What's Floating Around Cloud 9? 20 July

Welcome to another week and seeing as we have just had all of the photos in from our recent client event which was a Spinal Conference, we thought it timely to talk about photography for events this week.

Photo Booths are still playing a key part in both the private and corporate events scene and as we love an excuse to don a large hat, a whopping pair of sunglasses and a boa, we are no exception here at Cloud 9 Towers.

As well as increasing popularity at weddings there has been a new wave of photo booths at Proms, miles stone celebrations such as Christenings and Bar and Bat Mitzvahs and Birthdays as more and more people realise that not only are photo booths a great ice breaker and fun for guests, but they also capture unique and special memories especially those offering a post event guest book.

In the corporate and public events industry then its certainly the case that social media enabled photo booths are the way forward. These enable users to engage with the experience both offline and online, having a physical print and the ability to share their photos through hashtags, facebook, instagram and more. You can event create your own animated photos (GIFS) and flip books – again both as an actual flip book and a digital animation you can share with the world.

But once the fun stuff is out of the way, how about the professional photography?

Photographing special events is not the most glamorous gig in photography, but irrespective of the size or location of the event, getting the right images that capture the essence of the event can make all of the difference for you and your clients.

When you run a big corporate event it’s always a good idea to hire a specialised events photographer to capture the day. It’s also great to give your staff a reminder of your successful event because these photos can help them to be motivated and build their team spirit. High quality photos are also good to use as promotional materials and brochures.

Once you have chosen your events photographer you will need to brief them carefully to make sure that you get the shots that you want. The event only happen once so you don’t want to miss your chance to get things right so make sure you give a good brief.

Here are 9 ideas for you to make your photographer work for you and get it spot on!

People Count and if you have any keynote or guest speakers, or senior officials or celebrities then make sure your photographer know where and when to capture them. Introduce your photographer to the people that they will need to capture so that they will recognise them in the crowd and know who they should be looking out for. 

It may sound obvious but if you want your photographer to get the shots you need then they will have to be in the right place at the right time. You will need to give them an up to date schedule of the event and highlight any key note speeches, break-out sessions or team building games that you particularly want photographed. Remember they may need to get to a room early to set up their equipment so allow enough time between sessions for them to do this.

Many events these days have numerous stakeholders or sponsors, and they have probably invested a fair bit in both terms of time or financial support, so make sure you get shots of the key people involved, any exhibition stands or sponsors logos. Keep your photographer aware of any live sessions which have been sponsored.

If it’s an awards do, then again, keep those sponsors happy. Its not just about taking shots of the winners, but also capturing the essence of the entire event and sponsors giving out prizes will make for great memories for everyone involved.
 
Sometimes it’s hard to convey what you want out of a photograph in words so why not use a picture instead. Before the event have a look at other corporate brochures and search the internet for styles of photography that you feel will suit your brand. Then you can easily show your event photographer how you want your shots to look and the type of images that you are expecting from them.
 
Set up photos can also be a great way to show the befores and afters of an event. An empty space at 8am can look completely different at 10am when its packed with delegates and a good photographer can show the difference a few warm bodies can make to any space.
 
You will have briefed your photographer on who you want in your photos but you also need to tell them what you want in your photos. There’s nothing more frustrating than getting a great shot of a speaker but having an object such as a chair or lectern blocking your company logo. Be clear that you want full logos in the background of any shots that they take. If you are having your conference in a stunning venue or fantastic location you may also want them to get shots of these in the background too.
 
After a hard days of work your staff would want a chance to unwind. Many large corporations organise a party with food, music and dancing in the evening. Whilst it’s great to have the formal shots from the conference it can also be fun to get some more relaxed pictures to capture everyone really enjoying themselves. Let your photographer know if you want them to take some evening shots – they will definitely make everyone smile!
 
Finally, make sure you can get your photos quickly post event. There is nothing worse than having to wait ages to get the photos up and available for sharing. With the rise in social media, you need to make sure your guests and delegates can have access immediately to the shots!

There, we hope you have found that useful. Have a great week!

