How do you build out a cohesive community for a large-scale Social Media event?

As part of Social Week, we were taxed with the job of finding a way to cross-promote events among organizers and attendees. We needed something both cohesive enough to keep attendees informed, and that required minimal efforts on our partner event organizers.

Fortunately for us, Overblog arrived in the U.S. in June 2012. As a leading blog-provider in Europe they’ve amassed 3 million registered users and over 34 million uniques (according to Comscore). Their platform boasts a fully customizable interface, seamless synching with over a dozen social networks, and traditional blog options that let you post through the platform if you prefer a traditional framework.

What struck us as most unique about this platform was its ability to allow many different contributors to synch in any Social account they’d like. For Social Week, over 6 contributors synched in over a dozen different networks onto a page. The platform was then able to curate content that included the official #SWNY hashtag, but keep unrelated content off the page. What resulted was a destination page that all organizers could reference and promote as owned media.

The Hub helped with cross-event promotions before the event, kept a real-time rich-media update as the event unfolded, and served as a way for organizers to keep engaging with Social Week content long past the end date. And it worked. The average user stayed on the page for 11 minutes, a huge improvement from the 2:17 average on the main socialweek.com website.

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