How to create FOMO* at a Virtual Conference - A Case Study

*Fear of Missing Out

I had the pleasure of creating FOMO at a virtual conference this week. It was originally planned as a face to face conference organised by the wonderful Naeem Arif but due to the global pandemic, Naeem and his team pivoted and managed to turn the conference into a virtual conference in quick time. I understand that one of his team members, Events Manager extraordinaire Khalid Karim was integral to help turn that around in no time.

There are lots of similarities between a virtual conference and a face to face conference, in terms of creating FOMO. I'd listen to the speakers; I'd tweet the golden nuggets of information delivered by said speakers and I would create longer form posts based on my tweets for said speakers. I'd also give the sponsors greater visibility too. These long form posts were posted on Naeem's Facebook Page, which I then repurposed on LinkedIn to showcase my work elsewhere. Some of the speakers were more well known on Instagram so I repurposed onto my Instagram stories too.

There were notable differences between a virtual and face to face conference. At a face to face conference, I like to walk around the event and interview people to give them publicity for their business, and also garner their thoughts about the conference. At a face to face conference I also use my smartphone as a photographer, videographer, a live reporter, and a live social media creator. At a virtual conference, I tried taking photographs of my PC screen without seeing my image behind it, and this presented a few challenges.

In the end, what I ended up doing was taking quick screenshots of the virtual conference, and used those images instead. That meant that it would take me a few more seconds than normal to get a tweet out, but the quality of the image is important. It's important to show the speakers, sponsors and conference organiser in the best possible light.

I listened to 19 speakers. I tweeted on behalf of Midlands Retail Forum. From the 1,138 total tweets that had the hashtag #CXMids contained within it, I personally had tweeted 60% of the tweets. From an account that had 329 followers, the hashtag managed to reach 4 million people. On behalf of my client, I was also the top photographer: with 121 photographs taken that day. These are the highlights but let's break down the report that was put together by Tweetbinder based on the hashtag #CXMids.

#CXMids - a Quick Summary

Potential Impacts: the potential number of times people might have seen the hashtag. Potential Reach: the unique number of unique users that could've seen the hashtag.

Most Active - Top Retweeters - Original Tweets

From the total of 1,138 that contained the hashtag #CXMids, who tweeted the most? As you can see I tweeted on behalf of Midlands Retail Forum as well as myself. This makes up 60% of the tweets. Retweets are really important in order to give a tweet a second chance to be seen again, just in case people might've missed it the first time. Of the total number of tweets, 10% of the tweets were originally crafted. The rest of the tweets consists of retweets, likes and conversations that I initiate or get involved with. Engaging with other tweeters engaging on the hashtag is just as important as crafting tweets.

Note: For my clients, I don't schedule any tweets. There is nothing wrong with scheduling tweets as long as conferences run like clockwork, but for me personally, I never like to take that risk in case it overruns at any point. With the virtual conference, with the added seconds of screenshotting the conference, sending the screenshot to my phone, so that I can repurpose the photographs to various platforms, I tweeted a total of 726 times.

Most Popular - Highest Impact - Top Photographers

Most Popular shows the accounts with the highest number of followers. I love looking at this column to see if there are any contributors that weren't part of the conference. As you can see @BrumHour has a large number of followers which means that when they engaged with the hashtag, potentially 26 thousand of their followers might've seen the tweet.

Highest Impact is very important too. Whilst my client has over 300 followers, they didn't make it to the top 10 for impact and so I used my influence to increase chances of their tweets being seen. I did this by engaging on my own account with some tweets.

The screenshot to the right shows how I engage with one of the speakers, Hannah Foley, founder of Yak CX using my personal account.

Engaging actively with a hashtag is one of my key strategies when creating FOMO on behalf of a client as the screenshot below demonstrates.

The first screenshot on the left, is acknowledging a participant of the hashtag who gave some great feedback about the conference. The tweet in the middle is a quick summary of listening to several speakers. It demonstrates my active listening skills and drawing some of the speakers together in a tweet. The tweet on the right actively draws in one of the speakers, Clare Muscutt (UK's Top Female CX Influence, no less!) as she received great feedback that she might've missed. An active FOMO creator can read the tweets speedily and can discern very quickly which tweets would be a great opportunity to engage with either as my client, or as myself.

What about the other Social Media Platforms?

Twitter is the only social media platform that has opened up its API which enables third party tools to be able to access statistics based on their tweets. For the other social media platforms, in order to gain any statistics from them, one has to count them manually. Part of my agreement with my client is to create Tweets and also create Facebook Posts. In the end (because I love to over deliver), I managed to create:

• 13 Facebook posts that reached 591 with 4 shares.
• 58 Instagram stories seen by 948 people.
• 19 LinkedIn posts that reached 1,512 people, 16 comments and 23 likes, 6 shares.

At the time of writing, likes, comments and shares were still increasing on LinkedIn, Twitter.

With upmost gratitude to Naeem Arif, Khalid Karim and the incredible speakers and sponsors that I learned a lot from about the subject of Customer Experience, or CX as it's known in the business. Thank you Richard Jordan, Clare Muscutt, Chloe Woolger, Katie Stabler, Simone Smith, Caroline Cooper, Hannah Foley, Liz Mallen, Kate Birtles, Christopher Brooks, Bruce Philp, James Dodkins, Neil Skehel, Luke Murfitt, David Khan, Ian Golding, Janelle Mansfield, Jonathan Daniels.