Dylan Sanders' Blog: Best Event Talks: How to Hack into Big Corporations by Sean Holladay [VIDEO]

If you’re going to dream, it’s better to dream big. And nothing gets bigger than planning events for big corporations. Once you handle an enterprise-level event and do it well, you immediately gain a huge amount of credibility in the eyes of other companies. And, of course, doing these large events are financially rewarding as well.

But how do you start?

We asked that same question ourselves and found an answer in this week’s Best Event Talks from Events Uncovered TV. Here, host Silvia Pellegrini interviews Sean Holladay, co-founder of Crowd Mics. This is a free app that turns smartphones into microphones so everyone can have their own mic during an event’s Q&A. The audience can also use it to answer polls and comment on the event.

Holladay had a great hack to share during his talk. He’s found that LinkedIn is an effective way to get a foot in the door of many large companies. But the trick is not to shove yourself into the revolving door, lest you be thrown out.

The best method is actually to ease yourself in. He talked about how he first connected with anyone and everyone from that company. It didn’t matter if the person was a new hire or a junior associate. What mattered was that he got connected to someone there.

Since the people he connects with are also eager to connect to others in their company, Holladay’s network of contacts grows with them. Once he’s arm’s length from someone in that company that does their events, he asks for an intro. Combined with being almost ubiquitous in the target person’s LinkedIn and the fact that he shares a lot about his app, he’s sure to get a meeting out of the new connection and maybe even official use of Crowd Mics in their next event.

But does this really work? Well, his app was used by Salesforce in one of their large events so that alone should tell you how well it did.

He also talked about the importance of engagement in an event. What are the best ways to drive engagement for an event? And what event formats drive the most engagement? For the answers, watch the video and find out.