Using Webcasting and Social Media to Increase Attendance, Followers and Fans: An UNLEASH09 Case Study

Hello and welcome to today's webcast, Using Webcasting and

Social Media to Increase Attendance, Followers and

Fans, An UNLEASH09 case study.

My name is John Pollard and I will be moderating today's

webcast. Before we begin I'd like to go over just a few of

the features of the player that we're using, so that you

can have a wonderful experience.

We'll start with the Ask button.

During the presentation you can ask questions and you'll

find a little button in the lower left of your player, for

most of you.

And when you're asking a question, please include your

email address so that if we do have a chance to get to all

the questions, we can respond offline afterwards.

Also, there is an Info button in the lower right in most of

your players and that has some additional information about

the presentation as well as a number of links.

Immediately following this presentation the same

presentation will be available on demand.

So using the same link that you have, and you can feel

free to share that with your friends, colleagues, family,

may be put it in your Christmas card,

something like that.

So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce Erica St.

Angel and she's going to talk about some very cool things in

terms of webcasting and social media.

Thanks, John.

And thanks for joining us today.

And I am going to race through our case study, leaving you

with some tips for how you can do what we did

for your own event.

It doesn't necessarily have to be a conference, could be a

webinar are or any kind of series where you're sharing

information.

We will have some time at the end for questions and if you

want to stay a little longer and ask some more questions,

that's great.

Otherwise, feel free to Tweet at me or email me.

And I Tweet at @Mediasite, so if you'd like to Tweet during

this presentation, feel free to do that.

We'll be monitoring those for questions, too.

But as John said, there's that little Ask button.

So let's dive in.

So what is this UNLEASH case study all about?

Well, UNLEASH is our user conference, the Mediasite user

conference is the product we make.

And it's the place-- you probably have a similar

thing-- where you bring together people who use your

stuff to talk about how they use it.

So they want to hear from each other.

And they also want to hear from you, from your company.

And we share where we're going in terms of our roadmap.

And it's really the single largest gathering of all of

our users physically in one space at one time.

And we've done this now for three years.

And so you might say, so it's your third year, what's so

special about this year?

What did you do differently, why all the hoopla?

Well, you've probably heard of this thing called the

recession that's been going on.

And then also social media has just--

I hate to use social media explosion, but that's really

what's happened, is people have glommed on to this new

way of interacting with each other and with companies.

And the third thing that changed was, we make this

platform that you're watching right now, this experience,

and we'd never used it for our user conference before.

But because of the recession, people were facing travel bans

and budget constraints and they were telling us through

social media, oh man, I really want to be there, but I'm not

going to be able to come this year.

And so that sort of created a perfect storm where we said

now is the time for us to use our own stuff, to webcast this

conference and take it to the people who couldn't be there.

So this is the only thing you should remember.

It's also known as the remember this if

nothing else slide.

What we did was we webcasted all of the sessions, live and

on demand, we used LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

Those were the social media that we chose because our

customers were already using them.

And we did online videos.

We took interviews of people, put them into the Mediasite

experience that you're watching right now, and then

placed those in key places in terms of our email campaigns

and our website.

So all of that created some really powerful results.

And that's what led to us winning this Forrester

Groundswell award for the B2B category of energizing.

And we increased our attendees by 15%.

And this is something we're really proud of because a lot

of events were really struggling in 2009, even in

2008, in terms of getting the same people to come back in

and growing.

10% of our total attendee base was virtual, even though this

is the first time we offered this track for our conference.

We increased our Facebook fans by 500%, which meant that we

had more than 100 fans and we could claim that personalized

URL, that Facebook.com/you rproductnamehere, which is

something we really wanted because we knew it sort of put

a benchmark out there that we've successfully--

we've made it, we've gotten there.

And then we've doubled the number of Twitter followers.

And we also identified about a dozen--

I'm going to call them Tweeps, for lack of a better term--

but people on Twitter who are actively Tweeting about our

products, our company.

And we're also helping other people with support issues,

even people who are brand new to webcasting who wanted to

ask questions of the space.

