Preparing for a Live Event with Social Media

I‘ve been really busy this week helping Internationella Engelska Gymnasiet with the PR at Gymnasiemässan in Stockholm – a recruitment fair for senior high schools.

It’s been a lot of fun because as well as working the stand at the student recruitment fair we’ve been live-blogging, tweeting and updating the school’s Facebook Fan Page from the stands.

Having built the Facebook community up over the last three months it was great to see some of the kids from junior high schools asking questions on the live-blog as well as dropping by to talk to staff and students from the school in person on the stands.

Learning about communities

The biggest thing I’ve learned this week is you have to build your community months before a live event. Be really active. Engage. And then you’ll get the kind of response you’re looking for.

It was interesting to see that contacts I’ve built up on Twitter also came through for us and helped promote the event. If I’d do anything different it would have been to have identified the media contacts I wanted to pick up on the story earlier and tweeted more with them in the first place.