Dylan Sanders' Blog: Einsteins’ Favorites: How to Boost Attendees’ Engagement at Meetings, Why Visuals Are Leading the Way in Social Media & How Beacons Can Improve the Event Experience

Einsteins Favorites - Best Event Planning Articles Of The Week

This week’s selection is partly dedicated to improving attendees’ engagement, both online and offline. You will also find out about some smart apps promising to boost your brain power and learn all about beacons and how they can help with two of your biggest event challenges: attendees’ engagement and crowd management.

How to Boost Attendees’ Engagement at Meetings

The secret to memorable meetings is to always include the fun part because that’s what the attendees will resonate the most with. If having fun is the sine qua non of a truly memorable meeting, there are also other things to keep in mind if you want to engage your attendees and make them feel good about being there. When planning the meeting, you should focus hard on creativity and flexibility. Arranging the seats in an unexpected way, having different types of seating available and allowing for casual dress code will make participants feel more comfortable and set the right premises for them to enjoy the meeting. Read on to find out more practical tips about meetings that effectively engage attendees.

Why Visuals Are Leading the Way in Social Media

A picture is worth a thousand words. This idea also stands true for brand communication in social media today. An appealing well-styled visual post is going to attract more likes and shares that your post would with text alone. There is certified data backing up this fact: visual posts on Facebook receive 53% more likes, and tweets with images attached receive double the retweets. Using visuals, the right way is key to growing your audience in the social media space. Paying attention to the profile of your audience and keeping a consistent style in your communications also apply to the images you use to convey your brand’s message. Check out these best practices to use for visuals in social posts to successfully engage your social media followers!

13 Smart Apps to Boost Your Brain Power

We are all in competition with other people around the world to become smarter and better at what we do. So how can technology help us achieve this goal? You might be surprised to discover how much your smartphone can do for you. Do you want to master a new language? Or maybe you want to learn to meditate, discover new art or even get a totally new skill? These 13 apps will help you boost your brain power. Check them out!

15 Emerging Trends In the Conference Industry

The world of conferences is changing fast because it has to adapt to new technologies, society trends and business models. For example, you must have noticed that online conferences start to complement face to face experiences. Also, there is a growing number of speakers for conferences that tend to follow the TED model. Another shift is that engagement starts to drive conference attendance and not the other way around. Take a look at these 15 disruptive trends that are emerging in the conference industry and promise to change its future.

How to Solve 3 Crowd Management Problems at Large Events

The Anime Expo is North America’s largest celebration of Japanese pop culture. In just a few years, it doubled its attendees to a staggering 80,000 guests. At this growth rate, they faced new challenges related to crowd management. First of all, large crowds blocked the registration process. Lines became too long, and some rooms were overwhelmed. How would you handle such a situation? How many volunteers would you use? How would you manage the venue? Take a look at their solutions and share your ideas in a comment.

10 Simple Strategies to Help You Enjoy Networking

Does networking come naturally to you? If your answer is yes, you’re one of the few lucky ones. Most of the people feel stressed and under pressure when they have to meet new people. The bad news is that networking is no longer a choice, it’s a necessity. The good news is that there are some very simple things you can do to improve your networking skills while still enjoying the process. This article will show you how to prepare for an event, what to do during a networking session and how to build a relationship with your new contacts.

How to Take the Pressure off of Your Inbox with Dropbox

One of the things that we, event professionals, have in common is sending tons of emails with large attachments that sometimes completely block our email accounts. Fortunately, we now have a solution for that, right at our fingertips. The new Dropbox for Gmail can help you share large files and easily save space inside your inbox. The beauty of this new extension is that the person receiving the attachments doesn’t need to have a Dropbox account to download the files. Isn’t that a life-saver? Check it out!

How to Avoid Exhaustion, Burnout and Sleep Deprivation

Event planning regularly ranks as one of the most stressful jobs in the world. Arianna Huffington challenged event professionals participating at the Cvent Connect conference with a simple question: How should success look like? For many of the people working in the events industry, the road to success is full of exhaustion, burnout and sleep deprivation. In a room full of eventprofs that welcomed her with a standing ovation, Arianna Huffington sent us all a wake-up call to re-evaluate this success model. Here are the strategies that she recommends.

Why Freelancers Are a Useful Resource to Event Organizers

No matter your job in the events industry, you get to a point where it seems like you just don’t have enough time. Because we are so involved in our work, we usually make a huge mistake thinking that the only way something gets done really well is if we handle it personally. But this is a clear recipe for overload and burnout. This has to stop, and fortunately now we have the tools for that. Freelancers around the globe can take on time-consuming responsibilities, such as web design, customer support or content creation. And they can even do it better than us at a lower cost. Here is some great advice on how to make freelancer communities help with your most pressing daily tasks.

How Beacons Can Improve the Event Experience

Beacons are a location-based technology capable of enhancing attendees’ event experience. Despite their great potential, beacons have yet to be fully adopted with only some of the largest events having dared to try out their capabilities. By recognizing attendees’ location at a given event, beacons facilitate networking by letting you know which other attendees are in your area or which sessions take place in the same area where you are. Also, thanks to this innovative technology, attendees can easily be informed about last-minute event changes through real-time alerts triggered again by their location. Crowd management and attendees’ engagement are also among the primary uses beacons can provide. Here is a comprehensive overview of this breakthrough technology and how it aims to change the event world!

What do you do to improve your attendees’ engagement and their event experience overall? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!