They were really seeking out the opportunity

to share their wisdom.

So we found a dozen people who we now can rely on to answer

questions for newbies, who can talk to analysts or reporters,

all within Twitter.

We also increased our user group, the official Mediasite

user group, by 10% in terms of the number of members.

And our satisfaction metrics went up from 4.4 to 4.7 out of

a five point scale of people saying I'm

glad I came to UNLEASH.

And I would recommend UNLEASH to a friend, we

went from 4.4 to 4.6.

And probably the biggest metric that most people care

about is, we were able to pay for the conference, it paid

for itself in four months.

And that was through the expansion of the deployments

of the people who came.

So we're pretty proud of these results given, again, the

economy being as wild as it is and also social media having

such early days, and not really having-- there was no

roadmap when we started this a year ago, right now, December,

2008 is when this all began for us.

So I know it's easy to sit back and say oh, you probably

had a ton of money and people and you had dedicated

resources to do all of this.

And just to prove that really anybody can do this, we're a

small team, we have six people in our group, and really only

three of us were dedicated for any large percentage to the

conference planning.

So it's not something that you necessarily have to have one

person dedicated to contracting the webcasting

company or to just doing social media.

We've spread that out throughout the event planning

function on our team, and I believe you can do that, too.

So at this point, our team is ready to share with you our

super secret playbook for webcasting, social media,

online video and event planning.

And what I'm going to do is break it into what we did with

each of those different kinds of tools and then talk to you

how we use them before, during and after the conference.

So first up is webcasting.

We do this all the time.

We send people into the back of the room.

They take the audio and the video, like you're watching me

right now, coupled with the visual aids, like you see my

PowerPoint, synchronize it and stream it out over the web for

people to watch live or on demand or both.

And so we did all of our sessions streaming live over

three days, three tracks over three days.

And we also created a virtual pass where people would buy

just the online version, online access, and they'd

click on a secure link that they had to log in to get to

because they paid for it, just like you're

watching us right now.

So that was the key cornerstone of building the

content that we then used to talk about in our

social media campaign.

And the result of capturing all of these sessions is a

catalog that looks like this.

And when you click on any one of those links you get the

presentation that looks like what you're

watching right now.

And this is what the experience was like for the

people who are members of that virtual

community, the virtual pass.

And we knew that we were on to something because we had,

obviously, people sign up and pay to watch the conference

content online.

But we also had then Tweeting while the

conference was going on.

And so one of our attendees on the first day said, I couldn't

make it up to Madison this year, so I'm settling in to

watch the UNLEASH09 keynote from my office.

And then he was using that hash tag, which we'll get into

a little bit later if you're new to Twitter.

So we knew that, instantly, we had people out there watching.

We could tell that through the reporting data.

And we had people praising the opportunity to be a part of

the content even though they couldn't come

physically to Madison.

The other thing we did was interviews.

We did two flavors.

One was formal interviews where we scheduled ahead of

time 25 different customers to come and sit in a little room

that we got at the convention center.

We had the backdrop behind me here there and a nice camera

and a microphone.

You wouldn't necessarily have to do that though, you could

do it with a flip camera.

But we asked them five questions.

The first five were about our product and the last one was

about their conference experience, how are you liking

UNLEASH or what are you learning or what are you

excited about?

Then we also took that into--

we did some light editing on that.

And that's not something that we'd normally do, but as a

marketing group, we're building our

skill set to do that.

We took highlight reel for each of those interviews.

We also did a mashup of, overall, what we heard back

from the conference.

And we used that on our website for the conference

website and we've also now used it on our website.

But we wouldn't have been able to get so many interviews done

if we hadn't done them at the user conference.

And again, people Tweeted about that experience saying,

finished my video and photo shoot for UNLEASH in gorgeous

Madison, Wisconsin.

I've forgotten it's tough to be in front of the camera.

When he mentions photo shoot, we had a professional

photographer on site and after people did their videos, we

then had them do a quick shoot.

And the whole process for them really took

only about five minutes.

Three minutes for the interviews and a couple

minutes for the photos.

