More event organizers are using Twitter to build a sense of excitement and help their content spread. Thanks to all the live tweets, the TEDx conference jumped to the #1 trending topic in Canada the day of the event.

Even though I’m a huge fan of Twitter, I’ve noticed a downside of encouraging live event tweets: you can hinder your attendees’ ability to absorb your content and get the most from your event.

You – and your event’s attendees – may use Twitter with the hopes of building relationships that eventually move beyond the digital realm. If your attendees spend the bulk of their time hunched over their smartphones, they can miss opportunities to meet people and create business opportunities.

“If typing into a smartphone causes you to hunch over and frown, narrow your eyes or furrow your brow as you quickly try to input data into a tiny keyboard, this can look uninviting to people around you,” says Mark Bowden, President, TruthPlane™ Inc. “A universal signal that you’re approachable and friendly is openness in the body, eye contact and the eyebrows lifted slightly when you catch someone’s eyes. This is almost impossible if you’re hunched over a handheld device.”

Below are five tips for using Twitter to spread your event’s content, without worrying that your attendees will miss learning and networking opportunities.

Encourage pre-event connections through Twitter

Create a hashtag for your event and spread the word on Twitter. Host pre-event Twitter chats with your presenters and invite your followers to participate. You can also answer questions, share resources and encourage your followers to visit your event’s landing page.

Ask one of your team members to be your event’s dedicated tweeter

This will ensure that content from your event goes live on Twitter as it happens. It also takes the pressure to tweet off attendees who don’t want to miss a single second of content. Tell attendees that your dedicated tweeter will tweet the best points. If they hear something they like, they can simply retweet it instead of typing it. This gives them more time to focus on what the presenter is saying.

Use Twitter for Q&A during the event

Your dedicated tweeter should monitor your Twitter account and address any questions that may arise during the event. He or she can also pass questions from your attendees along to the presenters during your live Q&A.

Build sound bites into presentations

If you have a crowd of avid tweeters, you should make it easy for them to spread your content. Ask your presenters to prepare “sound bites” that can be easily tweeted.

Share event wrap-up information on Twitter

After the event, you can post links to videos, presentations or additional resources. You can also encourage attendees to ask follow-up questions via Twitter. Just make sure someone continues to monitor your account and can quickly respond to inquiries.

I don’t want to discourage live tweeting at events, as it’s a great way to spread your content. Just try some of the above tips to make live tweeting easier and less distracting for your participants.

What about you? What are your feelings about tweeting at events and during presentations? Feel free to share your comments below.

This week, I’ll be outlining several content distribution strategies that will help support community building among your attendees and set the stage for your next in-person meeting.

When we’re talking content distribution, there are three simple guidelines I like to follow. Provide your attendees with:

• The information they need to know
• When they need to know it
• In the manner that’s convenient for them

Think of your meetings as an ongoing process that contributes business value and results, not as isolated events. CMOs recognize that meetings and events have the highest ROI of any marketing channel. As such, meetings should no longer be treated as isolated events with limited, hard-to-quantify outcomes. There’s simply too much at stake to not be seeing ongoing dividends.

Case in point #1: TED Conference

One of the best examples of ongoing dividends from content distribution is the TED Conference. This influential gathering of great minds takes its brand “ideas worth sharing” seriously, posting every presentation from its 25-year history.

This free and open practice has helped build the conference into the global juggernaut it is today, spawning new offerings of local events and engaging with audiences it otherwise wouldn’t have been able to reach. It has essentially created a recurring content (and revenue) pipeline.

