The constant advice to meeting planners is to ‘engage’ their
attendees ahead of the event. This usually means ‘You need social media’.
Why doesn’t anybody say ‘Don’t waste time on that, learn to
use email effectively’?
After all, there’s plenty of room for improvement: most conference
emails are clumsy hype. The nearest they come to personalisation is to include
the recipient’s name.
It’s not as if there isn’t plenty of useful guidance:
Drayton Bird’s book on writing sales letters that sell has been a winner for
years because it’s practical. And his advice on writing applies to emails.
After all, a relevant email with an effective subject line
is more likely to be read than the stuff that usually goes out.
Unfortunately, marketing people have been persuaded that
social media is the thing to have. Never mind that there’s rarely anything of
value in the Twitter feed or the Facebook page for a conference.
Equally, when it comes to email marketing, they seem unable
to think from the recipient’s point of view. The result is time spent sending
out useless stuff that nobody reads.
But current thinking seems to be that, so long as they can
tell people ‘We’ve got a social media strategy’, it’s okay.
Originally published in Conference News