We also did informal interviews.

Now this is where we had customers volunteer--

this man here's got his flip camera--

to interview other conference attendees, to interview each

other and just to record sort of the conference experience.

And then they took that into whatever editing thing they

wanted, and they gave it back to us and we put it into the

Mediasite experience, what you're watching right now.

And the reason we did that is because we wanted to be able

to track the views, to track how many times people shared

those links.

And also to see how much they watched.

We kept them at around three minutes.

And with the reporting function, you can actually

see, people watched a minute and then they fell off.

Or people stayed to the very end.

And that's the reason why we didn't-- some people say, why

didn't you put it on YouTube.

We really wanted to put it within that experience so we

could see what the reporting was like on it.

And during the conference we got three installments of what

we call user group TV, so mug TV, we put those on our blog

as we went and then pointed back through

other social media.

Which brings me to social media.

So we decided Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and then

Flickr were really the primary areas where we thought we were

going to see the most traction.

We had already seen our customers interacting in those

spaces, so we chose not to go out and do maybe bookmarking

sites or-- and there's so many different ways you can go.

So we narrowed it really to those three.

And this is a screen shot from the conference

website last year.

And you can see highlighted how we used the videos from

the, actually, 2008 conference.

And then highlighting, on every page of the site, those

social properties.

For our Twitter account, we got a

handle which was Mediasite.

And if you haven't done that already for your business,

even if you're not planning on using it, I really recommend

doing it as soon as possible because I'm seeing a lot of, I

guess you'd call them squatters, people who are just

going out and getting those Twitter accounts and then

making it difficult for you to get the terms that you want.

So we did this in December of 2008 as part of just an

overall land grab to make sure that we could get our brand

and terms in as many different social spaces

as we possibly could.

And then keep an archive of that in a Word document.

So we established the media site page and then we started

Tweeting with the hash tag, #Mediasite.

And for those of you new to Twitter, a pound, little

number sign, and then a term, could be an acronym or a word

like Mediasite.

It helps people search through all the Tweets that are

happening around a conference or a specific topic and find

the ones that they're most interested in, without having

to necessarily be following or be followed by the people who

are talking about that topic.

So we started Tweeting with that hash tag really early on

so that people who were on Twitter--

and it was a lot fewer people back then, it's really

exploded now-- so those people knew, as they were talking

about the conference, that that's where they could find

other people and that's where they could send their message

so that other people would see it.

And just as an example, because a lot of times people

will say, oh, I don't even know what we would Tweet, I

don't know what we'd say.

We took photos of people presenting as they were going,

we shared links to other websites, it might be the

presenters home school or home organization, where they're

coming from.

Tweeted those links out.

And then this one-- we had a presenter who just got swarmed

after he spoke with Q&A, so I snapped a picture and said

Sean O'Donnell from Villanova draws a crowd after his

presentation at UNLEASH.

And again with that #Mediasite.

And as we were Tweeting that out, we had people Tweeting

back to us who weren't coming to the conference on site, who

weren't coming to the conference online, but were

saying, oh my gosh, thank you so much for sharing this.

I wish I was there.

And really began enticing them, I might be missing out

on something that, in the future, I'd want to go to.

With Facebook there are three different kinds of pages that

we chose to do for our user conference.

The first one was just a product page or fan page.

And that's really where businesses have their profile

on Facebook.

So we created one for Mediasite by Sonic Foundry.

And then underneath that we created the UNLEASH event.

And any time someone registered for the user

conference, we sent them a separate email that said hey,

thanks for registering, you might want to know about some

of these other social networking areas like the

Mediasite user group page, the Mediasite fan page, and then

also the event itself.

And that's how we began building people RSVP-ing,

saying yes, I'm coming.

Which means it shows up in their profile and so other

people that they might be friends with that they work

with are going to see that they're going to this

conference.

And then the last page is a group, which isn't necessarily

the official--

it's not the official group website, but it's the place

where people go to socialize within that user group space.

So those are the three pages that we created.

For LinkedIn we didn't really find a lot of real time

traction with LinkedIn.

