Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition

Micro Events

Strategic online events can engage your audience and provide you a powerful way to connect with experts. Micro events are free live activities that take place online and last for about an hour. Webinars, social media events, Internet radio shows, teleclasses, and live video broadcasts are all examples of micro events. The reason I'm using the word “micro” is because these types of events are short in duration and are far less complicated than multisession or multiday seminars.

These free events typically bring an expert live to your audience, and are more powerful than expert interviews because they're in real time. Live events have a special ability to attract lots of people—and experts.

Here's an example of a micro event. A few times a month, SocialMediaExaminer.com conducts Facebook Friday expert sessions. We invite a book author or well-known social media expert to answer questions on our Facebook wall for an hour.

We promote the event and the expert guest for a few days before it takes place. On the day and hour of the event, our readers flock to our Facebook wall and ask the expert questions (see Figure 8.4). It's a fun and engaging time when the expert shares his or her particular scope of knowledge. And sometimes our Facebook fans chime in with their advice, as well.

Figure 8.4 Here's an example of Facebook expert Jeff Widman answering questions during one of SocialMediaExaminer.com's Facebook Friday events.

By the end of the hour the expert is gratified ...