Today’s “The Day”
By Patrick Seidl, Strategic Communications Coordinator Today’s the day that you’ve been working so hard toward for months. It’s the day of your biggest fundraising or other business event. You’ve spent hours marketing your event beforehand – from e-blasts, to scheduled social media content and submission of your pre-event press releases – you’ve done everything right. You’ve even achieved your ticket sales goal. Hooray! Your catering order and bar selection were confirmed far in advance and you’re positive that there’s something for everyone. You’re excited. You’ve neatly packed away all your event supplies in clearly marked bins. Your name tags have been stuffed into their clear plastic holders and they’ve been alphabetized to ensure they’re easy to find. You’ve got everything covered! Mr. & Mrs. Jones arrive 45 minutes early, but the rest of your guests arrive right on time. They’re not waiting too long in line, things are going smoothly, and everyone is in high spirits. “This is going really well,” you say to yourself as you run across the room to make sure your VIP guests have everything they need. “Almost perfect,” in fact! Your cocktail hour ends, your guests are ushered to their seats and your programming goes off without a hitch. Your speakers stuck to their dedicated four minutes of air time and your chicken Chesapeake arrived piping hot. People are truly enjoying themselves. Dinner ends, and before you know it the event is over. All your hard work came to fruition. You’re so happy, and exhausted! Then it hits you. Despite your greatest intent of posting to your company’s social media accounts throughout the event – from pictures of your top sponsors to your elegant and thoughtfully planned tablescape – you simply forgot… and you know it’s too late now. Face palm. In today’s marketing world, utilizing social media is critical – especially when documenting events. It brings excitement and shows people who “forgot” to purchase their ticket to your event what they’re missing out on – something they WON’T do next year because, you know…FOMO (fear of missing out). I think back to one of the very first projects I worked on when starting at Fallston Group: dedicated social media for an amazing conference in College Park that celebrated professional women in banking and finance. The client had it all figured out and knew beforehand that they would need some social media support to help tell their story throughout the day. With an early 7 a.m. start, my fingers were afire as I posted updates to their Facebook account and Tweeted out live commentary on the spot from my smartphone. I was their social media correspondent. The best thing about it for our friends who put on the event? It was something they never had to worry about and were able to achieve fabulous results by delegating the to work to Fallston Group. What results, you might ask? During that event, we were able to live stream a video that was the company’s top-performing post OF ALL TIME on Facebook. An achievement they were very excited and proud to hear about. If you have an upcoming event and you want to make sure you don’t “drop the ball” when it comes to social media, feel free to contact us for a bit of advice. We can be reached via phone or email. You can also shoot us a message on social media and we’ll get back to you.