Back then they didn't have--

six months ago, they didn't have the status updates and a

lot of the more real time activity that they do now.

So I think our strategy for next year

will probably change.

But here, someone else had already started a Mediasite

user group on LinkedIn and that's what told us we need to

have a presence there.

So we really our LinkedIn strategy was just to keep

putting out updates about early bird is closing,

speaking submissions are due, those types of things.

And then the last one's Flickr.

And the main reason we chose Flickr is that with a badge,

which with a little piece of code, and I'm a marketing

person and I know how to do this so I guarantee you'll be

able to figure it out, it's real simple.

But with a small piece of code you can add that Flickr badge

to another website, to your blog, it just gives you a way

to disseminate photos from one central source.

So we created an account for Sonic Foundry and then we

created a set for UNLEASH 2009 and then told people that's

where they could go to add their own photos or to see

what the latest was.

And we brought a photographer on site for almost the entire

conference.

And the reason we did that is because we knew we wouldn't be

able to capture some of the more high quality photos we

wanted to use in our marketing.

And all of the presentation pictures I'm showing you right

now, with the exception of this one which is on a

BlackBerry, they're all from that professional

photographer.

But at the end of each day he would then give us a dump of

low res pictures that we'd used to populate our Flickr

and Facebook pages.

But we also had customers who were taking pictures and

sharing them in real time on their Facebook page.

And this is an example from someone from Memphis who drove

to Wisconsin to come to this conference.

And he's got a picture of him crossing the state line.

He took a picture of our speaker bag, the gift that we

had in the rooms, and posted that.

And then all of those we then linked to a photo album on

Facebook so people could see his stuff, too.

And this is an example now of what our badge, our Flickr

badge, looks like on our conference site.

And as the conference get closer, we're adding more

newer photos so that you'll see conference content come

into play, a couple months out and a couple months after the

conference.

And then lastly, email.

I didn't call this out as one of the key tools, but I think

it's still the basis of B2B communication for most

people right now.

And we include a link that said watch it again and keep

the dialogue going as an example in

our post event email.

And then in our newsletters on throughout the year we, for

example this is in July, and we said, in case you missed

it, here's one of the presentations from UNLEASH.

So that's the tools we use.

I thought I'd run through quickly how we use them

before, during and after.

And I wanted to start with during because I'm guessing

maybe one of the reasons you're tuning in is that you

haven't yet webcasted your conference.

I thought this will give you an idea of what you should be

doing on site in terms of capturing the content, how you

can leverage it after, and then how you can use it as you

gear up to plan your event for next year.

So we did, again, every session live and on demand and

created that virtual pass which we sold.

Then we scheduled formal interviews and

did those five questions.

You wouldn't necessarily have to have, like we did, a studio

with a backdrop.

Again just a flip camera.

I think they're $150 on Amazon right now.

Do that and it's really easy to just take those 30 second,

one minute snippets and put them on your website as a way

to really put a face on the conference.

And capture people while they're excited and on site

about how the event is going.

And then we were lucky enough to have customers who

volunteered to do the same thing on our behalf.

And this year we're really expanding that, too.

And they edit it and then we put it into our blog and into

the catalog, the overall catalog for the conference.

And then for the social media properties, we really relied

on pictures, both candid and professional, status updates,

and just what was happening at each point.

We're heading into the birds of a feather luncheon, we're

heading into the awards ceremony, the keynote just

kicked off.

And then live Tweeting, so actually commenting on what

people were saying, what you might be doing right now as

I'm talking, about the conference as it went on.

So for people who were afar, either virtually watching or

just watching the Tweets, that they felt a

part of that event.

And lastly, with email we did send surveys.

Sometimes people ask how we got our feedback.

We used SurveyMonkey to send surveys out for each session

as it went on.

Now after the conference, and this is really where the power

of event webcasting comes into play, because you've captured

all this stuff.

And yes, it's great that you had virtual people watching,

but now that you have that knowledge, it's a library that

you can use to send something smart to people throughout the

entire year.

