Associations
Spent the weekend at the American Marketing Association Leadership Summit. This is a training program for the chapter officers – part inspiration, part training. I’ve been to this before from the IH perspective and the experience was entirely different. Before, it was a chore. This was inspirational. Awesome.
Just for giggles, at a cocktail reception on the first night, George Couris (Chicago AMA President) and I started goofing around with ideas to set Chicago AMA apart at the conference. We worked it out over the dinner and keynote portion of the evening and launched the first Chicago AMA TweetUp, and the results were great.
A few lessons before I describe what we did and how it worked. First, it took 45 minutes to come up with a successful, Twitter-based marketing program. It was creative. It was fun.
It was a glorious mess of improvization the entire way through.
We launched the program without having an event destination in mind, and in fact it was 5pm on Saturday before I’d even settled on the methodology to get followers to the event.
The goal: Get a significant number of attendees to a “secret” event on Saturday night by promoting it virally through Twitter. Can we pull it off in just one day?
The tools: First, the #chiama hashtag – which we’d invented about two weeks before at a Chicago AMA board meeting. We had five or six people from the chapter at the event that night, a total of four available during the day Saturday, and only me for the evening because everyone else already had plans.
The program: A Wine Tasting at Vintner’s Cellar Winery presented as a treasure hunt. We’d spend the day on Saturday building an audience through teasers. Something was coming. It was going to be cool. That’s all they knew. (That’s because that’s all we knew too.)
By the cocktail reception at 5:45, we said we’d start dropping hints and directions to the event.
The Results: Out of an event that had maybe 300-400 people show up, we had a TweetUp with 35 attendees.
We got 10% of a conference to show up to an event that we pulled out of our asses 24 hours before.
Analysis: Wow. The biggest key to this was to rapidly recruit influential ambassadors. Of those on the Twitter feed, the most effective was @marybethonline. She has begun Tweeting with the #amasummit hashtag and we started promoting and using both hashtags. That expanded our audience greatly.
It grew virally from there. As the day progressed, more and more people already knew about it. Some would mention it to me first – “hey, you’re the Twitter guy! Where are we going?” People were posting to the #chiama Twitter stream with questions, promotions. They were reTweeting it.
When I first encountered Twitter six months ago, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. I’ve been slow getting it, but I’m starting to see this platform’s enormous potential.
I’ll never be bored at a conference again! 
See the full Case Study write up of the Chicago AMA Tweetup.
MeetUp offers professional associations and societies an excellent way to connect with new, potential members. That’s fairly obvious and bourne out by the Chicago AMA‘s experience in the past year. We don’t have figures on membership growth yet, but the MeetUp has delivered 400 more people to the prospect list for events and membership, if nothing else. Since we had only 2000 to start with, that’s 20% growth of the opt-in list in a very short period of time.
Once you have a base, however, there are opportunitites to spin off a series of easy-to-produce, paid events. For Chicago AMA, we’re looking at a series of four career oriented events with a prominent local career coach/recruiter.
It’s almost a franchised program – four modules. We just need to rent a small meeting room for 40 people or so and charge $40 per person to attend. Set it up as a revenue share and Chicago AMA could yield $400 in additional revenue per meeting. Say the four-course series goes every two weeks (i.e. – $800 per month revenue), then we’ve conjured almost $10,000 in new revenue per year, a measurable member benefit, increased footprint and enhanced brand value.
I’d say that’s pretty promising.
I’m going to try something new to recruit speakers for a March Chicago AMA event. I’m going to try and leverage the Chicago AMA’s social media footprint to find top quality speakers.
In the past, my network has served us well for speakers. I have about 50 people that I go to to find a good match. The Chicago AMA potentially provides access to almost 10 times that.
The goal is to recruit an online network to find the best speakers for the event. If social media is the future, we ought to be able to practice what we preach. In comments, please try to unmix that metaphor.
