Jeff Hurt

About The Author

Jeff Hurt is Director of Education & Engagement for Velvet Chainsaw Consulting. Most recently he was the Director of Education and Events for National Association of Dental Plans. He has worked in events/nonprofit arena for more than 20 years including Keep America Beautiful, Keep Texas Beautiful, Meeting Professionals International and Promotional Products Association International. He has also served on several board of directors for regional, state and national charities and organizations.

November 4, 2009

6 Tips For Using Twitter For Your Event & Conference

By Jeff Hurt

Here are some tips on using Twitter for your next conferences or events.

1. Embrace and use DIMTY and WIIFM from the beginning!
Attendees are more finicky than ever and will not sit passively if you try to sell outdated, poorly organized or inaccurate information. If they don’t experience DIMTY (Do I Matter To You: survey them before you create the content) and WIIFM (What Is In This For Me) quickly, they will leave. Use Twitter to start collecting information early. Ask followers questions and ask them to RT your questions to others. You’ll get replies from people with real time information. Use PollDaddy to set up Twitter polls and get results. This will benefit your content development and help establish more followers as well.

November 3, 2009

Eight Ways To Make Your Meeting Or Event Blog And Twitter Friendly

By Jeff Hurt

Recently, I attended HSM’s World Innovation Forum 2009 (WIF09) as a virtual attendee and followed a minimum of 20 leading innovation bloggers share real time thoughts, insights and opinions from the event through their blogs and Twitter accounts. Pitney Bowes sponsored the Word Innovation Forum Bloggers Hub for pre-registered bloggers and Tweeps and the WIF09’s Twitter Kiosks. Those tweeting from the conference used the hashtag #wif09 and third party applications like TweetDeck, TweetGrid and TweetChat to follow the live stream.

November 2, 2009

10 Reasons Why You Should Use A Back Channel At Your Conference

By Jeff Hurt

Have you participated in a conference or event back channel?

What’s a back channel you ask?

Open Back Channel picture from Guardain Activate09 source rooreynolds.com

A back channel is where attendees are texting or tweeting information about a presentation or event using SMS, a chat function or Twitter. The front channel, for lack of a better word and as opposed to a back channel, is the main presentation being delivered by the speaker.