So we sent the on demand catalog to all the people who

came immediately after the conference.

And we posted their videos, too, both the professional

ones, the ones that we shot and the more informal ones, to

our conference websites and to our blogs.

And kept blogging about the conference and linking back to

those presentations.

And then with social media, we talked about when the

conference was going on.

It was all about what was happening.

As soon as the conference was over, it was

all about what happened.

But then there's this lag time, you're sort of in

conference planning mode and gear up mode, and then you

kind of have a little bit of down time sometimes.

Then we started just talking about well,

what's happening, period?

Of the people that they met, who's presenting at another

conference or who's going to be in town doing a site tour

or something like that, to just help keep that buzz going

and keep bringing people back to those pages where they had

spent so much time right during the conference and

right before.

And then we sent sample catalogs.

We took about eight presentations from the entire

Mediasite catalog and created a sample that

was publicly available.

And we sent that out to everybody who didn't attend so

that they would get not only the knowledge that was shared

in those presentations, but also a taste for what they

missed out on.

And hopefully, again, entice them to come later.

And then those newsletter stories, in

case you missed it.

One a month, we call one out, make it publicly available and

have people click through.

Now that were gearing up, we're 125 days out from our

next user conference.

So we've created now an editorial calendar where we'll

be posting individual presentations or comments

about those presentations to our blog, to our website, and

in our email communication about the conference.

We also transcribed those interviews, the more formal

ones where we asked the five questions,

we transcribed those.

And there's a ton of search engine optimization goodness,

SEO goodness, in those presentations.

And we'll be adding them to our website as content, both

for the conference site and for just our

corporate site as a whole.

And then adding, again, that highlight reel mashup where

everybody talked about what a great experience we had,

putting that on our conference site, too.

Same thing with the customer videos, again.

And now our social media sites are becoming more about

gearing people up, asking them to apply for--

for the call for speakers, letting them know about early

bird deadlines, just the housekeeping of the

conference, but still building that buzz.

And occasionally we'll do, we're 150 days out or we're

100 days out to get people excited.

We also did a lot of matchmaking in the Spring,

before the conference, where somebody's coming from Texas

or somebody is coming from Malaysia, and trying to help

them find people who are from their home state or maybe have

something in common.

So I try to think about the social media space as we're

playing host. It's not necessarily about us being

involved in every conversation as much as it is about

creating a space and helping introduce people like you

would at a good party, so that they find commonality and then

have a reason to come back.

And again, those all important photos.

I really can't underestimate the power of photography in

terms of Twitter and Facebook, because that's really what--

people want to see themselves and they want to see what

happened, what type of event it was, what

the vibe was like.

And then lastly with email.

Now we're beginning to do, check out the videos from last

year, here's the sample catalog again, here's a

presentation you might have missed.

And oh, by the way, people are still talking about the

conference at these social sites.

So we don't really do anything here without measuring it.

Comments saying you can't manage what you don't measure.

And most of what we do I suspect you're already doing,

that falls into three buckets, the conference satisfaction,

metric surveys, which I'm sure you're doing in some fashion,

attendee engagement, and then content viewership.

So on the engagement side, you can look at the attendance and

the repeat attendance.

When you offer now a virtual pass, you can see sort of the

fluctuations between people who watched online and that

are now going to come on site.

And that's obviously, if you're looking to pack a room,

that's what you want.

But at the same time, we're enticed by the online audience

who can't come because of that travel ban or budget

constraint, giving them an opportunity to engage with us.

That, for us, in a way, almost has as much

value as the on site.

We don't ever believe that face to face is going to be

replaced by virtual, but we do believe that they're probably

more people who want to come that, for whatever reason,

this year can't.

And so that's why we want to grow both of those audiences

as we continue.

Looking at your Twitter followers, your LinkedIn group

members, your formal membership, it's a great idea

to snapshot those before, during and after the

conference.

It's sometimes difficult with some of these tools to be able

to go back and look at a reporting graph that shows,

oh, we spiked the week of the conference or

whatever it might be.

We do this really low tech.

