Recently we had a great conversation about is it necessary to have a blog for an event online. And if it is so, then how to achieve the maximum from an event blog. Here I’m summarizing the discussion to the following 5 points.

1. Your event is not yours anymore!

When you start a new event you look forward the participation. People join the event, share their thoughts and discuss or do some activity. But that event is not limited to them. You will gradually understand that there are lots of people out there who want to join the event but they couldn’t make it due to their schedule or any other problem (even the price). But you should understand they could bring a lot of success to your event by getting knowledge & sharing it.

2. Blog means scheduled & sequential posts:

Your event and blog has a lot of similarity which you can’t find b/w your event & general website. Your event is a stream of speeches, activities etc which comes one after the other. You can replicate the same online by blogging. We did it by streaming an event called “Challenge Chatni” giving a per hour event report & photos. We couldn’t deliver it fully due to lack of people and as it was a big national event, but it was so successful bringing back 15,000 online visitors for those 3days without any advertisements.

3. Fresh content attracts search engines:

As you post on a regular interval & the site updates in every 1 or 2 hours, Google and other search engines give it the priority. For “Challenge Chatni” keyword we got 4th place in Google and 2nd place in Bing which was better in comparison to “Chutney Challenge” an event in UK which was promoted like hell and was lot bigger than us. They also have a very impressive website. As I told you before we got 15,000 visitors for those three days and nearly 96% of them were from different search engines.

4. They want to keep the memory:

Your visitors and participants are busy in attending the event. They don’t get the time and resource to take the snaps of their choice all the time. So what is generally done? Organizer used to posts some selected photos to their website in a special photo gallery. But, is that enough?  You can’t share a lot of photos that matter to the visitors.

In Challenge Chatni stream blog we were able share more than 500 photos. We could have done more but we have some restrictions from the producer. Each photo was downloaded on an average 115 times (the total no of participants were 300) hence there was 500×115 = 57,500 down loads.

5. It a continuous engagement that matters:

After you finished your event you don’t know what to do. But there is a new challenge for the organizer lies to measure the success of their event. Event is generally a place of networking, where people make relation with lots of others. And later they start to follow them on Twitter or Facebook and other media. So your responsibility is to collaborate all those discussion and bring it back to the blog.

Their opinion matters a lot. They could give you suggestions on how to do the next event. So an engagement till the next event would be mind blowing. Don’t forget, you have a comment section for each blog articles.

Some advice on Event Blogging:

1. Make blog your first page. Don’t hide it.
2. Make a proper schedule. Post on regular intervals.
3. Have at-least 3 cameras. You can lend one from your friends.
4. Don’t go for editing or photoshoping. Be natural.
5. Post as many pics as possible. Every pic matters to someone.
6. Don’t forget to put tags. This brings search engine to you.
7. Try to collect as many interview as possible. People want to hear from the attendees.
8. Have features to share it in Social Networking Sites, online.