EU SUSTAINABLE ENERGY WEEK 18-22 JUNE 2012

SOCIAL MEDIA HANDY GUIDE FOR ENERGY DAYS ORGANISERS

SUSTAINABLE ENERGY WEEK 18-22 JUNE 2012

Energy

1. ABOUT THIS GUIDE

June is around the corner and the European Union Sustainable Energy Week (EUSEW) 2012 is fast approaching. The use of social media channels will be an exciting and innovative feature of EUSEW 2012. We are striving to make this years event interactive, inclusive and, well, social media friendly. After the success of EUSEW 2011, this year we have good reason to expect that a rich range of events will be organised all over Europe. Thousands of organisations and individuals will participate in the EU Sustainable Energy Week (EUSEW) by hosting, attending or collaborating with an Energy Day. Energy Days may take different forms (conferences, open door events, presentations, exhibitions, performances, etc.) but they all have one thing in common: they promote, innovate, and enrich the debate about energy efficiency and renewable energy sources. This guide is aimed at Energy Day Organisers and EUSEW community members at large. We would like to give you some advice in the form of tips and principles. Dont think of this guide as a set of rules, but rather see it as a list of suggestions and ideas that could help make your event more meaningful and people-friendly.

2. PRINCIPLES
A. INCLUSIVENESS. DONT BROADCAST; INVOLVE YOUR ATTENDEES. Injecting social media into your events fundamentally adds a second layer of discussion and brings a wider audience into what would have been a closed exchange. It encourages debate, conversation and participation like never before. You can interact with other listeners get their thoughts and reflections about what is being said; see who agrees or disagrees with the points being made; and learn by discussing the issues raised during the conference. Good speakers and great content will get wider recognition, as good feedback spreads fast. Include a Twitter Wall (as shown in the picture) Encourage questions from Twitter in all your communications prior to the event. Create the right #hashtags. Make networking a priority: offer opportunities for attendees to talk to speakers.

B. COLLABORATION Involving the crowd can also mean outsourcing tasks to your network. Your community can be of great help in finding solutions to many of your problems. If you invite them to co-create an event with you, the experience for those that participate will be much richer as a result. Ask them for their opinion on how to improve your event I dont have a budget for a photographer. However, I can ask my attendees to take pictures and upload them to my image-hosting site. Listen to their needs. Analyse and ask questions. For example: Which of these 3 topics interests you the most? C. INNOVATION. TEST, LEARN AND INNOVATE Start to learn as soon as possible from your community. Test technologies, test new messages, test new formats. Visit our website in order to find inspiration and best- practices but dont forget that on the social web there are no experts, only experiments, and the fastest learner wins (@jmichele). D. BE PEOPLE-CENTRIC. BE PEOPLE-FRIENDLY People see your Page updates alongside posts from their friends, so share content that is personal and engaging. Think of social media as a never-ending forum in which you speak naturally, using a language that is easy to understand. Avoid jargon and overly technical words.

Energy

Use graphs and visual tools in order to help the user easily understand the message and the different options available. Messages should not be limited to a description of activities or provision of pure information, but could also occasionally transmit feelings, while sounding lively and spontaneous. E. VALUE CREATION. GIVE VALUE TO YOUR ATTENDEES. Give relevant content: Providing relevant and interesting content is essential to generate traffic and contributions as well as encouraging the maximum number of users to engage at the highest level. Give content in social media before posting it through any other channels. Your followers will appreciate it! Be a connector: Provide a digital space where all attendees can see who is participating in your event and that highlights their social media accounts. And do it before the conference takes place. Promote sharing: Document the ideas that have been discussed during the conference. Share these ideas, release them into the public domain, thereby making them available for others to use and comment on. Encourage Learning: Learning is an active, social process. Humans learn from an interaction between their experiences and their ideas. So be ready to provide the context in which this interaction takes place. Be open to comments from the crowd. Instead of overly long keynote speeches, create a participant-driven meeting.

3. TOP 5 SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS FOR ENERGY DAY ORGANISERS.

1. Share your content with us in order to give your event a European dimension. 2. Multimedia composition: include video, audio, pictures, graphics and try to make complex data easily digestible. 3. Live stream your events so citizens who couldnt attend in person can still do so virtually and ask questions. 4. Dont give up on your event once its finished. Think about ways to continue the conversation, build on peoples ideas and inspire continued dialogue. 5. Talk to us (@euenergyweek). We always answer

4. SO WHATS THE PLAN?

From our side, the EUSEW secretariat, we will keep up our efforts in order to keep expanding our evergrowing community of actors interested in renewable energies and energy efficiency. We have put in place a Twitter account (@euenergyweek), a LinkedIn and Flickr Group a Facebook Page. Feel free to place your own news and achievements there. Be consistent and dont be shy. We aim to turn all those social media platforms into a recurrent platform of exchange between EUSEW stakeholders and in particular between Energy Days organisers. We want to turn them into a horizontal form of communication, involving more exchanges between community members who will want to increase the visibility of their events and projects. We will use Flickr to share and visualise the EUSEW in practice: we have created an open group on Flickr where ED organisers and attendees in Brussels can upload their pictures. http://www.flickr.com/groups/euenergyweek/ These pictures will be published, not only on our website, but also on other web forums. We also aim to ask our community for their contribution to our common project. From now on, we look forward to talking and engaging with all of you at EUSEW 2012.

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