Earlier this week I had the great opportunity to attend a large medical conference with an ‘exhibits only’ pass. The goal in attending the meeting was to look for innovative tactics utilized to enhance the exhibits experience for meeting attendees and exhibitors and meet with our counterparts at the association who were putting on the meeting to discuss strategy.
It was an awesome opportunity and I had been very excited ever since I found out I was able to go. What I hoped for was to encourage the flow of creative energy, and while that goal was achieved, I also happened to unexpectedly meet a couple of my exhibitor contacts face-to-face for the first time. There is just something about putting a face to the name that takes the relationship to a whole new level. (unrelated to the post, but still a cool and unexpected perk of this opportunity. . . I digress)
Back to the point. I’ll go ahead and admit that I had (unsurprisingly) sought out and followed the association’s social media efforts in the weeks prior to the meeting, mainly by monitoring their various Twitter accounts (and some of the more vocal attendees’ accounts) on a regular basis. I was pleasantly surprised to see a medical society utilizing social media, and on a seemingly regular basis as well as in conjunction with their annual meeting.
While I was in the association’s booth on the exhibit hall floor discussing the evolution of their presence in the exhibit hall, I mentioned that I was interested in meeting whoever was handling their social media initiatives.
A couple of minutes later, I did just that. After introducing myself and admitting my recent stint of stalking her social media efforts, I learned that she had been an employee of the association for some time now, in the advocacy department, and one of her responsibilities was maintaining a blog. The leadership recognized the value and need for a social media presence, as well as her natural talent for communicating via social networks, and eventually transitioned her into a newly created position in the communications and marketing department, handling organization-wide social media initiatives.
As someone who has a pretty strong grasp of social media and a particular interest in how medical societies are (or are not) using it, I’ve been pretty impressed with her efforts. Their membership consists of doctors, which usually tend to not be as active on social media or at least open to it off the bat. (I realize there are significant exceptions, there is no need to point this out to me. In this particular situation though, it applies). 
However, over the past seven days, and as of this post’s publication, there have been 1,142 tweets, from 201 contributors, and an average of 163 tweets per day associated with the official conference hashtag. These are not mind blowing statistics. However, based on unique circumstances and in comparison to similar meetings, these statistics are worth mentioning. Based on the association’s seemingly well thought out strategy and implementation, I won’t be surprised to see them grow in the future.
However insignificant the numbers may seem in comparison to more mainstream meetings – being in a similar environment, I was impressed. I was impressed more than anything by the association’s willingness to experiment with what many associations seem to be intimidated by or completely ignore.
She explained to me that they have a few main accounts representing the organization that she and a couple other designated staff work together to maintain, as well as some sub-accounts (like their 2010 annual meeting and their 2010 expo account) that come into play as needed. Because the association offers so many different areas of interest to their members, one account wouldn’t be sufficient to get the right message to the right folks. Simply put, this works for them.
Unfortunately, since she and the rest of her co-workers were mid-annual meeting and likely pulling 14-hour days, we didn’t have long to talk. But, I was motivated by her story and impressed with both her individual efforts and those of the association, and felt the need to share.
Things I wish I had the opportunity to ask her during our brief chat:
- Were there struggles along the way to your transition to convince key staff of social media’s potential value and importance?
- What social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.) have you been the most succcessful in engaging members and attendees?
- How do you plan to keep the conversation/buzz going year-round, as opposed to just annual meeting-centric?
- What social networks did you put the most effort into and what was the result? Success? Failures? Things to tweak?
- If she was aware of or had she considered using online event communities, like the Social Collective? Pro’s/con’s/potential challenges?
Either way, it was definitely a pleasure meeting her. I got her card and plan to reach out to her in the future with these type of questions and more . . . while continuing to (stalk) watch her social media efforts.
We are all in this together, right?
