Dan Willis shows digital marketers how to get conference benefits online when they can't attend in person. Build a spreadsheet of events and speakers, then use social-listening tools like Agorapulse or Hootsuite to track conversations and engage in real time.
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So you couldn't make the conference that you were hoping to attend and have all those great connections and experiences to build your business. No problem. I'm going to show you how you can attend an event digitally and still get the same results. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Dan, the Millennial Motivator, and today we are diving into how you can digitally attend events and still get great results. Let's go. I want to take this down to a really short 5-minute. Here's how you pump this out, get this done and get to it. So this week is huge for digital marketers out there with CM World and Inbound both happening at the same time. So Ohio and Boston have these massive events that are happening and for most they're not going to be able to attend both. Obviously the distance is going to prohibit that, but for some, even just traveling with hurricanes or whatever's going on, it's impossible to get to all the events that we want to. So how can we still capitalize on all these events that bring great minds together around a single conversation without having to necessarily be there in person? That's what we're tackling today. So these 3 steps are great ways for you to be able to engage those conferences. Step number 1, to get the ball rolling, what you want to do is track down what conferences are happening in your industry. Every industry is constantly pumping out new conferences and events that you can be a part of digitally online. First, make yourself a task list, a spreadsheet of here are all the conferences I want to attend in my niche. Having that list is going to be a massive boost to how you can engage online. Step number 2, and this takes a little bit more time, but the next step that you want to do is as you're building out the spreadsheet that has a list of all of these different events that you are interested in, the next step is to track down, okay, who's speaking at these events? Who are the keynotes? Who are the workshops? Find the people that are influencers that are going to be at the event. And make sure that you have their social profiles locked down. Now, there's lots of different social channels that you could use to track this— Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. For me, I prefer Twitter just because it's in the moment, it's in the now. So what I do is I track down all the key influencers that are going to be at the event. I make sure that I've got all of their social channels set up. The reality is you want to have all of these people, all of their profiles tagged and ready to go. The other thing that you want to have tagged are event hashtags. So depending on different stages, or maybe the event has an overarching hashtag, you want to make sure that you have that down as well on the spreadsheet. So you know who's talking, what their account names are, and what the branded tag for the event is. Those are going to be essential in the 3rd step of this process. Last but certainly not least, you want to hop in and grab Agorapulse or Talkwalker, Hootsuite, one of these social listening tools, and you use this massive spreadsheet that you've created to now go in and plug in these names. You plug in these hashtags and you create notifications as they pop up and fly. The beauty of engaging digitally online is that you now have the ability to reach into these conversations as though you were sitting in the audience, listen to what people are saying and engage back. It's a beautiful and simple way for you to make it feel like you're a part of the event, even though you may not necessarily be there in body. So that's it guys. Fast, simple, easy way for you to attend a conference digitally. Know the conferences that you want to be at, know who's speaking there and what the hashtags are, set up social listening and engage actively. That's it. It's that simple. Let me know, guys, what your thoughts are on attending a conference digitally down below in the comments. And if you have any questions about how to set up maybe Agorapulse or Talkwalker or why you would use those tools, let me know down below as well and I will do my best to answer you. Take it easy, guys.
