Social media monitoring event by Third Tuesday Calgary

Last Wednesday I helped organize a Third Tuesday Calgary event. I wanted to volunteer for an event like this for some time and I’m glad Doug Lacombe asked me if I wanted to participate this time. The idea of the event came from Doug. I was trying my best to execute on it and I think we did well. Here’s a quick summary of what what special about it.

Venue

This time Doug wanted to have a different venue that will allow for more relaxed atmosphere with maybe a few beers flowing around. My search for the venue ended at Metropolitan Grill Mount Royal  Village location.

The private room fit all 50 guests and it was perfect for this type of event. The only problem was that the music in the main area was a bit too loud as the doors into the private room were not closing completely.

Setup

Here’s one of the key things about the event. Only one of 4 presenters was physically in the room. The other three guest speakers joined us over a GoToMeeting setup. We had to ensure the hard-line internet connection to have a stable signal, and it worked out.

Note: if you plan to have a similar setup, make sure you buy a 100-foot Ethernet cable at London Drugs around the corner for that, you’ll be able to return it after you’re done.

We used a Snowball by Blue microphone to talk back at presenters. The venue had a good sound system that got the sound into the room. Video was transferred through an RGB cable, so make sure you either have a Mac with adapter or your PC has RGB input.

We started with a quick intro by Doug (to the Third Tuesday Calgary) and myself (to the idea, agenda and speakers). Then each presenter took 15 mins to do a quick demo of their product. Once each speaker was done I transferred to the next one.

Speakers

We were fortunate that some of the leaders in the industry of social media monitoring were presenting. Among presenters were Radian6, Post Rank and Sysomos. Although these products go the entire social media monitoring circle (Listen, Analyze, Engage, Monitor), we wanted to focus on Listening primarily, so most of the presentations were about ways the product is able to listen.

I was speaker #4 and concluded with a quick review of how one can setup a social media / web monitor using Google Reader. It was definitely a budget solution to monitor social web comparing to the leading products, but I believe that Google Reader is a great place to start you social media monitoring efforts. After my presentation I committed to prepare a visual guide on how to monitor the web, so the guide is coming up into the Online marketing resources section.

Value

The most important thing about such events is if they deliver value to its participants (both speakers and the audience) in balanced way. I hope this one has achieved a certain level of that.

Audience was presented with some of the best social media monitoring products out there. Now they can schedule a personal demo with any or all of these vendors, and hopefully make a better decision on selecting the product.

Presenters, of course, got exposure to 50 potential clients in Calgary. However, I really hope we continue engaging the vendors with our audience even after the event. The first idea offered by Doug is that we encourage the audience to ask questions through the Meetup.com and the vendors will address these questions.

In conclusion

In the end, the preps took us about 1.5 months and I think it was well worth it. I hope I see you at Third Tuesday Calgary events in the future. Here’s the Social media monitoring deck from the event:

Related posts:

1. Social media monitoring: LAR model revisited
2. Social media and SEO: compatible? Event review.
3. Executing Social Media in Calgary, Day 1 in review
4. Next 500 days in Social Media, event in review
5. Executing social media, notes from event (part 1)