Case in point #2: The Society for Human Resource Management

The Society for Human Resource Management is another group that’s been using their content for a strategic advantage. Let’s review the 360 degree content strategy they’ve perfected and the design principles behind them:

• Create a hashtag for each conference, meeting, and event. More importantly, educate your community on how to use social media to communicate more value-oriented content.
  • Design Principle: Make those 140 characters work smarter and leverage the wisdom of the crowd.
• Enlist industry bloggers to capture and share content.Use SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) to augment what your presenters are doing onsite.
  • Design Principle: More is more, when it comes to facilitating conversation.
• LIVE content. Broadcast content as it’s happening – like the news – and get it in front of your entire audience. This will foster more engagement and participation.
  • Design Principle: Be inclusive, not exclusive with your meeting content.
• Plan for success. Support participants in documenting key takeaways and measurable outcomes (objectives) and have them contract with colleagues to be more accountable. Don’t leave this to chance. It’s the primary reason both revenue and cost saving ideas generated at meetings don’t get implemented.
  • Design Principle: What gets measured, gets done.

Bottom line: Once you’ve invested the significant time and resources on planning and executing a successful conference, meeting or event, it just makes sense to do your best to remain engaged with your attendees, extending the conversation, and continuing to build the community that will help you address your current and future challenges.

What other suggestions do you have to use content to keep attendees engaged after an event?

First, what do we know about how adults learn in order to deliver content that engages them?

Today’s meeting attendees are:

• Self-directed: Involve them in the learning process
• Knowledgeable: Leverage their experience
• Goal-oriented: Define clear objectives and outcomes
• Relevancy-oriented: Learning must be applicable to their work
• Internally motivated: Relate learning to their interests

Given these characteristics, it’s no wonder that the traditional “sage from the stage” lecture format used in most meetings is no longer cutting it. Today’s attendees are looking for a more immersive meeting experience, and the following are 20 ideas for delivering one.

Appreciative Inquiry: A process for approaching change from a holistic framework using three core phases: discovery, dream, and design.

Body Voting: For any size group, ask individuals to stand or sit based on their answers to questions.

Buzz Group: A small group (the buzz group) breaks off from a larger group in order to generate ideas to take back to the larger group for discussion or decision making.

Case Study: An in-depth investigation of a single individual, group, or event to explore causation in order to find underlying principles.

Critical Incident: The telling of an individual experience (a critical incident) in story format, which is analyzed for its significant contribution to an activity or phenomenon.

Fishbowl: A small group discussion or demonstration observed by a larger, surrounding group. Open fishbowls have an open chair available for audience members to cycle in and out of the conversation. Closed fishbowls don’t allow for substitutions but the entire group can be replaced by another.

Graphic Recording: A visual record of an event using images, symbols and words. Great for summarizing conversations and connections.

Ignite: Similar to Pecha-Kucha (see below) except using 15 slides for 20 seconds per slide (5:00 minutes total).

Jigsaw: A small group technique where participants are paired with experts to learn a subset of material and then rejoin the group as instructor on the subset material.

Mashups: Like its musical roots imply, a collection of seemingly random people and their ideas making beautiful conversation together.

Mini-Lecture or Lecturette: An abbreviated presentation, sometimes followed by a facilitated discussion for the remainder of time allotted.

Open Space: A flexible format focused on an important purpose or task, but beginning without any formal agenda, beyond the overall purpose or theme.

Pecha Kucha: A fast-paced, fun presentation using 20 slides for 20 seconds per slide (6:40 minutes total).

Poster Session: A presentation of peer-reviewed research information with an academic or professional focus. Prominent at scientific or medical conferences.

Simulated Encounter: An experiential format designed to represent real-life scenarios like a sales call or customer service interaction.

Spectrogram: An interactive exercise which highlights the range of perspectives in a group. A facilitator asks a question and participants line up along a continuum.

StorySLAMs: Like a poetry slam but no rhyming required. Topics can be open or themed (5:00 minutes per story).

Tweettups: Sometimes planned, sometimes spontaneous group meetings, think ‘Happy Hour’ for the Twitterati. Invite and R.S.V.P. via Twitter only.

Unconference: A facilitated, participant-driven conference format centered around a theme or purpose.

World Café: A conversational process based on established design principles.

