and collect content, so you really want to own it. Hudetz recommends avoiding frequently used words, such as “expo,” because they dilute the impact of your hashtag, making it harder to own. She suggests asking yourself: “What terms can help me monopolize this space?”</p>
<p>You may think that a catchy phrase or pun is the answer, but Hudetz—who admits she too loves a good pun—warns that this may alienate part of your audience. In other words, not everyone may understand the pun.</p>
<p>“You have to think about your end goal with this hashtag, which is that you want people to post it, and have a conversation around it,” Hudetz says. “You want them to be talking about your event online. Think of it like, ‘What would make this hashtag successful?’ and then ask yourself if the pun is serving that.”</p>
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<h3><strong>Engage With Your Hashtag</strong></h3>
<p>Start by thinking about what hashtag would make you interact with a post, Hudetz says. “I’ll post a story with a hashtag if it means I get a free coffee.” Doing so will help you generate creative ways to incentivize your audience to participate, from giveaways to submitting speaker questions. For example, using a hashtag as the channel for attendees to ask speakers or panelists questions might encourage someone who’s post-shy to use your hashtag.</p>
<p>Planners should also engage with the responses to their hashtag. “Be sure you’re commenting, liking …making your audience feel like it’s part of a community,” Hudetz says.</p>
<p>Part of building this community means engaging with your partners online too. When you start hiring your vendors, introduce them to your hashtag immediately, and lean on them to cross-promote your event. Hudetz suggests hyping each other up online. “Think of [your partners] as your built-in cheerleading squad,” she says. “You all want each other to succeed.”</p>

People want to see what you’re capable of. They also want to see what your event looks like, and its hype, in its fullest form.

<h3><strong>Return to Your Hashtag Post-Event</strong></h3>
<p>Hashtags are not only a great promotional tool, they’re also a treasure trove of user-generated content that planners can revisit to curate articles, social posts, photo galleries, reels from Instagram story highlights, and more.</p>
<p>“Repurposing content from your events is a rich opportunity,” Hudetz says. “Of course you will have photos from your photographer and vendors, but the event photography from the POV of an attendee is so important because social media is, at its heart, about sharing stories.”</p>
<p>And, after your event is over, don’t forget to tap into your hashtag for some self-promotion. Hudetz suggests repurposing content generated via your hashtag to use on your brand page. Collect assets that used your hashtag—say, a collection of speaker questions, or a roundup of tweets or Instagram posts—and use them to create a gallery of posts that show your chops.</p>
<p>“In event planning, galleries are everything. It’s how you sell your services,” Hudetz says. “People want to see what you’re capable of. They also want to see what your event looks like, and its hype in its fullest form.”</p>

Expert Advice on How To Put the Powerful Pound Symbol To Work During Your Next Event.

Perfect the Art of the #Hashtag

<p>Channels, frequency, timing, topics—that’s what you expect from a social media strategy. And yes, you need them.</p>
<p>But for any of those decisions to make sense, they need to stem from your driving force: audience and goals.</p>
<p>“For me, content strategy always goes back to: Who’s your audience, and why did they come to your organization?” says Hilary Marsh, founder and chief content and digital strategist of Content Company.</p>
<p>Everything begins with the <em>who</em> and the <em>why</em>. From there, you and your team can figure out the <em>where</em>, <em>when</em>, <em>how often</em>, and <em>what</em>—aka channels, frequency, timing, and topics. Understand your audience and your goals, and you’re positioned to choose the tactics that will reach the right people in the right way. Rush through that foundation, and you’re positioned to … post a lot of tweets.</p>
<p>Here are three principles around audience and goals to keep in mind as you develop your social media strategy.</p>
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<h3><strong>Know why your attendees care about the organization in the first place.</strong></h3>
<p>No matter how epic your event, people aren’t showing up for innovative displays and fun cocktails. They’re showing up because they have a connection with the host organization. That connection might be literal (as with an association or corporate event for members or employees only) or figurative (as with a consumer trade show). Whatever that connection is, your social media strategy begins with understanding the bigger picture from your attendees’ perspective.</p>
<p>“Why is the person a member of the association that’s having an annual conference? The reasons they join are the reasons that they would attend,” Marsh says.</p>
<p>Understanding your audience’s motivations lays the framework for every arm of your social media strategy—indeed, for your meeting as a whole. It also has tactical implications: Setting up separate social media accounts for the event might seem like a way to build interest. In practice, it separates the event from the organization as a whole.</p>
<p>“Nobody has subscribed to [a separate meeting account], so then you have a giant challenge of building an audience so that you can engage with them,” Marsh says. “Instead, what a meeting planner might do is weave in information promotions—early bird registrations and such—into the organization’s larger social media channels.” Trust that the content itself, hashtags and all, will be an effective vehicle for what you want to convey without a separate channel.</p>
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<h3><strong>Be a translator.</strong></h3>
<p>Learning about your attendees begins with deep engagement with the host organization. Independent meeting planners may have a steeper learning curve here than planners employed by (and therefore immersed in) associations or corporations. For all planners, though, the host organization offers a well of expertise on what matters to you: who the audience is, why they’re invested in the event, and where and how to reach them, in addition to the topic of the meeting at large.</p>
<p>But when you’re crafting a social media strategy, take care not to put the organization’s expertise ahead of your audience. The more of an insider you become, the more information you have—and the higher the risk of being in sync with the organization’s knowledge rather than the attendees’.</p>
<p>For example, branding an event makes sense strategically, but referring to the meeting exclusively in branded terms leaves out attendees and ignores their reasons for wanting to attend.</p>
<p>“Let’s say it’s called the Connections conference,” Marsh says. “Then you see, ‘Connections is happening next week’ or ‘Save $200 if you register for Connections by February.’ Well, if you don’t work there, you’re going to have no idea what ‘Connections’ is, and then it gets overlooked. It’s a matter of not being able to see outside of what you already know. And I see it all the time.” Instead, think of yourself as a translator between the “insider baseball” lingo of the organization and the attendees.</p>
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<h3><strong>Think engagement, not marketing.</strong></h3>
<p>You might be marketing an event, but a social media strategy that puts promotion ahead of engagement is likely to be ignored. “Social media is not a one-way channel,” Marsh says. “How do we join in those conversations that the audience is having?”</p>
<p>Think of social media strategy as a microcosm of your meeting. You want the event itself to go off smoothly—and that begins with engaging attendees well before the first keynote, and keeping the event top of mind after everyone is back at home. Social media strategy breaks ground for that ongoing connectivity, lending a layer of continuity to the work you’ve put into the meeting itself.</p>
<p>After all, your meeting exists to help people connect. Why would your social media strategy not do the same? “If you just see social media as a marketing channel, people will tune you out,” Marsh says. “Nobody’s got time for that.”</p>

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