You have a thriving and robust community, and you want to know how you can expand on that success at your company’s annual customer conference, or at customer meetups. How do you promote the community to a wider audience that has the same interests and concerns as your users? And vice versa, how do you get event attendees to take an interest in registering and engaging on your community?
(In case you haven’t heard, Khoros has some exciting features around Events and Live Streaming that will be debuting in 2020*! Keep reading for more information about this! All of the suggestions below are activities that can be implemented independent of these new features.)
Publish Event Content On The Community
There’s no better way to get attendees to learn about the community than by driving them to it for critical information. Create a Group Hub specifically for your event, then use various communication channels to promote the link, such as:
- An announcement on the community
- Social media posts
- A dedicated space in your customer emails
- Link to it from the most high-traffic pages on your company’s web site
- Add it to the signature of your employees’ emails
- Including the URL on any printed materials
Encourage attendees to use the Hub to start networking and interacting with one another before the event even begins. If all of your event’s questions and answers are in this Group Hub (and not duplicated on another web page), there’s no way attendees can miss out on getting visibility to the community while they get informed!
Don’t forget that you can use this same Group Hub to publish summaries after the event. You can even add attachments with copies of any documents or presentations (or videos, if you have a Brightcove integration with us), and these materials will continue to drive traffic as people come back to the Hub to get copies of what they saw.
Recognize Community Users With Special Name Tags
Perhaps you want to call attention to the community users at your event! Give these users (or even a subset of the users, like your community VIPs) a special designation on their name tag or badge. This could be accomplished by adding a ribbon to the bottom of their badge, or giving them a unique icon, or including their rank name. Doing so usually sparks questions from other attendees wondering how they can get the same or a similar distinction.
Secure A Keynote Shoutout
At most company conferences, an executive will usually present some kind of remarks or even provide a keynote. Work with your marketing team to write up a few sentences highlighting the success of the community, and see if you can get the executive’s buy-in to include them in his/her speech. That’s some powerful promotion when you can get the community mentioned on-stage with the attention of all attendees watching!
Give Exceptional Perks to Community Users
As incentive for signing up for community, you could promote the event’s special perks for community users. Ideas include:
- Early access to keynotes. (For example, users get in 15 minutes before everyone else.)
- Reserved front-row seating for keynotes.
- Early access to the event’s registration (this one could prove worthwhile for popular meetups).
- Attendees receive a special community badge. (Find out how to create badges for offline events.)
Arrange A Place For Community Users To Meet
Some companies have the ability to create a special Community Lounge at their conference where users can interact, sign up for the community, and learn about new features. For those brands or groups that don’t have this ability, something as simple as a Community Coffee Meetup could suffice. Just be sure to heavily promote the date and time!
Offer Community Swag...And Lots Of It!
If you’ve got the budget for it, creating swag with your community URL on it could be the gift that keeps on giving. Be sure to strategically place the items in high-traffic areas such as: the registration desk, coffee and snack tables, on tables in popular breakout session rooms. Also, when deciding on the kind of swag, be sure it’s something that your URL can fit on without looking tacky or too crammed.
Examples
Curious about who’s doing a great job at integrating their community with in-person events? Check out these Khoros clients! (Don’t forget about our very own dedicated Events section on Atlas!)
- The Qlik Community utilizes a category for all the necessary information about their annual conference, QlikWorld.
- The NI Forums (also known as the National Instruments Community) has a dedicated category page for all of their events and competitions.
- The Atlassian Community promotes their in-person global user groups (under Community Events) and provides an online meeting place for each as well.
*A brief note from @RahulHa, Director of Product Management for Khoros Communities Solution: Coming this year on Khoros Communities is support for Events. This allows for publication of an Events calendar for the Community with each Event sporting a detailed page with all the event-specific details. Members can RSVP with classic Yes, No and Maybe responses.
Coming along with Events is support for Live Streaming. With Live Streaming, you will be able to now go live and leverage the benefits of video right from within the communities. Applications are endless; product launches, product Q&As, trainings, webinars, product demos, news announcements, conferences and presentations.
Work is underway on this new capability, and do let us know if you have any questions or would like to get more details around Events & Live Streaming. We would be more than happy to walk you through the detailed requirements and also work with you as we move into Beta and Early Access in the coming months.
If you’re looking for some strategic assistance in brainstorming more ways to integrate your community with your events, talk to your Account Executive or Customer Success Manager on how Khoros can assist you through Success Services.
What are YOU doing in your community to showcase your company’s events? Or what are you doing at your events to showcase your community?
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