Hey guys, welcome to Shama.tv. In today’s episode, I want to talk to you guys about how to promote an event or a get-together, whatever you might be throwing, using online marketing and specifically, I want to talk about how you guys can market your events using social media or new media marketing. So here are my tips for you.

First of all, it’s a really good idea to approach bloggers in the city that you might be hosting an event in, because one, they already have the audience built; and two, their audience probably has trust and rapport with them. So as long as your topic matches something that the blogger talks about or something the blogger’s audience might be interested in, then the first thing to do is to build that blogger relationship. Hopefully you’re already been doing blogger relationships and working on that, but go to the blogger. Tell them you’re hosting the event. Tell them the city, the date, whatnot, and that’s a really good way to leverage an audience that’s already there in a local city to promote your event.

The other thing to do is also look at meetups.com, because meetups.com is, you know, networking but locally in different cities, and there are, especially in a big city like Dallas here, we’ve got so many meet-ups going on, so the idea is to find multiple meet-ups and approach their organizers and see if they would be okay with you promoting your event to their group. Now, these guys make charge affiliate, you know, an income, but that’s not a bad idea. It’s still a great way to get the word out about your event.

The other thing I want to talk about is on social networking sites, so what can you do?

Twitter. Twitter can be so powerful in getting the word out about an event, so what you want to do is of course Tweet about it, but to really build up the buzz, you may even want to have a little Twitter competition where you say, you know, the X person to re-Tweet this information gets a pair of movie tickets. It doesn’t have to be a huge prize, but it gets people involved and it gets your information out there. So that’s one way.

The other thing is to look at Facebook. What you want to do is set up a Facebook note, a note in Facebook about the event you’re having and then tag the people that you think would be a good fit for that event. I can’t tell you how annoying it is to get tagged on Facebook notes or videos or even pictures that have nothing to do with you, so you really want to make sure that when you have an event – so let’s say it’s a local event, like if there was an event in Dallas – I would only tag the people that I thought would benefit from it. So again, you’re providing value. You’re sharing with them something that you think is going to be cool, but you’re not going out there and mass-tagging people. It makes all the difference in the world.

You can also use LinkedIn. Again, same principle. You can set up a LinkedIn event. You can go into LinkedIn groups and, you know, check with a moderator to see if it’s okay, and announce your event.