Live Events for Online Communities — Ep 5

In this episode, learn about live events for your online community and how it brings everyone closer, giving you the opportunity for a win-win-win. Episode Highlights: Live events are a great way to bring an online community together. Madalyn talks about how she brought members from her #TwitterSmarter chat together in person at this year’s Social Media Marketing World conference in San Diego. Live events can be an important part of building your online community and strengthening membership. When meeting members of your online community for the first time, it’s like meeting an old friend. We have a need for connection. It’s important to have that physical face-to-face contact. Is it okay to hijack or take over a large event and host your community there? Like say SXSW or Social Media Marketing World? The big draw of a great community is having the members connect with each other. They love meeting each other. Consider how connections can be beneficial and how people fit and mesh with each other. It’s a great way to hit it out of the park, as Kami says. Live events give you the opportunity for a win-win-win in a way that online communities don’t. Events are most successful when you find a need and can fill it with what the community needs or wants. And that’s what Kami did with Social Media Breakfast Houston and Madalyn with the #TwitterSmarter chat and podcast. What if you start an event and no one shows up. Madalyn makes a great point with this: The idea is the seed and the roots are the event. The riches are in the niches because when you talk to everyone, you talk to no one. Links, Tools & Apps Mentioned in this Episode: Social Media Marketing World South by Southwest (SXSW) Big Give Houston Social Media Breakfast Houston Growthli GoGirlsMusic Podrover Create If Writing Call-To-Action Your call-to-action for this week is to meet someone locally in one of your online communities. We want you to reach out to someone nearby and have a face-to-face (or Skype) conversation. You can alway use someone in our #CommunitiesThatConvert or #VideoReplyDay community. Take a picture (or screenshot) and tweet it, Facebook it, or Instagram it with our super long hashtag (LOL!), #CommunitiesThatConvert. We’ll be monitoring it and we’ll call you out in a future podcast episode. How to Reach Kami Huyse: If you’d like to learn more about Kami, visit her website at www.zoeticamedia.com. You can contact her by email at [email protected] or tweet to @KamiChat. How to Reach Madalyn Sklar: If you’d like to learn more about Madalyn, visit her website at www.madalynsklar.com. You can contact her by email at [email protected] or tweet to @MadalynSklar.