Last week, I met David Rich of event marketing firm George P. Johnson. David is their Senior VP of Strategic Marketing, and he was one of the panelists for a marketing workshop on experience marketing. The question at stake: how does social media and event marketing meet as a marketing strategy?
Even more intriguing is that people want to connect more in person after interactions on the web rather than decrease the likelihood of people getting together. There already is some evidence of this, which I have namely seen on Twitter with small announcements of people meeting up over common interests.
As George P. Johnson’s surveys indicate, event marketing appears just as desirable as social media marketing. Take that with a grain of salt, as George P. Johnson is an event or “experience” marketing company, it still resonates in that it is a natural human need to connect with others in person.
In a brief interview, David’s insights about event marketing and the millennial generation are a good jumping off point for marketers to start thinking about the possibilities. There is an entire loop that integrates events with social media, starting with hype on the web and keeping it up after the event is over.
There is an audio version which will be included soon. Find the interview script on the next page.
UPDATE: The interview was recorded in QCP file and needs a workaround.
MM: This is Clara Kuo with the Millennium Marketer. I am here with David Rich of George P. Johnson, and he’s going to be talking about social media and event marketing; how those things are related to (each other). So, David, can you just tell us what your role is at George P. Johnson?
DR: Yes, I’m Senior Vice President of Strategic Marketing at GPJ, which means I run our strategy practice globally in 24 offices around the world.
MM: Wow, that’s a big number. So talk to me about social media. How does that relate to event marketing and what do you see are the trends with the two tying in together?
DR: Social media is a powerful enabler of event and experience marketing. because ultimately social media is about communities and events are about communities.
Social media is a format for which communities can gather and they can exchange information and ask each other questions and at some point that community wants to get together face-to-face and that’s what happens at events and experience marketing.
What’s interesting is that you can have social media that is the run up to an event and then also social media can magnify the event as its happening, so people are blogging at events. “Do you hear what so-and-so says” or “Can you believe what they said?” or “Isn’t it amazing what they said?”…You have all kinds of
spiderweb threads that comes out of that experience and ends up in the social media. Then of course you have the extension of those events after the live portion where the conversation continues…
I think that really smart marketers will have to determine when is the right moment to bring people back together and what should the conversation be from a content perspective.
MM: And second of all how do you think that affects Generation Y, do you think they are responsive of event marketing? (Assuming that they would rather converse on the internet)
DR: I think so. What we’ve seen in the field is that there really aren’t any generations that don’t want to get together face to face, they each want to do different things the complexion of the events and experiences are different by generation, but we see that it’s a basic human need that runs across all age ranges and as you get into the different generations how they want to get together, what they want to do when they get together varies greatly but there still this need to say, “Hey, cool man, I’m into that and I know you’re into that, so let’s talk about it.”
