But the association has 1.1 million members. Although those attendance numbers are big, there’s a significant number of members who don’t make the conferences.

In his recent BlogWell presentation, the association’s Todd Carpenter walked us through how the group used a small investment in social media coverage to earn a 10-fold increase in traffic and take events to a much bigger audience.

A few of Carpenter’s take-aways:

• Recruit a few talkers to share their experience. The National Association of Realtors created a blog on which select attendees can share their conference experience. It got these members more involved and meant this content was shared with their large social following.
• Facebook photos allow for a real-time feel. Carpenter and his team made it easy for attendees to share photos via Facebook, which created more of a “live” feeling compared with a website such as Flickr, on which attendees tend to upload photos after they get home (if they upload them at all).
• Think about the next event. Not only did all of this content take the association’s conferences to a bigger audience, but it also gave the group tools to promote its next big event.

Watch Carpenter’s case study. Slides are available.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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One of the most effective session formats, which consistently drew standing-room-only crowds, featured multiple ideas from a variety of panelists — each limited to a minute or less (in some cases, 15 seconds or less). Here are 11 tips — many are a combination of two or three speakers’ ideas — from a session called “60 Ideas in 60 Minutes for Marketing Your Association in a Social Media Age”:

1. Ask why members join. Have people share the reasons why they are members. These testimonials can be featured as part of your website, Flickr feed or even a video series posted on your YouTube channel.
2. Offer unique discounts. Ask exhibitors to offer member-only discounts at association events — for a limited time. Vendors can build the marketing into their booths, as well as pre- and post-show marketing, to drive traffic and boost sales.
3. Add social recognition. Use social products, such as branded badges, to reward and recognize volunteer and member online community efforts.
4. “We missed you.” Send a postcard to non-attendees/non-members during your annual event with messaging that spins ahead to next year’s meeting.
5. Tap the executive team. Get them blogging or hosting Twitter chats with members and the industry as a whole. Members and potential members enjoy the transparency.
6. Create a speakers’ network. Share a portion of the revenue from meetings/webinars with speakers/content leaders who promote the events to their communities in advance.
7. Go online with offline. Tweet or blog about upcoming print publications, such as research in quarterly journals — without violating your own embargo rules — to stir excitement and conversations.
8. Populate your video channel with useful content. YouTube is the second most popular search engine — not Yahoo! or Bing. Make sure that members, and others, can find content from your organization there. How-to clips are popular choices.
9. Brief is powerful. Produce a weekly e-newsletter — open to all readers — that includes a tip of the week. Weekly frequency is the new minimum, as it is key to any return on investment for any sponsors, as well as reader growth.
10. Open your meeting. Put a live Twitter steam on your public website with posts containing the conference hashtag. Livesteam selected sessions (ASAE livestreamed this one). Have interns blog about selected sessions, with take-aways. Tag photos that attendees contribute and open those pictures to non-attendees.
11. Beef up LinkedIn. You can easily add an RSS feed to your association-led LinkedIn groups that gives members something to chat about.

Image credit: Soubrette, via iStockphoto

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In his recent BlogWell presentation, SAP’s Brian Ellefritz dives into how the company trained a team of social-media “reporters” to cover its flagship sales event, SAPPHIRE NOW. In his talk, Ellefritz shares how the company used social media to build excitement before the event, as well as to offer live coverage during it.

His big ideas:

• Assemble a great on-site team. When Ellefritz and his team were looking for on-site reporters, they focused on people who were already comfortable with social tools and had online followings.
• Use simple permission forms. To get permission to publish all the live interviews and testimonials the reporters captured, they were given 3×5 cards that used simple (and legal-team-approved) language for interviewees to sign.
• Have an answer for, “Where will this be published?” SAP created small cards with Web addresses reporters could hand out to attendees who wanted to follow-up and find the content online.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And if you love this presentation, be sure to check out our upcoming BlogWell in Austin, Texas, on Feb. 2.

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In his recent BlogWell case study, Xerox’s Duane Schulz explained how a small group of social-media believers got a bunch of departments engaging fans and customers through social media. A few of his big ideas:

• Find a unifying event. Schulz’s team focused on their ColorQube product launch as an opportunity for social-media integration.
• A registration process is more efficient than an approval process. Schulz says his team benefits from having established policies that define what they can do rather than an approval process. It makes it easier for social initiatives to move forward while still ensuring brand consistency.
• Use the momentum. Taking advantage of the brand’s focus on social media, Schulz and his team established a hub-and-spoke organizational model, expanded the social-media marketing team, established further guidelines and registrations, and created a social-media community center.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And if you like this presentation, be sure to check out our upcoming BlogWell in Chicago on Aug. 11.

