While I like newsjacking,

I really love eventjacking as a great way to get your message out.

If you're a startup organization, or new to social marketing, or

you don't have a big budget, eventjacking is very, very powerful.

And a great way to start using the power of communities to your benefit.

Eventjacking is a process of injecting your brand in to key events

which are attended by your high value markets.

So what you want to do is think about your high value markets and

think about what sort of places they go.

What sort of conferences do they go to, or conventions, or gatherings?

Maybe there's a walk for a diabetes or something, and

if that's your target market, you can go there.

All you need to know is the hashtag from the event, and

a knowledge of the speaker or the participants to do effective eventjacking.

The benefits of it is it boosts your SEO just like newsjacking does.

It engages readers in really timely commentary,

timely though in this case being around the event that's happening.

And so you're essentially becoming a part of the event

without actually being at the event.

It allows you to impact the event with or without attendance on your part.

And the key is that if you're using hashtags and

you're in the right topic areas, people assume you're at the event.

Whether you are or not is really immaterial.

It gives you leadership and thought leadership in an area, and

allows for real-time dialogue with attendees.

We found at Northwestern is, if our students do this around an event that's

relevant to the client that they're working on for their final project,

people will talk with them and actually ask them for more information.

Because they view them as a thought leader,

even though they're not physically at the event.

And so the thing you want to do is you can curate content,

you set it all up for the event.

And you do this to educate and

engaging with the attendees while they're at the event.

So the key is, there's two types of eventjacking.

Because these are predictable events that engage high value audiences,

one type we could do it is professionally.

Professionally, we go to conferences and seminars and

conventions around a topic area.

And because these are scheduled, and because they have their own hashtags,

we can become a part of the conversation around them by just scheduling our

content flow to coincide with these conferences, seminars and conventions.

So professionally we can do it, we can also do it socially.

There are holidays and annual celebrations, and for

many organizations are really compatible with the products and services they offer.

And so for Veteran's day, or we have a Taste of Chicago

event that happens here in Chicago over the 4th of July.

These sorts of holidays, because they're predictable and there's content we can

flow out, we can use those effectively to event hijack as well.

So we could do it both professionally and socially.

In terms of professional eventjacking, the thing to think about is,

think multimedia and think about doing multiple activities.

So here's how you do that.

Start weeks or even a month before the conference in terms of actually

putting out your content.

You're going to plan that, you can plan it out months in advance.

But you want to have it so that you have a pretty active schedule that is growing in

intensity up to the conference itself.

Use blogs to create thought leadership on key topics.

And then you can take those articles, much like you're doing in the course,

and you can advertise those out through Twitter and

LinkedIn and other places to make the connection with the individuals.

And you want to use the hashtags of the conference to do that.

So you're essentially marketing your blog

to the attendees using the hashtag of the conference as a way to do it.

You might also think multimedia in terms of asking speakers to provide answers to

ten questions, and then publish them when the conference occurs.

For example, on the right you see an IBM World of Watson where I spoke.

And they went through and asked me ten questions, and published that prior to

the conference, to essentially get my followers involved.

As well as to let people know that the conference is on, and

who the speakers are.

They had myself and other speakers doing the ten questions.

Use video and audio to best connect with different segments of your audience.

And so again, you can use multimedia to get out to the people.

You could do webinars, you could also do, of course, your blogs, you could put out

articles, and so forth, as a way of getting to the audience you want.

Use keywords to improve your SEO.

So whatever the theme and topic is of the conference, and

other keywords that you have, use that to improve it as much as you can.

And remember,

as you're going after a conference, think about content before the conference,

content during the conference, and content after the conference.

Using the hashtags of the conferences and hashtags of the key topics, and

even the handles of the speakers to maximize your impact.

Holidays are also a different way to use eventjacking.

The key is, if you're going to do this, and

if you notice over the right you have a Veteran's Day from USAA,

which is an insurance company that focuses on veterans and military.

The key is don't sell, just celebrate and remember the event.

It's really a time for you to support the individuals and

to support the event itself, as opposed to trying to sell.

Start with major holidays and celebrations, and

find the ones that are really relevant for your products and services.

Even if you're not, we will be celebrating the holidays here in December.

There are certain key holidays in the countries that you're in.

Be sure to schedule those, and think about putting out just some nice content

that supports that particular event.

Look for national awareness days, if you're for example doing some sort of,

lets say you're in diabetes, is there a diabetes awareness day?

Well you ought to schedule some content around those awareness days

to get to the market.

And look for natural matches, for example, if you're a florist it's a no brainer,

in the US, to go with Valentines Day, because people give flowers.

And so those sort of things are very natural, look for those kind of match ups.

Build a multi-week, multimedia plan and keep it classy and appropriate.

And so the key is, you're really there to support the celebration.

But if you do that correctly, people begin to recognize your brand and

your company name, and that will pay off for you in the future.

How do you do it?

Well, there's some good ways to get started.

In our capstone for the Coursera course, as well as the classes that I

teach at Northwestern, we have a 52 week calendar that we can download, and

the one that we use is from HubSpot.

If you don't have it, here's the link, and you could actually download it.

But what it does is, it allows you to schedule out the 52 weeks of the year.

So the first thing you should do is schedule holidays.

And so, set up the holidays that you want to do it, and

then plan several weeks of items that will be relevant to that.

So if you're doing something around the December holiday season, with Christmas

and Hanukkah and so forth, you'll probably want to put some pictures out there.

You'll want to plan maybe to do an article or

a thank you to your clients because it is in December.

And so plan out how you're going to support those.

If there are hashtags, especially for the holidays and

the awareness days, be sure to capture those and put them into your calendar so

that you'll use them at the appropriate time.

And then develop any keywords that you have.

The next thing you want to do is add your conferences and events.

Identify the key topics that they're talking about,

the key speakers that they have, capture the conference hashtag, and

some of the keywords that you're going to be using.

Then you want to develop a fairly aggressive schedule that might run a month

or two months.

And it will get more and more intense as it's coming up to this major event.

And remember, get your content flow in your 52 week calendar, before the event,

during it, and after the event.

And schedule different blog articles and

different sort of things that you want to do, webinars, videos, audio.

Think about doing some interviews with the speakers.

The more it makes you a part of the event, without being a key part of it.

Once the event tracking is done, then fill in the rest of the 52 week

calendar with topics you want to cover during that time.

So use eventjacking to really impact your high value market when it's time.

Again, eventjacking is easy to do, it's very inexpensive.

And it's very relevant, because you're now talking to the exact target markets that

you want to engage with.

And doing it in a way by being a part of the events that are in their lives and

that they are celebrating or attending.

And so it's a very natural way for

you to use engagement strategies to build awareness of your products and

your company in the target markets that you value the most.

Eventjacking - a "must" engagement strategy for start-ups

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