This time last week I was invited to speak at the #360tweetup which is designed for event industry professionals who want to keep learning from their peers and is run by the fabulous Peter Kerwood (@pkerwood) who is the Marketing Director of venue Altitude where the event took place.

I was speaking after the awesome @tiffanystjames who gave a fantastic insight into the fundamentals that event organisers can put in place to help socially enrich their events.

My role was to introduce the concept of harnessing the ‘back channel’ conversation that occur before, during and after events to create an engaging visual display known as The Tweetwall.

The TweetWall captures all the tweets that mention the event hashtag and gives everyone who joins the conversation their 5 seconds of fame up on the big screen. It a great way to show the audience you value their input and has been used by event organisers to drive footfall to certain key areas of their events – as everyone likes to see their name in lights!

The TweetWall also delivers a new way for event organisers to be generate additional revenue with zero development effort.

So how do you make money from the TweetWall

Well if you harvest all the tweets and display them via a TweetWall you have a new opportunity to attract sponsorship from brands, as all are looking for new ways to gain an edge and many of them are now shifting more of their budget spend to social media. The TweetWall allows event organisers to tap directly into this need. Here is the TweetWall from last Tuesday’s event.

Syndicate the Tweets via a Social Widget

One of the things Tiffany St James talked about earlier in the evening was using your speakers and sponsors to help spread the word and amplify the event. The TweetWall allows you to go one step further as it also generates an industry standard sized widget that anyone can embed on their site with one line of code. You can see an example below and if you keep watching you sill see some sponsored logos appear.

Imagine if all your speakers were asked to add a widget to their corporate site or personal blogs – what do you think that would do to the attendance figures?

Sponsors love it because they get some added value instantly and can show their customers that they are involved with the upcoming event – which can only be a good thing for the event organiser.  The key thing is that anyone can take it and embed on their site and help amplify your event, the TweetWall widget makes it easier for them to do it.

How do you connect with your audience after the event

All the tweets that are posted throughout the event are captured and used to automatically create a networking site so that the event organiser or sponsors can re-engage with the audience.

The site provides some fantastic insight and identifies questions such as:

• Who tweeted the most at the conference?
• Who is the most active on Twitter?
• Who has the most followers within the community?
• Who should you be following?

Click here to see the #360tweetup Networking site in action

The Interactive Wall

Every conversation that happened during the event is captured and used to create an interactive feature where users can roll over any Avatar to see who said what. It’s a great way for users to catch up on the sessions they missed or recap on session posts.

Automated Suggestion Tool

As so often happens at events, attendees never get the chance to meet and connect with everyone and they often do not know who they should be talking with. This handy feature helps fill the gap by automatically suggesting people they may find interesting. As they enter in their twitter name they are automatically presented with suggested connections based on the 2nd degree of separation that exists amongst the people they follow on Twitter.

Here’s a link to Peter Kerwood’s auto suggested people to follow.

The Relationship Wheel

A picture paints a thousand words and this handy tool makes it very easy to see how the people at an event relate socially to one another on twitter. Rolling over any of the avatar displays the connections that already exist. Clicking on an avatar creates a personalised relationship wheel.

The key thing is that you can use all these features to connect with people after the event, which I did with some of the people from the event this week (see some of the tweets below). This allows your social team to start conversations with your audience after the event – without trying to sell to them!

@tanyagoodin -nice to meet you last night – here is your data-wheel bit.ly/AuQJDN some suggested people you m bit.ly/xxNcKh— Andrew Lyons (@_andrewlyons) February 14, 2012

@LondonEventGuruhere is your data visualisation from last nightbit.ly/xLoMq7- be great to chat at next event — Andrew Lyons (@_andrewlyons) February 14, 2012

It’s time to arm your sales team with new metrics!

Based on the feedback from the event and the people I spoke with after, it seemed that the social amplification metric I discussed seemed to hit a nerve. You see, it still amazes me that event organisers are not including the social amplification potential of their events in any of their sales collateral or passing on this information to their sales team to use. If we look at the metrics we uncovered from the #360tweetup we can determine there were 248 Tweets from 78 users and the number of impressions delivered using the #360tweetup was an impressive 355,787. How does that compare to your event or your competitors event?

If you don’t know what your events social amplification metric is, you should — and in the next post I will go into detail on why its important and how it can ensure brands spend at your event instead of your competitors.