Learning some basic concepts and spreading the workload are crucial to success By Tyler Davidson Get your meetings and events social media strategy working well and you’ll have engaged attendees, inspired speakers, satiated suppliers and organizational stakeholders primed for participation. Get it wrong and your meetings story of shame may spread like wildfire on the Internet—a virtual Frankenstein’s monster that will never die. Case-in-point: The story of the loosely moderated Twitter feed at TWTRCON that resulted in a “hashtag takeover” by PETA to protest NASA’s use of squirrel monkeys for radiation research. While attendees may have expected a presentation on customer service from NASA Public Affairs Specialist Stephanie Schierholz, what they got instead was an army of animal rights activists cyber-bashing the space agency on large projectors that flanked the stage. And if you don’t believe it, you can read all about it here, http://therealtimereport.com/tag/peta, and probably for a long, long time. While in reality the world of social media and its applications for the meetings and events industry is not that scary if handled with care, meeting planners should still do some basic groundwork before blasting off into cyberspace. Read more... |