Preparing Your Event Planning Blog for Distribution

Summary: Tips to help event planners prepare their blogs for distribution through RSS Feed to Twitter, Facebook, and other social media websites. Includes videos to demonstrate how to locate, activate or burn an RSS Feed for your blog.

In Part 1 of Social Media Marketing Strategies for Event Planners, I highlighted the fact that, before focusing on social media tools, it's important to develop and fine-tune your overall business, marketing and sales strategy. We identified 5 basic building blocks for implementing your social media marketing strategy. Our discussion focused on websites, blogs and LinkedIn. Some of the comments we received pointed out that some event planners are using their blogs as their website. This is definitely an option and a matter of personal preference. I prefer to have a separate website and minimize promotional content on my blogs. We'll get into Twitter and Facebook basics in Part 3. Before you're ready to distribute your blog via LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media websites, some preparation is needed. To get ready to feed your blog into Twitter, Facebook, and other social media websites, 3 things are important. You need to:

1. Shrink your URL with a service like tinyurl.com (as discussed in part 1)
2. Write a summary for each blog post.
3. Locate, activate or burn an RSS feed.

Developing your Summary

Whenever you post a new entry to your blog, create a clear, concise, and keyword rich summary describing your content. Shorter is better. Your summary should give people a taste of the content they will access if they click on the link to your blog. Wordpress and Blogger have summary fields where you can type the information you want to display about your blog on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. At the time of writing, Posterous didn't have that functionality. If your blog hosting service doesn't have a summary field, post your summary at the top of each blog entry as we have done on this page.

Using RSS Feeds

You will need an RSS Feed so that:

• people can subscribe to your blog
• you can autmatically feed updates about your blog into Twitter, Facebook, and many other social media websites

The URL for your RSS feed is like a golden key that will unlock the door to many social media marketing opportunities. Find it, activate or burn it. Then, save it. I'll show you how to use it in part 3. RSS stands for "Rich Site Summary". It's the standard Internet format for transmitting website content that changes frequently. I am not a techie so I like to think of things in simple terms. RSS is like a specialized URL but much more powerful. I think of the RSS feed as being like similar to the headlines and information snippets that crawl across the bottom of the screen on CNN. As the updates come in, they are sent out. An RSS Feed works in a similar way. (My apologies to those of you who are highly technically sophisticated. I realize that I have not done RSS Feeds justice.) Here is some detailed information about RSS and RSS Feeds.

Locating an Automatically Generated RSS

Some blog hosting services like Posterous automatically generate icons and RSS feeds like this one: insert RSS Fedd Icon Hover over the icon with your mouse and right mouse click on it. Scroll down to copy short cut.

h   t   t   p   :   feeds dot feedburner dot com / Event Management Blog

This is the URL for the Event Coup RSS Feed. (I have inserted spaces so that Posterous doesn't automatically format and display the feed but there will be no spaces in what you retrieve.) Once you've created a blog, determine if you have an automatically generated RSS feed by searching for the icon, and retrive the URL.

Creating an RSS Feed

Some blogging websites like some versions of Wordpress, don't automatically generate an RSS Feeds. You'll have to generate it manually. Here are 2 methods.

Activating Your RSS Feed with a Widget

Burning an RSS Feed with Google Feedburner

1. Go to Google Feedburner
2. If you don't have a Google account, create one.
3. Confirm your registration.
4. Watch the following video for detailed information about how to burn an RSS Feed with Google Feedburner.

Caution: This short video has music.

Next Steps

Take time to review what we've covered in parts 1 and 2 of Social Media Marketing Strategies for Event Planners. Start your blog and register with LinkedIn. If you're already registered with LinkedIn, work on building your profile and join at least 1 LinkedIn Group. Next we'll focus on using your RSS Feed to distribute your blog through Twitter, Facebook and other social media websites.

Photo Credit: Jemimus