Social media has clearly become a main medium for many businesses. Therefore, it is highly important to stay on track and avoid mistakes.  At ABCey Events, we are always using social media to connect with our clients and community, and to share our local knowledge. Brian Solis, tech guru and social media connoisseur, offers some great tips that we think are very helpful.  Here is a quick recap of what he shares with us.

1. Showing Up Isn’t Enough: While it is important you have a social medium and make a name for yourself, it is most important to learn how to engage with your followers.  Whether it be through Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other social medium, make sure you really engage in conversation to attract potential consumers.
2. You Can’t be Everywhere, Nor Should You: With the extensive new up and comings of technology and new social mediums, you may be really excited to try everything. Don’t.  Be where your followers are and excel within that medium.
3. Authenticity and Transparency are Nothing Without a Connection: Authenticity and transparency are the two very important aspects to social media.  They act as a “guiding light” more so than an effective form of engagement.   Therefore, it is most important to make sure you add value and content to your social media, and in return, authenticity and transparency will support your content.
4. Talking to People Isn’t a Business Strategy: Make sure you have a purpose before you engage in conversation! It is important you engage in conversation and make people who don’t know about you, find out about you.  You want the people to start talking about your brand, so engage, engage, engage!
5. Keep Your Customers Tuned in: Adding one video is not going to make you go viral.  According to Solis, “Companies believe that uploading a video to Youtube is the key to anything going viral. What they don’t know is, 48 Hours of video is uploaded every minute to Youtube. The chance of your video going viral naturally is basically nil”.  So if you want to go viral and you are sure that going viral will help your company, seek out people that will help you share and make yourself known.  ”If it creates lift, leaves an imprint or if it drives action or outcomes, that’s when you’re going viral. “

What other common mistakes have you made as part of your social media strategy?

Do you ever spend hours in a store or shopping online, trying to find the perfect gift for someone, but just can’t quite figure out what to get them? Well, now your days have become much easier, and just in time for the holidays!  Givvy is an “open community that let’s you participate in shaping the next gift-giving trend”. Whether it’s for a birthday, holiday present, housewarming party or a little something for yourself, our community of curators makes it easy to discover trendy new gifts that will inspire you and delight your friends and family.  You can also keep track of your most important occasions and social events with a personalized calendar and gift reminder service.

Givvy is uniquely designed for use inside Facebook—so you can discover gifts and share occasions while staying connected to the friends you love most. Givvy is an open community that let’s you participate in shaping the next gift-giving trend. Simply share your favorite gift ideas with friends and earn points as your influence gains in popularity. The members with the most influence earn exclusive rewards and join our community of Curators.

Your Holiday season of gift giving has now become much easier.  Make sure to check out Givvy’s Facebook page for great ideas for the perfect gift.

ABCey Events would like to thank Larry Rubin, one of Givvy’s founder’s for making our gift-giving days much easier!

Who would have thought that you could “collect people, places, and things with a touch”? Poken, is a small device that stores all of your personal information, such as, your name, business, and contact information. This information can be traded with other individuals at the touch of another Poken. This would be great for an event! Rather than trading business cards, you can simply exchange your information through the Poken, and in return, Poken creates a timeline of the people you met with all of their information. This is a great way to generate business leads and gather brochure information at your next event! Here are some of the benefits:

For You:

• Generate high quality business leads
• Simple and easy to deploy infrastructure
• Reduce paper waste and send a message of social consciousness
• Minimize printing and logistics costs of leaflets
• Track networking success with post-event analytics

4000 people were hosted in Orland, Florida and participants were allowed to collect information via Poken, click here to see the results. ABCey Events hopes to use Poken at our upcoming events!

Google has finally made it possible for Google+ to have brand pages so businesses can merge and communicate with Google’s social network. Rather than having a Google+ profile, it will be much easier for companies to promote themselves via their own page. This will make it easier for followers to interact with the company and hopefully will increase the brand’s followers.  Users can choose to follow brands, such as specific, news, games, or restaurants, and be able to interact with that specific brand.  Ben Parr states that “when users add a brand to their circles, it increases that brand’s follower count”.  Hopefully this will be beneficial to businesses! This is very similar to Facebook and we are curious to see how and if it will affect Facebook’s brand pages.

Zeny Huang, Emerging Media Strategist at JWT New York, thinks that Google+ will be better and more successful than Facebook for four reasons:

1. Better Search Opportunities: There must be better search benefits for Google+ users because of Google.com domain.
2. More Customization: Google+ users will be able to use the excess white space on the sides of the profile for custom skinning of the brand page as well as space for advertisements.
3. Better Analytics: Google Analytics will help guide brands in organizing and specifying content on their page to direct towards their followers.  Also Google Analytics will allow advertisers have space for media placement that and will create more interaction between their followers and media spending.
4. Google Can Learn from Facebook: Google can learn from Facebook’s advantages and weaknesses and make Google+ better.

