A lot of money and time is put into make any conference successful, but how do we judge success?  Number of registrations? Number of attendees?  Pipeline from the event?  Number of news articles written?  Ratings from surveys?   These are all important measures, but now that conference attendees are more social, we also need to look at how much and what people are saying on the different social channels to understand the full impact of an event.  And let’s be honest, we can get some of the most unbiased feedback through social media.

Last week Salesforce hosted one of our Cloudforce events in Paris.  The Web Analysis & Testing team used Salesforce Radian6 to analyze the social mentions to gain insight around the success of the event, including:

1) the growth in conversations compared to the prior year

2) the impact of introducing a new customer video

3) the engagement driven by a social media contest

Y/Y Growth in Social Mentions

I don’t know of any company or organization that wants to have fewer people talking about their event compared to the prior year.  By trending the social mentions of Cloudforce Paris 2011 vs 2012 we were able to see a 45% lift in social mentions, most of which occurred between 9am -12pm (the hours of the keynote).

Impact of New Content

Often when companies create new content, emails go out internally, we pat each other on the back, and then we hold our breaths to see how it is received.  During Cloudforce Paris we introduced a fabulous new customer video featuring Rossignol.  Not only did this video make me want to go skiing right that minute on a pair of Rossignols, but also it made me want to buy all of salesforce.com’s products.  I probably felt this way because I am a salesforce.com employee, but fortunately through social media we were able to gain insight into how others reacted.   Mentions of Rossignol drove 7% of all Cloudforce social mentions and were overwhelmingly positive including comments like:

Social Contests

In order to engage conference attendees, many companies are turning to social contests.  During our Cloudforce events in San Francisco and Paris we teamed up with HP to create a social contest using the hash tag #eprint.  Attendees, and those watching the keynote streaming, could tweet a picture and be chosen at random to win an HP photo printer.  Not only did this contest engage the attendees, but it gave them an excuse to share with their networks pictures of how great the conference was.  The end result was 111 tweeted pictures that potentially reached over 25,000 Twitter followers!

Becuase of the success of the #eprint contest we are starting to brainstorm additional ways to encourage attendees to post pictures of their conference experience.  What do you think about a photo scavenger hunt? (you can respond in the comments below)

Our team frequently analyzes events to help organizers know what attendees like and what they don't.  For a few other examples of how you can leverage Radian6 to measure the success of your event you can check out our analysis of CeBIT in Hannover, Germany and LeWeb in Paris, France.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at @lmactagg or leave a comment below.