We have an Excel document that we just sort of put this stuff

in on a monthly basis.

Then as we get a little bit closer to the conference,

maybe start looking at weekly.

And then by the same token, looking at whether people are

Tweeting, is there an increase in that?

Are they posting to their LinkedIn page about the

conference or posting to their status updates on Facebook?

This whole new area then, I suspect that maybe you haven't

had a chance to leverage, is content viewership.

Now, it's hard when you're on site to have people--

unless you're doing some sophisticated RFID kind of

technology that sort of takes a read on how many people are

actually walking into a room, it's hard without just a gut

check, to know how many people attended each session, unless

you run into like an overflow situation.

In the live module, for the virtual conference, we knew

exactly how many people were watching and which session and

for how long.

And the same thing happens, then, in on demand.

When you send the entire catalog out to your attendees,

all of them, on site and online, you then start seeing

them clicking on the content.

And it becomes interesting to see the trending of certain

topics that maybe weren't so popular on site but now have

become more popular online.

You can also take a look at who's Tweeting the links out.

If you use certain links, if you share them from your

Twitter account, say with a shortener like bitly, you can

track how many other people then go on

and share that link.

And also email.

If you add little referring IDs in your code, then you can

track where these links are coming from and you can see

how many people are watching your content anew, if you

decide to make it public, by sharing it

through social sharing.

And a lot of people have asked me well, how do we get people

more involved?

All of that's great, but how do you get them to come?

I've built the site, I've got my Facebook page, nobody's

really doing anything there.

It's not rocket science, but the way to get them involved

is for you to be involved.

And if you look at any of these pages you're going to

see a whole lot to me, unfortunately.

It's not meant to be the Erica show, but there definitely

needs to be one or two people who take primary ownership,

not necessarily of doing everything related to that

social networking side, but at least are posting

on a regular basis.

And that's why I really recommend setting up an

editorial calendar for social media, just as you would for

your email campaigns or for your event promotion.

Because that forces you, then, every time you do something,

every time you put out a press release or put out an email,

to ask yourself, all right, how would I turn that around

and share it with our social networks?

One of the ways we did that was by actually putting a face

on us as the hosts of the conference.

And this is the program director for the conference

and me saying, we invite you to come to UNLEASH.

And we did a quick three minute webcast where, just

like the one you're watching right now, where we

highlighted some of the things that were new, talked about

the virtual conference pass.

And this, for a lot of people, really early in the

consideration process, they instantly recognized us, they

saw us on the social sites and said oh, I know her.

I watched that presentation.

And then when we met them physically on site, there was

a much quicker rapport because they felt, like I'm talking to

you right now, they felt like we were talking to them.

So if I've convinced you that webcasting is something that

you should do for your next user conference, you might

want to know what I would recommend

recording for next year.

So what should I record?

And I would say do everything, but I know for some people

that's a little bit daunting at the beginning.

So at a minimum do a keynote, or do one track.

The keynotes and maybe one of your most popular tracks.

What you'll find is, and you don't have to sell an online

pass to do that, but once you have that content, it's sort

of like the social sites, people aren't just

automatically going to come and watch it.

But any time you share it you will get click-throughs on it

because you're sharing something smart.

So that's number one and I would do that even if you

don't do anything else.

But with the video side of it then, I would try to get some

customers to talk to you in a formal or informal way.

And if you're lucky enough to have customers who are already

kind of into the whole social media sharing, invite them to

do the interviews, too, and share them back with you.

So we promised you a year's worth of

inspiration in terms of email.

And this doesn't have to be direct emails.

I mean, I've given you 24 here, so you'd be sending a

message every other week.

But this could be how you use webcasts on your blog or on

Twitter or any other social site or on your own website or

in your newsletters.

The whole idea here is, once you have that library, it

gives you a ton of meaty things to keep saying

throughout the year to keep the buzz level up for your

conference.

So I'll walk through these really, really quickly because

there's a couple of them that might

not immediately resonate.

So obviously, you want to do day of and day after webcasts,

like you're going to get for this webinar.

Or emails like you got here.

