Social Media is everywhere. Blogs. Facebook. LinkedIn. Twitter. YouTube. Flickr. The list of social media applications continue to become entrenched with modern life and its user base keeps multiplying daily. As recently as a few months ago, businesses and professionals were asking, “Is this relevant to me/my organization/my industry/my profession?” If you’re struggling with why you should be involved in social media, consider the following statistics:

• Facebook now has over 300 million members (as of 9/17/2009). It’s estimated that there are another 500+ million people engaged in other social media channels. Odds are, many of these people are your colleagues, employees, customers and prospects.
• Over the next five years, Forrester Research estimates social media marketing to grow at an annual rate of 34 percent – faster than any other form of online marketing and double the average growth rate of 17 percent for all online mediums. That means social media marketing spending will hit $3.1 billion in 2014.
• Nasa’s Phoenix Lander used Twitter to break news that had been found ice on Mars. I guess that would be the first status update from another planet (okay . . . although very cool, this probably doesn’t affect you much).

So what does this mean to you? If you plan events, we hope this post will help you in considering how to integrate social media into your agenda. Social media sessions at conferences – whether breakouts or keynotes – are some of the most-attended and highest-rated. Here are some quick ideas to get you started.

1. Create an event blog and/or podcast. Feature interviews with key speakers to promote the event.
2. Record your sessions and repackage the content for future use. Repackage it. Repurpose it. Look for additional revenue from people that could not attend. Use it to add value to those that did attend and want to reference the material at a later time.
3. Create a Twitter hashtag. Post regular updates and encourage attendees, sponsors, and exhibitors to do the same.
4. Utilize a live Twitter feed for questions and audience polling. Make sure there is WIFI at the event!

5. Encourage others to re-tweet your registration messages so that you don’t lose your audience repeating the same message over and over.
6. Utilize Facebook tagging to create viral campaigns promoting the event.
7. Post highlight or wrap up videos and interviews following each day’s activities.