MetzMash

When Showing Up Isn't Enough

About three years ago, I was a teacher at a small charter school in San Carlos, California. One of my 14-year-old students was diagnosed with leukemia. Her family's battle to find bone marrow donors was really gut-wrenching. A few weeks ago, local tech events guru Christian Perry wrote a posting on this blog about how to get people to show up at events. Well, if it's just a party or a networking event, then showing up is good enough.

But sometimes, people and organizations need to use social media to do really important things, like save lives. As profiled in Now Is Gone, the Red Cross has been using social media for nearly a year now to do this. And we have a special interview on Thursday with an individual in San Francisco who  used social media to do just that - to help save the lives of two friends, one of whom invented something that many of our readers use every day. Stay tuned. It's a busy week on MetzMash.

Guest Post: Instant Crowded Room - Just Add Social Media

[The following is a guest post from SF BETA organizer and Zaptix CEO Christian Perry.]

One of the fascinating parts of Silicon Valley -- and an aspect that most people outside the culture miss -- is that the center of the digital world still does plenty of meeting and mingling in the meatspace.

I've been putting together tech events for more than a year -- some of them, including SF Beta and geekSessions, are among the most popular in the Bay Area. While I like to think that the quality of the events has a lot to do with their success, we owe a huge amount to the way we've used social media to spread the word and boost attendance.

For other enterprising event organizers, I present to you seven ways of using social media to build successful events.

1. Create Facebook Events: Every time someone says they're attending an event on Facebook, all their friends hear about it in the news feed. One of our recent events, a small chat on OpenSocial, got 131 RSVPs for a 50-person room, and we used NOTHING but a Facebook Event page to promote it.

2. Use Facebook Groups: A Facebook group gives you an installed base of fans who are eager to hear about your events. Unlike Events, your membership keeps growing; you don't need to start over each time.

3. Post on Upcoming.org: With the rising prominence of Facebook, Upcoming isn't the force that it used to be. Still, it's a great way to share your event with more people.

4. Build a web presence, preferably as a blog: We've  seen consistent traffic to all three of our major sites. I suggest using a blog format for your site -- it makes it easier to add updates and keep people engaged.

5. Incorporate social media: Did someone make a video of your event? Embed it! What about all those photos on Flickr? How about a Twitter stream? It's pretty easy to integrate all these things into your site, and it makes your events seem a lot more vibrant than just a static page with text.

6. Reach out to other social media creators: All those bloggers, photographers, and videographers need material to write about, photograph, and shoot. By reaching out to the social media community, you're almost guaranteed to start a conversation and raise awareness of your events.

7. Create events that don't suck:[ed. My fave!] Perhaps this goes without saying, but the better the event, the more likely all those blog posts and RSVPs will translate into warm bodies. Good weather doesn't hurt, either.