A see what you missed, and now you can buy access on demand

for people who didn't come.

Highest rated sessions for like the overall conference or

for a specific track or a specific speaker.

And then the most attended.

Because the virtual people aren't going to see what was

the most popular on site and the on site people aren't

going to necessarily see what was most popular online, you

can share that information with each other.

Also the most controversial.

There's always that one session that maybe on paper

didn't necessarily--

you didn't think it was going to spark

this amazing dialogue.

And this is similar to like number 17 with engaging Q&A.

Sometimes that abstract doesn't really give you

insight into what really took place in the room.

And this is, once you've webcast it, once you've

captured it, that on demand content then becomes a very

interesting way to point people to specific highlights

of the conference that maybe normally would have only been

talked about just in words, in text.

And it shows them they can experience it again, whether

they were there on site or if they had never come, if you

decide to make it publicly available.

Also most Tweeted, and then you can snag that Tweet and

use it as a quote.

Or the most emailed.

Pick your staff favorites.

There's always some that we have here that, oh, it was

such a great session.

And you want to call those out and share them.

Also goes back to basics.

There are sometimes presentations that seem to be

evergreen, that people request them to be held at your

conference over and over and over again.

And this is one way to do that, even though you're not

having your conference, people can still get that

information.

And the same thing with hidden gems and funny moments.

There might be presentations that maybe weren't that well

attended or they happened, you know, there's always the last

person on the last day.

And this is a great way to throw them a bone and to

highlight maybe some of the great information that not as

many people got a chance to see because, for whatever

reason, those weren't highly attended presentations.

Great PowerPoint text.

You obviously can share PowerPoint on SlideShare, but

you don't get the person talking, gesturing around

their content.

And those slides sometimes can't speak for themselves,

especially as people use more and more images.

So this is a fabulous way to say, look at these amazing

slides or look at this amazing reference material.

But you've also got the person talking about it

right next to it.

And some of those motivational presentations where you might

walk away from a conference with that feeling of I'm going

to conquer the world, I learned so much great stuff.

And then a couple weeks go by or months go by and

you lose that vibe.

Sending those types of presentations a couple months

afterwards help people get back into that conference

mindset and back on the bandwagon in terms of yes,

these are things that I want to accomplish for our

organization.

Same thing with seasonal themes.

If there's a back to school or a holiday type presentation,

it's a good thing to put in your newsletter.

And you can also do tip roundups

without doing any editing.

There's a little bit of code that you can put at the end of

a presentation that says Play From.

And it will play from right at that point.

So you can find say, maybe three different tips across

three different speakers, and without editing or exporting

anything you can just say watch here, and then click

through on that and they can watch maybe

that five minute snippet.

And then again, as you get closer to the conference, you

can look at all of the on demand data about what people

have been watching over the year and then talk about what

was most watched, emailed or shared.

And then again, sharing that catalog to

entice people to come.

And I'm not going to go through this one, but you can

come back and watch the presentation, pause it on

this, or look at the PowerPoint slides that are

attached in the links.

And this isn't necessarily what we did, but it's a

template just to give you more ideas of how to use social

media and webcasting as the fodder, as the marketing

fodder for a year's conference event planning campaign.

And that's all I've got for today.

And you can continue Tweeting at us at Mediasite, he if you

have other questions.

And otherwise, I'll open it up to John.

Great presentation, Erica.

A couple people--

I think, we all need to take a collective--

Sorry.

-- aah.

Breathe out.

I raced through it.

Relax.

Some of you asked about, can we slow her down?

I know.

There is actually, on the classic player, there are two

links available on the classic player, for some of you, would

have a speed control available and you could slow her down.

But anyway.

We do have a number of questions.

I'm going to try to just keep it a little quick, I think,

just because of the time.

Cheryl asked about matchmaking.

You talked about connecting people before and maybe during

the event, and I think she was looking for some specifics

around that.

How did you facilitate that?

Right.

Well, I'll talk about the really low tech, no price way

that we did it this year, this past year.

And then I'll tell you a little bit more about what

we're going to be looking at for this next year.

