Picture yourself on day one of an trade show, walking into a cavernous expo center lined with booths and full to capacity with people. You spend the day wandering through the room collecting business cards and trying to remember what booth number that widget you were interested in was located.
When the day is out, you attend the arranged networking session where you try to cram in meeting as many useful people as possible.
Or let us say you are there for a seminar and you set into a hotel conference room filled with rows and rows of tables. Do you fight for the end seat or sit at the empty table and hope no one sits down next to you?
Enter Social Media
The use of social media and Twitter in particular, is a great way to get involved. Following hashtags and building lists will allow you to get to know the other participants before the event.
Social savvy events will create a Twitter hashtag beforehand. By following a hashtag, you are able to follow any tweets about that event using it. As you follow along, you can get to know many of the participants ahead of time and start to make those important connections. Follow those people on Twitter and get to know them, start a conversation and make plans to meet up at the event.
Picture yourself at that same trade show, but this time after you had followed the hashtag on Twitter beforehand. Now you walk into that expo center and head right to the booth of a connection you made via the Twitter list you made of the attendees. That night, another connection you made introduces you to someone they think could use your services or sell you that widget you were looking for at the best price.
And at the conference? You walk into the table filled room and you find the group you arranged to sit with. After the session is over, you go over to introduce yourself to the speaker, who you had been chatting with online for a while now.
These connections will often be more solid than ones you make at the event, where the only memory you have is a name on a business card and maybe some quickly scrawled notes. This community you form will stay with you after the event and become even more close after meeting up in person.
A great local event in the Fox Cities that uses a hashtag is the New North Social Media Breakfast. The hashtag used for the monthly even is #nnsmb. Everyone involved knows, that to remain part of the conversation, using the hashtag will keep it “in play” I was actually on the panel at this month’s event and spoke about using hashtags. Here is a link to the story on Storify following the conversation.
Some upcoming events I will be watching out for are:
Will you be attending any upcoming events this Spring/Summer? How will you make your connections?
*Updated* Click here for Scott Stratten talking about using hashtags before, during and after an event.
*Update 05/04/12*
Here are the attendee lists for #ResponseExpo
