Convention Insider (Conventions.net)

If the answer to this is no, you are missing out on a great opportunity to promote, publicize or market your event, trade show or convention. Flickr makes it possible to store your photographs online and they allow you to actually share those photos with the people that matter to you.  You can share your photos on your blog, or even on the Facebook page that seems not to get enough attention from you.  Flickr is also a database that can be searched for people that are perhaps looking for information related to your event.

Flickr allows you to upload photos that can then be tagged and labeled.  If you have an annual event and want people to see photographs from other years or if you want to make those photographs part of your sales pitch or sales brochure, it makes it easy to store them for future use.

In addition to being able to share your own photos, you can actually have other account holders’ photos fed via RSS directly onto your site as they tag those photos with your hashtag.  Hashtags are more than just a way for people to follow your event online, they are a way to identify your event in social networking sites like Flickr.  If you have not yet signed up for an account on Flickr I suggest you gt one and in addition to signing up for a free account today, I would also recommend that you sign up for a Pro account.  This will give you a little more flexibility in your use of the system.

I love to follow along on Twitter for people that are live tweeting events.  Live tweeting refers to attendees at conventions and trade shows that send out Tweets during the event to let their followers know of great nuggets of information.  Many events are getting great exposure as a result of Twitter and it helps spread the word that the event is well attended.

I was following along with an conference called the Cause Marketing Forum which was taking place in Chicago.  One of the speakers was a friend and client of mine and I was curious how the event was going.  I was able to call up the hashtag of #CMF10 and see what everyone was saying about his session and about the conference overall.  He was also tweeting out information from other panels and sessions that he attended.  I was able to get some good quotes and some good ideas about what was happening in Chicago while I was in Denver.

This is a great way to get some further exposure to your event.  I suggest all of the meeting planners out there have an acronym and the year for their event publicized as a hashtag for your event website or somewhere in your materials when promoting the event.  With the explosion of smart phones at events and how people are communicating, it will be a normal procedure to get updates sent directly to the Twitter stream and ways to get the word out about what is going on at your event.

I can actually attend an event and see what is going on across the country at another convention at the same time.  Technology is making it possible to be at two or more conferences at one time!  If you want to hear what is happening at an event but can’t make it across country to attend, try following along on Twitter.  If you want to see some of the tweets we send out at Conventions.net, you can follow us on Twitter too!  We will tweet some info about events and use hashtags as we do it.

[Photo via Hashtag.org]