  

What's Floating Around Cloud 9? 30 March 2015

Welcome to another week at Cloud 9 and as we've recently launched our own YouTube Channel, we thought we'd share a few tips we've learnt along the way! 

“2015 is the year of the video”. You hear this sentence time and time again and it can be seen all over the internet. Everyone is talking about the rise of video and how video marketing is, without doubt, the future of content marketing. While everyone within the events and meetings industry admits to knowing that video is the way forward, we're still not using video to its full potential. (we have to admit we've still got a way to go but we're giving it a go!).

Below is a sneak peek of Meeting Booker's findings and how hotels can use video to drive more bookings...

Use video to increase social engagement

Recent Twitter research revealed that Tweets featuring a vine video get 256% more engagement than
tweets with no video. 256%. That’s a phenomenal difference. Sharing video on your Twitter or Instagram can help you get a huge following and will also encourage customers to share their own videos and tag you in them. Posts that include video on both Instagram and Twitter are a lot more likely to be seen and shared than posts which contain just text or images.

Use video to attract people to your website

Site visitors who view video on the hotel website’s homepage stay, on average, two minutes longer than visitors who just view text. Making video available can also make customers happier with the likelihood of a customer making an online booking or requesting a proposal said to increase by as much as 67% if a video tour is available.

Use video to increase conversion rates in emails

Did you know that including video in the body of an email can now increase conversion rates by up to 50% for hotel bookings? Video content in email marketing used to be considered something of a trend, but in recent years it has become more of a standard marketing technique.

The reason a lot of people opt not to include videos in their emails is that video can take up a large amount of memory and space, and many mail clients will not support large video files in the body of an email. To get around this problem, you can make a thumbnail image of the video and include that in the body of the email instead.

Use video to get a page 1 ranking on Google

There are four key ways in which video can help increase your sites’ SEO. First off, video will improve your sites SERP ranking. Pages with video are in fact 53 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google search results than pages without video. Secondly, having a video encourages more people to click, thus attracting more people to your site. Thirdly, visitors to your homepage will usually stay two minutes longer on your site on than sites without video and finally video is great for link building.

Use video to showcase your venue on YouTube

According to Google’s first ever YouTube White Paper, 89% of leisure travelers and 93% of business travelers watch online travel videos before going somewhere. A great way to advertise your hotel is to

pay for your video to be shown at the beginning of popular YouTube videos.

While most YouTube watchers are interested in community-generated content, the majority of travel-related views are for professionally released videos. In fact, views of branded videos are up 394% year on year, making YouTube an excellent platform to showcase your property and attract more bookings.

We hope this has been helpful and maybe given you the motivation to use the power of video, but if not then don't let that stop you looking at our efforts! 

So, that's it for this week folks and don't forget it's just a month away until the CHS Awards, so book your tickets here. 

Have a great week folks! 

What's Floating Around Cloud 9? 15 December 2014

Welcome to another week and its our last full week of the year before the team here at Cloud 9 Towers take a well earned rest over the Christmas season.

Its been a busy old year and we've welcomed some lovely new clients to our company, run conferences and awards in various UK locations and abroad, booked all sorts of venues for all sorts of events, attended a variety of trade shows, exhibited at a couple of shows, been on some amazing fam trips and industry parties, expanded the team, and held a couple of open days in addition to welcoming a raft of visitors. 

We would like to thank everyone we've worked with this year, and whilst we are still around for the remainder of the week, the team will be calling time on 2014 this Friday.

You will still be able to contact us via email and mobiles for the duration of the Christmas holidays though, before we come back raring to go on Monday 5 January 2015.

2015, who would have thought it!?

So what of next year, and what as an industry can we expect? Well, these are certainly exciting times. The rate of technology change is accelerating with thousands of ideas, apps and innovations bubbling up to help meeting planners, exhibitors, venues and other meeting participants to do their jobs better.

Mobile apps for events have become mainstream and it seems the trend will continue to grow in 2015. 

Now, nearly everyone, including technology laggards, is carrying around a smart phone. Mobile use at events has exploded and mobile event app providers are expanding and refining the options. Much of the development has focused on replacing existing processes such as replacing paper event programs, agendas, attendee lists exhibition guides, and/or course notes, replacing the need for keypad polling and paper surveys and replacing directional signage and program maps.

