Event Launch Guidelines
4.2.1 – Event planning – launch story
This is a few weeks or a couple of months before your event launch. By this time, your prelaunch plans and launch story should be carefully planned out.
1- Write down your event launch story so that everyone is in sync with it. You can use docs.google.com to write it out collaboratively.
2- Establish a pre-launch story and action-plan. Use a good brainstorming tool to map out your ideas for the launch story before locking them down.
Mind42.com is a browser based online mind mapping application.
3- Get your event overall launch story and offer right. Identify overall launch timelines and add those timelines using an embeddable timeline widget called
xtimeline.com
4- Establish a pre-launch plan & skull session. Go through the posts on how to build hype and pre-launch campaigns at
EventsListed.com/eventline Remember that trigger timing is important to decide when to hit the right mental triggers during your marketing campaign. These mental triggers should help in getting early customers.
5- Once you have the basic plan mapped out, you can use Shoutlet.com to sharpen it up around a marketing campaign. You can create RSS and podcast feeds, launch and track text messaging campaigns, manage and track email marketing campaigns. You can also upload video and syndicate to free video-sharing sites.
4.1.2 – Launch Preps – Getting the schedules up
As we’re getting closer and closer to the Event day, you would now want to have the exact schedules prepared and shared with the team.
1- Set the final menu selection with your caterer for food and beverages & add the menu for display online in your event page at EventsListed.com. Take time to finalize the menu that fits your event perfectly. Make sure that the food and wine are compatible with each other using Snooth.com. Snooth is a very comprehensive wine database, featuring millions of reviews and hundreds of thousands of wines
2- In your calendar, enter the dates you want meetings with all outside vendors and consultants. Its good to meet with vendors to ensure that everything is going according to plan. Its also a way of making sure that everyone is on the same page. iscrybe.com is a good easy to use calendar that can help you get started.
3- You can also use your calendar for scheduling deliveries of special equipment, rentals & confirming setup. This can be anything from music systems, projectors to cameras. Anything that needs to be rented, setup and tested before the event. To setup auto-reminders to your cellphones from your calendar use mymemorizer.com
4- Using calendars is useful if you can make task deadlines and rollouts. Once everything is scheduled in the calendar, your Task Manager notifies you about these due dates and plans so that nothing falls between the cracks. Taskbin.com has an interesting solution for those of you who want to assign and share tasks in a group effort. All your tasks are “shared”. TaskBin is not like a calendar or a scheduler, and there is no need to enter specific dates.
5- When setting up your schedules, you should make sure you still keep a tap on the market, on the location and other things that may effect your event. DontMissAnything.com enables users to define when they would like to be notified in the future without having to fear to receive too much information.
4.1.1 – Launch Preps – HRM
Preparing your team for the event day can get complicated and unnerving. Having the right set of tasks to do helps a great deal in getting things done in an organized manner.
1- Managing off site workers is difficult to keep a tap on. There are tools specifically designed to monitor their work and record the hours spent on your projects. You can use
odesk.com‘s Team page for live screen monitoring or time sheets.
2- During the final launch preperation’s, most of your volunteers or workers will be all around the place, doing their own set of individual tasks. You can keep them all in the loop by sending microblog messages to their cellphones using through an instant messenger using Kwippy.com
3 If you are looking for a more formal HR management tool, try
LessHR.com. It is an end-to-end employee hiring/managing/firing/payroll/review system for small businesses and event managers alike.
4- Make a list of things you need your team to get done, e.g. putting up advertisements, ordering trophies/awards, preparing VIP welcome packets, enlisting TV/radio sponsors, enlisting public service announcements, enlisting locations for posters, etc etc. You can make these lists using 43folders.com.
5- For those of you who always want a Task Manager of sorts to organize your work, EventsListed.com. offers just that. Its like an automated personal secretary that organizes, assigns, sends reminders etc.
3.3.4 – Event Marketing – Content Sharing
One way to spread the word about your event page, is to be actively involved in sharing your content in multiple sites and mediums. This allows more readers to read your stuff, thus increasing your outreach. If your content has the right kind of links and call-to-actions then it should bring more traffic to your site or event page as well.
1- Content sharing sites like EzineArticles.com are great, not only for spreading your content but also because they help in increasing your page rankings if they are written in a good keyword rich manner.
2- You should also have a solid Social bookmarking strategy to enable your readers to share your content with their friends. Enable digg.com, del.icio.us and
stumbleupon.com on all of your blog-posts and web content.
3- Hubpages.com and Squidoo.com are great places for article marketing. They allow you to share content by forming a presence on their sites where your prospective clients can find you.
4- Use tubemogul.com for bookmarking and sharing your videos for others to see. It automatically sends it off to all of the popular video sharing sites.
5- Lastly, enable email subscriptions and RSS using FeedReader.com on your blog-posts and event pages so that people can keep a tap on the event updates without having to visit your site daily.
3.3.3 – Event Promotions – Video Marketing
Video marketing is a gift of the recent internet technologies. It has viral potential. It increases page rankings manifold. More than anything else, it is one of the richest mediums of communication.
1- For marketing your event, use videos to drive traffic to your event pages. You can share these videos on Youtube.com so that they are widely spread. Videos increase your traffic by at least 20% and are a great outreach strategy.
2- For online video marketing, a sure shot way of planning your videos well is by setting up a TrafficGeyser.com account. It bookmarks your videos, helps with search engine rankings, sends your videos off to multiple video sharing sites.
3- Alternatively, you can setup a TubeMogul.com account. Its a free site that distributes your content for you and provides you with accurate stats regarding your videos. These stats are useful for measuring the effect and value of your videos to your overall business.
4- You can pimp up your videos with effects, animations and graphics by using an online tool called graffiti.vidavee.com
5- Read good posts on how videos can help your marketing efforts and how to build effective videos. Visit eventslisted.com/eventline. There is a “video” tag on the left column, use that to read all of the video related posts.
3.32 - Event Promotions - Getting on Facebook
If you are promoting your event using social networks, then Facebook is the place to be.
1- First of all go to Facebook.com for registering yourself and filling out your personal profile. Make sure you keep it a ‘personal’ profile and not a ‘company’ profile - it has to be human and relatable.
2- Once you have your personals profile on Facebook, setting up pages for your event is a simple one step process. You can have event specific pages where all of your Facebook contacts can look at details of the event and participate with the planning. Go to
facebook.com/business to build your pages.
3- You can put up demographic specific ads on facebook that show up in a small area on the left. By doing so, you can target very specific niche groups even based on keywords of interest, which are usually inaccessible otherwise. To advertise via these social ads on facebook, go to facebook.com/ads
4- You can also create groups of your event, that your community can become members of. Its a great way for them to mingle with each other and is also great for feedback and other activities around the event. When on your facebook.com page, select “Groups” and then “create new” to make a new group from scratch. Once it is up and running, you can invite other people to it.
5- Lastly, go to oreilly.com for facebook demographics and best practices to get you going. Search for facebook on the blog.
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