The Business Marketing Association (BMA) national conference has become an annual meeting place where leaders and visionaries of business-to-business marketing from around the world meet to share best practices. With all of the current buzz, it was a given social media had to be part of the 2010 conference experience.

Social Media: So, What Else Is New?

The challenge was to apply social media in a way that would be new to attendees. “BMA members are knowledgeable about social media, so to give them value, we have to take things one or two steps beyond the customary and deliver new ideas and applications that they haven’t seen yet,” says BMA chairman Gary Slack, who is also chairman and chief experience officer of Slack Barshinger.

BMA dabbled in social media in 2009, but the program had been fairly narrow. The goal for the 2010 BMA conference, appropriately named “Engage,” was to fully integrate social media into the conference experience. This meant organizing it in a way that ensured that it would be easy for the 675 conference attendees to embrace, demonstrating best practices and using it to drive buzz, PR and future attendance for the event.

A Team Approach

BMA national board member Mike Brown, founder of The Brainzooming Group, spearheaded the effort. Brown assembled volunteer BMA members to function as the Social Media Team, a group of 20 marcom professionals and b-to-b marketers embodying a wide variety of experience and skills. Brown interviewed each team member to ascertain their topical interests and capabilities—from photography to writing to conducting video interviews.

At the same time, Brown created an editorial production calendar which covered key content and areas of the conference. Then he gave each team member specific assignments, guidelines and deadlines. The scope of the program embraced Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, blog posts, Wiffiti and Foursquare.

The team functioned like a mini-news team. It created more than 30 blog posts, 20 speaker interviews for YouTube, drove 20 roundtable discussions on LinkedIn for 259 participants and posted links to relevant blog posts on Facebook. The team’s activities established a framework that stimulated interaction among the attendees. “Many people say social media should be organic, just happen—but in an event framework it’s different. You have to organize in advance to make sure you have the key points covered and the outlets accessible—then let the organic growth build from there,” says Brown.

BMA partnered with Live Marketing to implement the program on site. This included managing onsite operations and creating an aggregator Web site (www.bmaengage.com) where BMA conference attendees and the general public could access all Engage social media content in one place. The aggregator Web site pulled together Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook along with on-site blog posts, making it easier for people to engage in their favorite platforms or to try something new. “The idea was to bring everything together, make it easy for people to tune in, catch up and connect,” says Bryan Pray, senior producer of online programs for live marketing. In addition, live video of the keynote sessions was streamed to the aggregator site—a tactic that reached many marketers who did not attend the event.

Cross-Platform Promotion

The program was heavily promoted before and during the event via all email, Web and conference materials, and of course, social media. It was also promoted before every educational session and via “I just got engaged” buttons distributed on the show floor. Further visibility was created through a Command Center on the event floor—sort of a cross between a news desk and mission control center. There, attendees watched the Social Media Team create and upload content and view posted content on a large monitor. Throughout the event, the social media team exuded an air of cool amplified by their team t-shirts and preferred seating at the front of the keynote sessions.

A favorite social media exchange was the use of Wiffiti to stream live tweets on jumbo screens in the front of the room during the keynotes. “Some people thought it would be distracting, but what it did was make the experience richer. People could immediately see what other people were thinking. You could see the ideas build in real time,” says Brown.

The program lives on in cyberspace and continues to draw return and new attendees. “What the program did was broaden the event experience by moving the backchannel conversation to the foreground,” says Pray. “Content and education were shared and delivered. Now, they can live on and be shared with the rest of the marketing community that wasn’t able to attend.”

In all, more than 500 people participated (total conference attendance was 675), including both conference attendees and those experiencing the conference virtually. Over 4,400 tweets were created and posted during the conference sessions. Approximately 900 remote Web site visitors participated, representing 31 countries.