This post will take around 47 seconds to read.
Events have a distinct lifecycle. made up of three stages. And it’s not all about Twitter.
Socious discuss what this means in terms of engagement, including some interesting statistics from a recent conference. This showed a 96% drop in tweets after the conference – hardly surprising, but reflecting a lack of post-event conversation.
After a conference attention shifts to blogs, which appear in the week or so following an event:
Socious poses the question:
Is your conference still successful if the thought-leadership, idea sharing, and conversations tapered off a few days after the conference and disappear almost completely after a week?
This is perhaps a rather narrow view of conference success, however the conference lifecycle should be borne mind, both by event organisers ( the post concludes with a list of suggestions) and by those following conferences.
Related articles
- Where Should The Content Go? (eventamplifier.wordpress.com)
- #bbcsms: What next? (bbc.co.uk)
- Conference Conversation Curation Frustration (mardahl.dk)
This is really interesting Ann, and thanks for pointing us at this diagram!
One could argue that this distribution of online conversation is perfectly logical and not necessarily a negative thing at all. In the case of a traditional conference, how many people would ring each other up or text each other to continue chatting about the conference more than a few days afterwards? Any then it would normally have only been to follow up leads.
After the conference is the time for reflection and more structured thought, which is better suited to blogs than to Twitter. Fewer people will blog, but what is often missed out of these metrics is the number of people reading the blog posts and commenting upon them. That information may be difficult or even impossible to get, but would actually give you a more realistic idea of how long the levels of engagement last post-event. Usually, such metrics only measure engagement as the release of new material (be that in tweet form, or blog posts or whatever), but that is not actually the same thing as engagement.
Food for thought!
I liked the diagram too!
All to often I’ve been following events and post-event you’d be lucky if the organisers even moved the booking form link, let alone actually added any details. That’s changing a bit in the curation era.
Agree that the distribution is normal, but at UKCLE our aim _was_ to prolong the conversation post-conference, and even up to the next one. We had some success in this, and sometimes it even happened without us even knowing about it, which was particularly hard to evaluate!
Thx again for a thoughtful comment.
[...] recent post by Ann Priestly challenged me to think about the ways we measure the online engagement with a conference. She [...]
This is a very interesting post. I read someplace that, at Steve Job’s recent WDC conference in SF two weeks ago, there were something like 345 tweets during the event – in a room that held only 1200 people!
Howard Givner of the Event Leadership Institute recently wrote something about this as well…the more attuned corporate event planners are to the value (and immediacy) of social media broadcasting during events, the more clout they can bring to the executive table. Events are not just the four walls anymore, and the “cost per impression” goes WAY down when you consider the follow-on audience is 10x to 100X what is in the immediate audience.
Thanks Cindy! There’s no doubt that livetweeting events is changing the game, and it’s good to see it spreading beyond IT type circles too.