Customers will use social media to give compliments or complaints about a company, regardless of whether that company uses social media itself.  Therefore, it is important for a business to use social media to give their customers an environment to share their thoughts. Dave Toliver, Director of Corporate Marketing at Angel, gives seven ways to create a memorable customer experience with social media.

• Give Your Customers a Place to Talk:  If you don’t have a place for your customers to talk openly, they will do it behind your backs and you may never know what customers don’t like. Therefore, having a place for customers to freely give compliments or complaints, allows you to know what you are doing well or need to resolve.
• Integrate Social Media Into Your Customer Service:  Giving a place for customers to voice their complaints allows for you to find a way to fix them, but be prepared to have resolutions for the complaints.  Likewise, if a customer compliments you, make sure to give them thanks or even coupons and rewards.
• Activate Your Existing Customer Base:  Many businesses have more customers than they do Facebook or Twitter followers.  Reach out to the current customers to start building your social media fan base. Then use the social media to reach new customers and perhaps promotions to sell your product.
• Be Proactive:  Interact with customers. Engaging in conversations will make you noticeable and customers happy.
• Reward Influencers:  If you reward customers, they will most likely be advocates for your business.
• Create Compelling Content:  Give your customers something they can admire on your page.  Remember, they are following you, so you want to make them feel special and exclusive.
• Stand Out From the Crowd:  The majority of social media is done by text. Be different and make yourself stand out. Use pictures, voice applications, or even music, to engage with the customers and make yourself memorable.

Friends! This Thursday, October 27th we have a really special event for you. Rise2Shine & Marilyn’s Mission is collaborating to bring their 1st Annual MONSTER MASH @ MARS Fundraiser to help alleviate the suffering of young underprivileged children, locally and in Haiti. Our local favorite Superstar DJ’s Clarkie and Dirtyhertz will be gracing the decks & providing us with some great tunes for the eve! The event will be held at Mars Bar, SF located at 798 Brannan St and will run from 9:00pm-1:00am. Costumes are optional and there will be some other fun stuff in store including a Raffle & great prizes! For more information and to RSVP, you can visit the Facebook Event Page.

Marilyn’s Mission has been supplying household necessities to children and families in need for 13 years. They work in conjunction with Holy Family Day Home, a day care center for homeless and low income children, and many other charitable organizations. Many people want to be charitable around the holidays, but the people who need it most, are in continuous need. Marilyn’s mission strives to supply all year round.

Rise2Shine (R2S) is a 501(c)(3) Non-Profit organization established to help alleviate the suffering of young children living in impoverished developing countries worldwide, with a current focus on Haiti. R2S concentrates on helping the forgotten children, those children from six months to five years of age. These children live in abject poverty and are too young to attend public school, resulting in minimal access to essential food and educational services.They are super excited to finally announce the grand opening of their flagship location in Fond-Parisien, Haiti on 11-11-11 (only 2wks after this fundraiser).

With your help, we can all make this possible. To ensure a better future for our children, please RSVP today and come out and show your support! Suggested donation $15! You can also make donations on the Rise2Shine website here.

Virtual events and Hybrid Events have been a hot topic for a while now. If you’re unclear on what a Hybrid event is, it is simply the extension of traditional in-person events with tools such as broadcasting and social media. For some special event professionals, hybrid events are not cutting-edge but commonplace. Every event now-a-days should really be considered a hybrid from the start, unless there is a specific reason for there not to be. The more people to get involved into a brand, a product or a communication message, the better their response will be in the form of buying decisions or recommendations. Hybrid events involve people even more than classic events did in the past, and at this point you can see that virtual and social media elements offer a lot of advantages for companies planning to use them. It’s not just regular “ROI” anymore, it’s Return on Involvement as well!

International event powerhouse Vok Dams Group, headquartered in Germany, was among the first agencies to integrate the Internet into special events back in 1998. And the company’s commitment to hybrid events is clear: “The future belongs to hybrid events, which pair live with MoSoLo—the use of mobile/social/location-based technologies,” says company leader Coja Dams. For Microsoft’s partner conference in Germany last week, the Vok Dams team turned to a mix of elements, including a custom event guide app, communication via Facebook and Xing (the German version of LinkedIn), Xbox Kinect modules at the event, and scannable tag codes at networking events that helped the 1,400 guests learn more about one another.

