Applications for Co-creation at events and exhibitions

The goal of social media is to turn customers into a volunteer marketing army - Jay Baer

In a previous blogpost, I described co-creation as a means to create 'an experience' at an event or an exhibtion. As promised I bring you a piece about mobile applications to facilitate co-creation. It might have stood out for you, but an increasing number of exhibitions, events, but also televisionprogrammes communicate a hashtag (#) with which visitors and viewers can place messages on social media, such as Twitter. This is a sign that an attempt is being made at co-creation at these occasions.

There are several applications (apps) available, which can help the co-creation process. These apps work by aggregating messages which are written by event- and exhibition visitors in real-time on different platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etcetera, and feeding these messages back to the visitors at the event or exhibition, which amplifies the experience. An example of an app which performs abovementioned tasks is the What's On? app by Triqle Event Intelligence, which also displays the current programme as well as the current messages.

When choosing an app to facilitate co-creation there are a few questions to be answered. Who is the target group? What types of technology is available and acceptable? In which way can the target group be triggered? What is important to the target group?

The first part of the questions concerns the technological possibilities of the target group: apps like What's On assume that the largest part of the target group have a smartphone and are not afraid to use it to post messages to their platforms about the event or exhibition they are attending. Should the possession of smartphones not be high, this is something to take into account; maybe the organisers need to place a (large) number of computerterminals at the event or exhibition to facilitate the visitors' posting their messages.

The second part of the questions concerns the target group's motivation; when you know the target group and their motivation well, you can trigger them to be active and put co-creation to maximum use. Spend time on getting to know your target group and tailor your co-creation activities to get the most out of it.

The ultimate use of co-creation is to incorporate it earlier in the process, by incorporating your target group into the development of your event- or exhibitionconcept. This way, you know the concept of your event or exhibition corresponds with the wishes of the target group. During the conceptualisation process you will get to know your target group even better, and you can take the co-creation activities into account during the development of your concept.

Central to this story is that social media are undoubtedly very useful in encouraging and establishing co-creation at exhibitions and events. However, whether or not social media should be used to establish co-creation at an exhibition or event depends on the target groups of your event or exhibition: is your target group not highly involved in social media? Then maybe it's best to put your efforts into finding another way of establishing co-creation.

Statistics on social media users

17 January 2011 13:26