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In his recent BlogWell case study presentation, PEMCO’s Rod Brooks shared a bunch of tips on how to use social media to connect with a local audience. A few of his great ideas:

• Connect online and offline engagement. Rod and his team sent brand ambassadors out into the community to meet their fans. Social tools helped them identify and organize these fans before inviting them to offline events.
• Adopt the voice of the customer. Your customers can often say it better than you can. PEMCO started by allowing customers to share reviews and testimonials on their website and now try to put the voice of the customer at the center of every business decision.
• You can’t break it. PEMCO wouldn’t have had the success they have today in social media had they approached it with extreme caution. Instead, they jumped in, used common sense, tested a bunch of things and discovered a few ideas worth building on.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And if you like this presentation, be sure to check out our upcoming BlogWell in Chicago on Aug. 11.

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Some of his social-media advice:

• Realize that buy-in is key. You need to get not just your leadership, but also other departments, on board to launch a successful social presence.
• Education is an advocate’s best weapon. Your role as a social-media evangelist is to take away colleague’s fear of the unknown.
• Use social media to help broaden events. He notes that encouraging video and blogging and conference helps bring that live experience to a wider audience.

Check out our full interview with Midkiff.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Want to learn more about managing the integration of social media into your trade association or nonprofit’s operations? Join SmartBrief on July 20 for Buzz2010: Social Media for Associations in Washington, D.C., where workplace columnist and author Alexandra Levit, Securities and Exchange Commission New-Media Director Mark Story and American Red Cross Social-Media Manager Wendy Harman will share their thoughts on managing the pitfalls of social media.

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Today’s post was written by SmartBrief’s Abe Silk.

As part of the ongoing Social Media Success Summit, Michael Stelzner, who has run a number of social media contests via his website Social Media Examiner, gave a great primer on how to run a successful social media contest. With the advent of social media, businesses and organizations can now create effective contests that generate a lot of buzz with even a very small budget, Stelzner said.

Here are some of Stelzner’s tips for great contests:

• Keeping it simple. According to Stelzner, the key to a successful social media contest is to make the reward valuable and compelling, while keeping the work people have to do to win to a minimum. As a case study, he used the example of SMSS itself, which gave away one ticket for just tweeting a pre-created tweet and two tickets for writing a blog post or commenting on the official blog.
• Creating a winning tweet. Twitter is a great tool for spreading the word quickly, and Stelzner argues that the wording of the tweets you create is crucial. He suggests using a bit.ly tracking link to monitor sharing, creating a hashtag so that you can easily identify winners and creating compelling language that invites interaction. For SMSS they used, “I want to win.”
• Promote well. For SMSS, Stelzner began with a blog post, but quickly followed-up with an e-mail to “fence sitters,” or people who had expressed an interest but hadn’t yet bought a ticket. He also suggested leveraging affiliates and crafting tweets and blog posts for them and also crediting them with a sale if someone they sourced won the contest.

For more great social-media sessions, check out the continuing 100% online Social Media Success Summit that (full disclosure) SmartBrief helped plan. For access to the whole session and many others, sign up here.

Image credit, Viorel Sima, via Shutterstock

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This month’s featured event, IAB Social Media Marketplace, takes place Monday, May 18 in New York. It brings together brand marketers, ad agencies and publishers to discuss which social media channels work and how success is measured. I recently reached out to one of the key presenters, Sarah Hofstetter, vice president of emerging media and client strategy at 360i, to get a preview of her keynote conversation with Marc Fonzetti, Internet specialist for Reckitt Benckiser.

Merritt: Of all your clients, why did you choose Reckitt as the brand to feature at the upcoming IAB Marketplace?

SARAH: Oftentimes marketers hear about broader social marketing success stories (Burger King, Dove) and are frightened by the daunting task and run away, given the immense challenges of internal education, buy-in, etc. So for IAB Social Media Marketplace, we thought marketers would prefer to hear from a large multi-brand CPG marketer that is on the cusp of diving into social media for the first time, today.

How are you working with Reckitt to change minds internally about marketing via social media?

Education is key. Marc Fonzetti, Internet Specialist at Reckitt (and co-keynoter at IAB), sees the amazing opportunities for all of Reckitt’s brands to benefit from social marketing and its ability to spark advocacy, drive loyalty and amplify messaging. Whether it’s reaching teens with Clearasil, young men with Frank’s Hot Sauce, boomers with Mucinex or moms with Airwick, Marc understands the need to customize experiences based on how each of these groups behave online. But socializing that internally and getting buy-in was much harder. At the IAB Social Media Marketplace, Marc will speak to some history on marketing initiatives, the impetus to start evaluating social marketing, how a company as established and reputable as Reckitt educated their teams internally across each brand and their marketing teams, got buy-in, and are now ultimately incorporating social marketing into their programs.

Are companies new to social media behind the curve at this point?

Not at all. In fact, with the rapid growth of user-generated content and social media, many brands were so eager to jump into the marketplace that they took a “bright shiny object” approach, were dazzled by buzzwords and didn’t think about how their programs tied into their overall marketing objectives, and made some pretty ugly and public mistakes. Now is a fantastic opportunity for brands to not only learn from those mistakes but take a disciplined, smart approach to social marketing, understanding how to motivate and engage audiences in their environments, resulting in advocacy, preference, sharing and loyalty.

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