For this year we just watched Facebook.

And as people signed up we looked at

where they were from.

We did a little bit of cross tabulation with our customer

database to say OK, that person on Facebook, their

profile might be a little different than they are.

But we identified who these people were and then started

to let them know hey, someone else is

coming from your territory.

Or someone else is speaking on this topic that you've

expressed interest in in the past.

It was really just a matter of like a Friday afternoon, going

through and saying hey, so and so, you might like to

talk to so and so.

And sharing that kind of information.

Super low tech.

But as low tech as it was, it works.

And same thing on Twitter.

We would we would let people know hey, people following

Mediasite, these are our fellow Tweeps, people who are

on Twitter, who you might want to get to know.

They all started following each other.

Now with Twitter you can actually do lists.

And several of our customers have done that where they say,

these are Mediasite Tweeps, these are people like me

talking about this thing.

And then people can see that list and start to follow them,

and it percolates from there.

Again, super low tech, no price.

Dumb, maybe common sense, but it works.

Now we're starting to look at event networking platforms. We

recently did a webinar with Zerista which is on our

website if you want to watch it.

And that's an event networking platform where people create

profiles and then find each other within there and set up

meetings with each other.

We don't have exhibitors at our event, but it would be a

really amazing tool if you had exhibitors, because you could

actually set up meetings.

But it helps people see what other people are attending or

specific sessions.

People can put out what topics they're interested in talking

about and then find others like them and

begin it that way.

So that's sort of the two different spectrums. You could

do with no money and just time or you can do it, you can

actually pull the trigger on event networking.

Great.

Maybe we'll just take one more question.

I don't want to keep you guys longer.

And then if you do have further questions just keep

them coming in and we'll respond to

you directly offline.

Let's talk about the direct relationship between social

media or webcasts and registration.

Have you been able to show this type of relationship?

I think a lot of people are result oriented and they want

to be able to see hey, am I getting the

biggest bang for my buck?

Yeah, and that's really like the white whale

of marketing, right?

Is to be able to show the direct relationship from what

you're doing to the bottom line.

A couple ways that we figured out how to do this.

We added referring IDs to any URL that we

share through Twitter.

So anytime we treat something we add a little question mark

SM equals something.

And that helps us know that when somebody comes back into

our website that they came from Twitter.

And this was really helpful as we were--

we've just started doing it now for the

conference going forward.

But we can actually track to see OK, somebody followed that

link in and then went on to look at certain things on our

site using cookies.

So that's one way you can do it.

The other piece of it is to see that the people who were

interacting on some of these Facebook pages, they might

have joined a group, for example, the Mediasite user

group, and hadn't registered for very long time.

And yet you could see that they were interacting on that

site and asking questions.

And then later they come along and actually register.

It's not science.

And there are amazing tools out there that monitor social

networks for you.

They are kind of pricey and at our price point and at our

staffing level, we weren't able to pull

the trigger on that.

But I think the key thing is that if you think about

anything that you share online digitally as a link, as

something trackable, then it makes it a lot easier to go

back and associate what happened with the

click-throughs and what happened with your

registrations.

The same thing goes for the webcast content, the publicly

available content that we put out there.

We decided not to do this, but you could require people to

give their email address to watch it, even though they're

not buying anything, they're just registering.

But once you have that information then you can go

back and see OK, this person from Sonic Foundry watched

that webcast and they later came along and registered, and

match that up in their time line in terms of how you track

your user data.

So I've got more ideas on that, too, and I'm happy, if

anybody wants to just send me an email or send an Ask

question through here, happy to answer more

questions on that.

Well that's great.

I think in the interest of time we're going to call it.

And just like Erica said, she will respond to you off line.

We have a number of questions just kind of flowing in here.

But I want to respect those of you have who other commitments

this afternoon.

So thank you for attending and feel free to watch this again.

And you can share that link, there's a Share button on the

interface that you can send that forward.

And also the on demand version is at the same URL that you

are watching right now.

So thank you very much for attending and have a wonderful

rest of your day.

Thanks again.