When promoting your event you want to take advantage of all the potential channels—formal and informal, concrete and "virtual"—to get the word out. Technology and social media are now making information increasingly "sticky" and easy to pass on to others. Following are a few ideas based on DW Event's easy-to-use online event management software.

Creating a dynamic event website

To fully promote your event, you'll want to make sure that you have an event website that can adequately present all of the information and attendance pitches needed to hook your audience. A lot of event promotion is now done online, by leveraging links and invitations through different social networks. If the link to your website only brings up very basic information (date, time, location and an image) you might lose potential attendees. But if your website has interesting articles, speaker bios, a full program, and even interactive features that allow the public to weigh in on the event via discussion forums or directories you'll stand a good chance of grabbing people's attention and keeping it.

Some good features to include in an event website are:

• Full program schedule
• Speaker information and bios
• Articles on topics of relevance to your event, as well as headline speakers and special guests
• Powerpoint presentations, PDFs and other documents available for easy downloading (before or after the event, or tied to certain program sessions)
• Photogalleries and video of the event after it takes place

Making your event content "sticky"

Essentially this means that the more content you provide on your event website that is easily leveraged, forwarded, downloaded, rss-ed, tweeted, and easily sent throughout the Internet's infinite webs of communication, the likelier it is that more people will find out about your event. In this sense, integrations and API with handheld devices and social media programs will strengthen your capacity to distribute information about your event.

Some good features to look for in social marketing and leveraging your event include:

• An easy, automatic invitation forwarding tool that will enable visitors to your site to forward invitations to the event by simply entering the email addresses of their contacts
• Integration of website content with social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter so that articles and other information can be easily sent out through the end user's social media network
• Integrating your website and online registration with handheld devices such as iPhone or Palm, so that people can easily view and forward relevant information on-the-go
• Using an email broadcasting tool that allows for html email marketing pieces, including multiple links back to your website

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