Check out out blog, blog.eventbrite.com -- we have numerous interviews with event organizers and we always try to ask a question about how they are using social media.

Tamara,

Would you post a link or two here in this conversation thread to some specific articles?

Thanks,

Tony

We exclusively used social media to market Buzz2009 - http://www.buzz2009.org/2009/06/living-case-study/ - had 90 participants (which was the max) and 5,000 on the webcast with Guy Kawasaki. It worked amazingly well, however as this was our first one we'll use this data to benchmark against next year.

We have used Social Media to market for several of our Conferences ( I work for an event management company). It certainly creates a buzz. For one of our conferences, we offered a cheaper reg. rate for those signing up via twitter and facebook, that is how we measured how many poeple registered via social media. Another conference we waved the registration fee all together if they came to the conference via social media. It was a good way to measure/encourage registration.

We have used social media for promoting and driving attendance to our events. One of the most notable was our "Secret Session" at ASAE two years ago. We conceived the event, launched and promoted it in just 30 days using only word of mouth and had over 250 attendees.

I am also using the Conference 2.0 platform and will use 90% social media and word of mouth marketing for a 1 day conference on "Legal Aspects of Social Media" on 2 March 2010 in Washington DC. mark your calendar and watch this space. We are putting our money where our mouth is and will use the tools to drive dialogue around the event and with the speakers.

Debra,

Here’s some data:

At ASAE 2009 in Toronto, Bruce MacMillan, CEO MPI (Meeting Professionals International) attributed a 8 & 9% increase (respectively) in attendee satisfaction at both of their main events.

Stats shared at ASAE 2009 Annual Conference in a session on Business Meetings of the Future by:

Meet Different 2009
Satisfaction Survey
2008 85.4%
2009 94.8%*****

WEC 2009
Satisfaction Survey
2008 84%
2009 92% *****

*****Mr. MacMillan attributed a large part of the improvement “directly to the engagement on the social network site”.

MPI actually used a conference community site like the one you are on now.

Now, this isn’t data that shows direct increased attendance. That’s tough to do in a year like 2009. However, it’s not too much of a stretch to say if you as an attendee had a better time than you did the year before, you will talk about it and come back next year.

One more thing: Here’s another great video about the impact of social media marketing from the folks at Socialnomics. http://ow.ly/E0Yu