Philippe Jeanjean, Head of Digital

It’s been a busy week of event-related activity at Publicasity. This past weekend saw us representing several of our clients at the UK’s largest parent blogging conference Britmums Live, and last week we hosted the PRCA Expert Briefing on ‘Amplifying live events with social media’. For those of you who couldn’t make it, here are some of the key takeaways from our presentation and discussion.

1) Focus on the outcomes

Social media can support and amplify events in many ways, such as driving footfall, engaging with attendees, increasing online brand mentions, creating lasting content and collecting data and leads. Focus on the most important of these goals and attribute direct KPIs to them.

Tip: Ensure your social media activity doesn’t distract from the event’s goals. ‘Networking’ events are not always enhanced by a room full of people fixated on their smartphones!

2) Social success starts offline

To cut through the social media noise at a busy event, you need to get people participating and sharing content and experiences. Your brand activity needs to be compelling enough to get people physically engaged.

Tip: Forget about creating ideas that ‘work well on social media’. Your starting point should be creating experiences that work well at the event. This will help ensure activity strong enough to generate social content.

3) Don’t handcuff your community manager

Spontaneous content is much more relevant and more likely to be engaged with. However, your brand won’t be able to riff on breaking news if you have a distracted community manager or a cumbersome approvals process.

Tip: Ensure that your community manager has enough time to dedicate to monitoring and posting, and create clear guidelines that reduce the need to have every post approved by someone else.

And he's off! @Publicasity's Head of Digital talks amplifying live events at today's @PRCA_UK's Expert Briefing pic.twitter.com/kkB4oHCiDK

— Amy Burgess (@Starlet3000) June 19, 2014

For a copy of the full presentation, please contact Philippe Jeanjean ( @Pjeanjean)