Social Media in the Events industry

Being deeply immersed in the 'events' industry it's interesting to see how the sector has embraced social media into its marketing strategy, or in most cases how it hasn't!

If you sift through your twitter followers you will see numerous restaurants, bars, events agencies etc (The Jazz Cafe included...hopefully). But as with all businesses on twitter, to utilise the medium fully it's not as simple as tweeting generic advertising and marketing messages - the twitterati are much smarter than that. In her excellent blog 'Eight things I hate about Business Twittering' @EmmerSimms discusses how 'doing twitter wrong as a business is worse than not doing it at all' which sounds crazy, but she's 100 percent right. The fundamental principle of a venue's approach to twitter should be to give it a human face; a personality and a means of giving its consumers greater access and interaction with them (I've often toyed -and still do- with changing my twitter username to ChrisJazzCafe to help achieve this more). In simply tweeting '3 course meal for £25 tonight' or 'indie night - free entry for students' or any see-through offer from your companies profile with a picture of a building as their avatar you will only act to distance your business further from your disillusioned public - the exact opposite effect you should be searching for.

Give it personality - speak to people, share your feelings. In Emma's article (that really is a must read) all 8 bullet points are relevant, but a particular dislike of mine is what she refers to in number 4 'Follow floggers'. Twitter isn't a numbers game - a recent contact of mine was after social media advice and the first question asked was 'how many followers do you have?' I'd rather have 50 that I engage with than 5000 I spam - numbers are virtually irrelevant.

I've been guilty in my early twitter days of 'spam shopping' as Emma put it, and I got nothing from twitter - and deservedly so! I can still do better, but now that I engage with people and actually have conversations the results have been mirrored to the effort put in. @RichardCharon is a good example of how opening dialogue with someone can lead to future business. After regular dialogue, not sales-talk, with Richard he paid us a visit here at The Jazz Cafe as a customer and enjoyed himself. As a member of BNI, when the issue of a group outing arose Richard recommended coming to one of our monthly comedy nights http://www.thejazzcafe.co.uk/gallery-comedyclub2.asp. A couple of months after initial dialogue was made we had a large party booking and key new contacts made. You'd have to ask Richard if a generic 'Live music / comedy event here tonight' tweet would have had the same result - I suspect not.

Whole events have been organised from start to finish on twitter. A recommendation from @sandieb321 led to @NickyAACampbell getting in touch and a subsequent concert was planned http://www.thejazzcafe.co.uk/moonlights.asp. From this concert came new twitter friend @LorraineMX5 and a brand new fanbase created. The same is true of Danyl Johnson's fan account @Danyls_Fanyls and the packed concert that followed www.thejazzcafe.co.uk/danyl_johnson.asp. See the attendance of @phil_creighton at www.thejazzcafe.co.uk/thejazzsessions.asp and charity events for @sblethyn for similar stories.

In essence what I am trying to say is that the events industry more than most sectors has the opportunity with social media to truly enhance their brand if they simply paid it the respect it deserves. I recently discovered http://www.eventcrowd.com/ with over 2000 members, and you can count the thousands of event groups on LinkedIn....so the industry is beginning to wake up and take note.

There are great workshops out there such as @Nigel_Morgan's (http://www.morganpr.co.uk/) for companies to understand what they should be doing, and @ProteanMarcom have a great starter guide available (http://ow.ly/27vq1) so there really is no excuse anymore. I'm trying my best...honest!

Oh - that's my debut blog by the way :)

See http://www.thejazzcafe.co.uk/ for up-to-date info on what's going on here.
0118 9681442.

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