Additionally, event apps have offered improved means of on site social media networking, group or targeted alerts and announcements, improved peer-peer messaging, appointment making and business contact exchange, networking and social media engagement.

 
However, mobile event apps are not just about improving existing processes. They can be about providing entirely new services including tracking trends and delivering vital analytics such as identifying the top speakers, the best attended stands, crowd flow and influences at conferences and events.

Free Wi-Fi is the most desired hotel in-room amenity. With hundreds of mobile event apps now available, Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity have become the lifeblood of event communications. This has not been without challenges, with hotels and other event venues scrambling to keep up with the exploding demand.

The good news is that the technology exists to provide very high-density, high-speed Wi-Fi connectivity to large groups – and many facilities are starting to catch up! Planners are increasingly examining venues’ abilities to provide good quality, easy-to-use, and reasonably priced Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity as key factors in making venue purchase decisions.

In the meantime, the larger the event (especially large tradeshows), the more likely that attendees will experience less than ideal Wi-Fi connectivity. In two to three years, as venues digest the “bulge in the snake” of Wi-Fi demand, this will be less of an issue.

The transition from “attendee” to “participant” will continue.The combination of social media and mobile technology has provided a wide range of attendee engagement options. The entire dynamic of meetings is changing; instead of “top-down” it is “bottom-up.”   Instead of attendees passively sitting at event watching a talking head, meeting participants are demanding a greater say and expect active engagement. This is playing out in several ways including social media apps, used to recruit and engage participants before the events, during and after events.

Additionally,highly mobilized social media tools (Twitter, Instagram, Vine, YouTube and others) are seeing strong use during many events, and certainly we have noticed that at any media related event, a speciality of our, a live Twitter feed is a must. 

Another trend for 2015 is that meeting designers are moving away from passive theatre-style seating to alternate room sets to facilitate discussion and participation and delegates at events are now expecting personalised communication and choices tailored to their desires.

A bit more worrying for the industry though is that attention spans will continue to decrease! Human knowledge is doubling every year and the rate is accelerating rapidly . We are awash in information. The world’s body of information is at our fingertips and available 24/7 wherever we go. We are barraged with hundreds of marketing messages daily and receive hundreds of email/text messages as well. 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute! As we desperately try to multi-task to keep up, many of us feel overwhelmed.

One of the results is decreasing attention spans that are changing how events are marketed, managed and experienced. Shorter presentation times are being scheduled (the15-minute TED talk style is becoming more prominent), more interactivity during sessions and more audience engagement tools are required. 

Images need to play a prominent role in articles, blogs, website postings, event promotional materials and computer presentations (a picture is worth a thousand words). 

Short video is the new language of the internet – more powerful than pictures and far more powerful than text. A good video can be worth a thousand pictures! 

Finally, despite the increased use of virtual meetings technology, face to face meetings and trade shows will remain an important part of the industry.  In today’s multi- tasking and often distracting work environment, attention spans are short. Thirty to forty-five minutes is usually the maximum you can expect someone to pay attention to a webinar while sitting in front of a monitor.

Meetings, on the other hand, take people to a more focused environment with fewer distractions. As long as attendees are informed, entertained and fed, event hosts can keep them engaged for days. At the minimum, we share a social contract to at least look like we are paying attention at an event. The opportunities for networking, brainstorming, and relationship building are usually far greater at face-to-face events than online. 

For an exhibitor, it is often the best way to meet so many qualified buyers in such a short time. For buyers, it is a great chance to meet vendors of interest – all together in one location, categorised and mapped for your choosing.

Meetings provide a vastly richer, more targeted, and more focused learning experience than nearly any virtual meeting. To put it succinctly, there is no such thing as a “virtual beer!” 

These are just a few of whirlwind of changes coming, and one thing is for sure, 2015 is going to be a whirlwind of a year for Cloud 9!

Have a great week and please remember the office will be closed from Friday until Monday 5 January.

During the festive period, please call 07774 741883 for any urgent or venue enquiries.

Enjoy! 

What's Floating Around Cloud 9? 15 September 2014