Whether it’s attending events that our clients participate in, or events that our client host themselves, event PR support is a major pillar of our support strategies. A few weeks ago, we were in Las Vegas to provide that kind of on-the-ground support for our client Dynatrace, as they hosted their fifth annual Perform conference. That on-site support ran the gamut of media relations to content creation to managing customer video testimonials.
This week, we’re posting a new blog series that takes a deep dive into how we deployed each of these capabilities, and tackled the challenges that emerged along the way. Today, we’re looking at how we managed our on-site content creation efforts.
- Part 1 – Always have a media plan B in your back pocket
- Part 2 – The key to event content: Finding the common thread
- Part 3 – Alleviating those on-camera nerves for video testimonials
The key to event content: Finding the common thread
Dynatrace rolled out a small army of speakers at Perform, some of whom headlined the show’s big keynote presentations while others led smaller discussion groups. Couple that with all the product and research announcements that were unveiled, and there was just a ton of stuff to cover.
Part of our on-site support was to recap all of this information into a series of end-of-day blog posts, that pooled everything that happened that day – the speakers, the announcements, etc. – into a single place. But, after the first day, corralling that information into a chronological overview of the day’s events didn’t just prove to be enormously time-consuming – it was unnecessary, too.
Covering the day’s events like you were live tweeting it works better if you’re actually live tweeting it. But, if you’re writing it up as a blog post, then a straight timeline recap of the day can easily fall into the trap of the “this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened” format.
You can avoid that trap by ditching the idea of a chronological recap altogether. Instead, find the common themes of the day’s sessions – that one story thread that runs through most, if not all, of the presentations – and use that as the angle into the post. That way, the blog posts aren’t just a minute-by-minute timeline of what happened that day; instead, they’re about a certain topic, like the cloud or digital transformation, and all the information or quotes taken from just a handful of the day’s presentations can be more organically woven around that theme.
