Facebook & a shameless plug

Without wishing to add to the overall media hysteria about Facebook I would like to highlight the usefulness of the 'groups' function to specialist publishers. For a long time our events teams have talked about building social networks around conferences and exhibitions. We have worried that our delegates and visitors don't get enough opportunity to interact and that the audience we have spent so many marketing dollars to collect then go away until you start promoting to them for the next related event or the following year.

Now, there are several simple solutions that don't require any technology investment on your part. Why build a social network when they already exist and can be adapted to your business needs? The groups function on services like Facebook and LinkedIn is so easy to use and set up & link to that you can quickly gather hundreds of 'friends' to your brand or event.

Want to see an example?

Here's the plug. From December 4-6 at Olympia in London Incisive Media will host the Online Information show. It is aimed at knoweldge managers, information professionals and e-publishers & features over 200 exhibitors, a range of free to attend seminars and a 1,000 person conference on 'Applying Web 2.0 technologies in your business'. It's a fantastic event that a lot of SIPA members both attend and exhibit at. Please come along. This year, for the first time we have established a Facebook group for the event where delegates and exhibitors can come together to arrange meetings, make product announcements and ask advice. 

In the 3 weeks since it was set up we have over 150 members and the discussion has started. With hindsight we should have set the group up as Online Information rather than a group specific to this year's show but it's been an interesting experiment and one which I would encourage you all to play around with (assuming Facebook hasn't been barred on your company servers...)

Rory Brown, Incisive Media

Comments

[Robin Crumby]

Interesting Rory. I see this number is now over 200. We are working on something similar. And debating how this links in with our own social network www.communicatorsnetwork.com