ABCey Events loves learning about the immersion of new and innovative technology and events. Several event pros who routinely stage hybrid events stress that complex technology is not a must though. Multi-source events can also be incredibly cheap, from Skype and Twitter, to most costly, satellite and interactive texting. We do think that putting a digital spin on a live event can make the event better. Technology is changing at light speed. It is time for the us, the event marketers of the world to assess their portfolio and align new business models to their event marketing strategies!

This post was adapted from “Hybrid Special Events–So ‘Now’ or Not Yet?” by Lisa Hurley of Special Events Magazine.

Here it is, Mac users! Few things are better than connecting with friends and family, especially when you’re far apart. A few days ago, Skype officially released Skype for Windows where you can video chat with your Facebook friends without leaving Skype. They seem to be giving the G+ huddle feature a run for thier money!  Yesterday, Skype and Facebook appeared to get cozier under the Apple sun. All the features are the same as in Skype for Windows, but now Mac users can enjoy video chatting as well. They still aren’t able to do group chat’s like G+ but hopefully that will come in the near future. We had been conducting business calls with the Huddle feature, but we’re excited to check this out now too. Nothing is better than a face to face meeting!

We must admit, good for Skype! Now they have both Windows and Mac users within the Facebook database. What are your thoughts on how it will benefit Facebook? You can download Skype 5.4 for Mac OS X Beta now. While you do that, I will go and Skype-celebrate the new update with my Facebook friends.

Is Google+, also known as G+, Google Plus or Plus, really a competition for Facebook? As you already know, the major difference between the two is in the privacy settings. Facebook does allow you to create lists, but they’re incredibly time consuming and you can’t post directly to just those in a certain list (you can only view). Google+ allows you to manage the content as you post it through creating Circles of your networks. Also, there is that magic +1 button that apparently might influence the SEO presence of our posts. Today, for most of us Facebook has become a natural part of our every day communication process. G+ is great, but do we really need another social network to post to if we already have one, or two, maybe 5 that already serve this purpose? It really would be great to just have one platform for all of our online activities. Among tweeting, posting, blogging, sharing one can easily get confused. Personally, I am loving the Huddle video chat feature and have already conducted a few hour long business calls. Just make sure you take a shower first!

Does G+ have a chance of beating out Facebook? Should Facebook be even concerned? In any event, here at ABCey Events, we always look forward to changes and plan accordingly!

Here at ABCey Events we know that it can be difficult to keep up with the latest technology and stay connected in the social media world with all the new innovations being created. The new buzz about Google+ may have some of you hesitant to jump on the bandwagon right away. You’ve just become comfortable navigating through Facebook and you can’t imagine starting over. Well, there is hope for those of you who want to make the change but don’t want to start completely over. We found an easy step by step process to migrate all of your friends, pictures, videos and other data to Google+.

1. Migrate your friends: A social network is nothing without a group of friends with whom to talk, so the first thing you’ll want to do is move your friends. The easiest way to transfer your Facebook friends is to import them through a Yahoo email address. To do this, head to mail.yahoo.com and click the Create New Account button (if you already have a Yahoo or Flickr account, you can skip this step). Once you’ve created an account, sign in and head to the Contacts tab. Click on “Import Contacts” and choose the Facebook option. You should now see all your Facebook friends in your Yahoo address book. Lastly, head to Google+ and go to the Circles tab. Click “Find and Invite” and click the Yahoo button. It’ll add all your Yahoo Contacts.

2. Migrate your Photos: You have built up a lot of photos from your own computer and your friend’s and it would be a shame to loose them. Migrating your photos is ridiculously easy with the Move Your Photos Google Chrome extension. Install it, click on its icon in the extension bar, and log in to your Facebook account. Select the photos you want to transfer and click the upload button at the very bottom of the page. Don’t log out while it works, just let it do its thing.

3.Mirgate your Videos: The only way to move your videos, unfortunately, is to download the entirety of your Facebook data and re-upload them. To do this, head to Account > Account Settings, and scroll down to “Download Your Information”. Hit the “learn more” link and hit he Download button. It will take awhile to gather your info, but you’ll receive an email when it’s done, and you can download a ZIP file full of your photos, videos, and profile information.

Now that all your data’s been migrated, you can enjoy using Google+ as your main social network. There isn’t a foolproof, one-step way to migrate your data, but this should help make the process quite a bit easier. If you’re not ready to make the switch yet it’s understandable. ABCey Events is learning new things every day about Google+ and we will keep you up to date with any new tips we find.  To find out more helpful tricks, view the full article.

Have you made the switch to Google+ yet? Do you think it will take over facebook?