Each of these presentation formats is designed to increase engagement and foster a greater sense of community among your attendees. And who can argue with that?

So when it comes to a content delivery strategy for your conference, meeting or event, keep these design principles in mind:

Promote interactivity: Active learners retain more and apply more of what they learn to their jobs. Stop lecturing to your attendees. Get them more engaged with each other using a wider variety of presentation formats.

Create (more) informal learning opportunities: Research shows that approximately 80% of what we know we acquire through informal learning opportunities, not formal training programs. Don’t leave this to chance at your meeting via coffee breaks, luncheons, or social hours. Create contests, challenges, or assignments, complete with goals and objectives, which your attendees will want to participate in. They’ll leave better prepared to implement the new ideas they’ve been exposed to.

Empower PowerPoint: A tool’s utility is only as good as its user’s ability. If you must use a presentation tool, give more thought to what you’re trying to communicate and how best to do so. For some fresh perspectives on presenting ideas or data, see http://www.presentationzen.com/ and http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/.

Stay tuned next week for the last part of this series that covers how to distribute content after a face-to-face meeting.

If you have more ideas on other ways to deliver content during in-person events, let us know in the comments!

We’re starting to see new methods and techniques for developing, delivering, and distributing content which are transforming the way we meet, and this has significant implications for content marketers.

This is the first in a series of three posts on how you can 1) create, 2) deliver, and 3) distribute content for face-to-face meetings. This post talks about how you can develop content that is engaging for your audience, and the next two posts will provide suggestions on unique ways to deliver and distribute content.

When it comes to creating content strategies for your conference, meeting or event, keep these design principles in mind.

Engage Early and Often

If you want to provide great content for your meetings, you need to solicit input from your potential audience through a variety of traditional and new media channels. Facilitate (don’t lead) the dialog, listen actively, and keep the conversation going both during and after your event. Collaborative content creation represents one of the greatest opportunities for increasing engagement with, and among, your attendees.

Nowhere is this more evident than at the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival held in Austin, Texas each March. Event Director Hugh Forest credits crowdsourcing content for their steady increase in attendance at a time when other events are seeing declines. “Soliciting presentation ideas from our online community and having them vote on those they’d like to see, has helped us understand our attendees better,” notes Forest. The increased engagement has led to more dialog which has led to more creativity, innovation, and ultimately translated into success.

Social media tools represent another content channel meeting organizers are using aggressively to reach prospective attendees and drive attendance. Platforms such as blogs, Twitter and video are mostly used for promotional purposes, but the greater opportunity lies in facilitating more dialog among attendees and with the content presenter so that when they gather together, they can dive deeper into the content, and deriving more value from attending than they would have otherwise.

Case in point: A well planned content strategy is even more important when you consider that when someone like Daniel Pink is brought in to give a presentation on his latest book, ‘Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us‘, many of his attendees may have already seen it on YouTube. Given this, what does Dan do for an encore? The challenge for content marketers is to position Dan’s message in a way which fosters greater understanding, and ultimately application for your attendees.

Focus on the Attendee (User) Experience

As you design your event, imagine the attendee experience before, during, and afterward and make sure you’re optimizing both content and context. Content is still King but context is Country. And what good is a King without a country?

One of the most interesting means of engaging meeting attendees prior to an event was Cisco’s use of an alternate reality game (ARG) called The Threshold. The online game was designed to build teamwork and greater awareness of Cisco products and services during Cisco’s Global Sales Experience.

The ARG was used because this year’s meeting was 100% virtual, without a single face-to-face component. But the results underscored how the right content strategy, in this case an online game, might help you exceed your objectives. Over 13,000 individuals participated in the game, generating thousands more posts on the discussion boards. Who knew sales people were such avid gamers?

Stay tuned for part two in the series where I’ll talk about different ways you can deliver content during meetings. In the meantime, let me know if you have any other examples of marketers who are using content to engage with people prior to face-to-face events.