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S U S T A I N A B L E E N E R G Y

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Energy

EU SUSTAINABLE

ENERGY WEEK18-22 JUNE 2012SOCIAL MEDIA HANDY GUIDE

FOR ENERGY DAYS ORGANISERS

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1. ABOUT THIS GUIDE

June is around the corner and the European Union Sustainable Energy Week (EUSEW) 2012 is fast ap-proaching. The use of social media channels will be an exciting and innovative feature of EUSEW 2012.We are striving to make this years event interactive, inclusive and, well, social media friendly.

After the success of EUSEW 2011, this year we have good reason to expect that a rich range of eventswill be organised all over Europe. Thousands of organisations and individuals will participate in the EUSustainable Energy Week (EUSEW) by hosting, attending or collaborating with an Energy Day. EnergyDays may take different forms (conferences, open door events, presentations, exhibitions, performanc-es, etc.) but they all have one thing in common: they promote, innovate, and enrich the debate aboutenergy efficiency and renewable energy sources.

This guide is aimed at Energy Day Organisers and EUSEW community members at large. We would liketo give you some advice in the form of tips and principles. Dont think of this guide as a set of rules, butrather see it as a list of suggestions and ideas that could help make your event more meaningful andpeople-friendly.

2. PRINCIPLES

A. INCLUSIVENESS. DONT BROADCAST; INVOLVE YOUR ATTENDEES.

Injecting social media into your events fundamentally adds a second layer of discussion and bringsa wider audience into what would have been a closed exchange. It encourages debate, conversation andparticipation like never before. You can interact with other listeners get their thoughts and reflectionsabout what is being said; see who agrees or disagrees with the points being made; and learn by discuss-ing the issues raised during the conference. Good speakers and great content will get wider recognition,as good feedback spreads fast.

Include a Twitter Wall (as shown in the picture) Encourage questions from Twitter in all your communications prior to the event. Create the right #hashtags. Make networking a priority: offer opportunities for attendees to talk to speakers.

B. COLLABORATION

Involving the crowd can also mean outsourcing tasks to your network. Your community can be of greathelp in finding solutions to many of your problems. If you invite them to co-create an event with you,the experience for those that participate will be much richer as a result.

Ask them for their opinion on how to improve your eventI dont have a budget for a photographer. However, I can ask my attendees to take pictures and uploadthem to my image-hosting site.

Listen to their needs. Analyse and ask questions. For example: Which of these 3 topics interests youthe most?

C. INNOVATION. TEST, LEARN AND INNOVATE

Start to learn as soon as possible from your community. Test technologies, test new messages, test newformats. Visit our website in order to find inspiration and best- practices but dont forget that on thesocial web there are no experts, only experiments, and the fastest learner wins (@jmichele).

D. BE PEOPLE-CENTRIC. BE PEOPLE-FRIENDLY

People see your Page updates alongside posts from their friends, so share content that is personal andengaging. Think of social media as a never-ending forum in which you speak naturally, using a languagethat is easy to understand. Avoid jargon and overly technical words.

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Use graphs and visual tools in order to help the user easily understand the message and the differentoptions available.

Messages should not be limited to a description of activities or provision of pure information, but couldalso occasionally transmit feelings, while sounding lively and spontaneous.

E. VALUE CREATION. GIVE VALUE TO YOUR ATTENDEES.

Give relevant content: Providing relevant and interesting content is essential to generate traffic andcontributions as well as encouraging the maximum number of users to engage at the highest level. Givecontent in social media before posting it through any other channels. Your followers will appreciate it!

Be a connector: Provide a digital space where all attendees can see who is participating in your eventand that highlights their social media accounts. And do it before the conference takes place.

Promote sharing: Document the ideas that have been discussed during the conference. Share theseideas, release them into the public domain, thereby making them available for others to use and com-ment on.

Encourage Learning: Learning is an active, social process. Humans learn from an interaction betweentheir experiences and their ideas. So be ready to provide the context in which this interaction takesplace. Be open to comments from the crowd. Instead of overly long keynote speeches, create a partic-ipant-driven meeting.

3. TOP 5 SOCIAL MEDIA TIPS FOR ENERGY DAY ORGANISERS.

1. Share your content with us in order to give your event a European dimension.2. Multimedia composition: include video, audio, pictures, graphics and try to make complex data eas-

ily digestible.3. Live stream your events so citizens who couldnt attend in person can still do so virtually and ask

questions.4. Dont give up on your event once its finished. Think about ways to continue the conversation, build

on peoples ideas and inspire continued dialogue.

5. Talk to us (@euenergyweek). We always answer

4. SO WHATS THE PLAN?

From our side, the EUSEW secretariat, we will keep up our efforts in order to keep expanding our ever-growing community of actors interested in renewable energies and energy efficiency.

We have put in place a Twitter account (@euenergyweek), a LinkedIn and Flickr Group a Facebook Page.Feel free to place your own news and achievements there. Be consistent and dont be shy.

We aim to turn all those social media platforms into a recurrent platform of exchange between EUSEWstakeholders and in particular between Energy Days organisers. We want to turn them into a horizontalform of communication, involving more exchanges between community members who will want to in-crease the visibility of their events and projects.

We will use Flickr to share and visualise the EUSEW in practice: we have created an open group on Flickrwhere ED organisers and attendees in Brussels can upload their pictures.http://www.flickr.com/groups/euenergyweek/These pictures will be published, not only on our website, but also on other web forums.

We also aim to ask our community for their contribution to our common project. From now on, we lookforward to talking and engaging with all of you at EUSEW 2012.

VISIT EUSEW.EUJOIN US ON SOCIAL MEDIA

FACEBOOK.COM/EUENERGYWEEKTWITTER.COM/EUENERGYWEEK

http://www.flickr.com/groups/euenergyweek/http://www.flickr.com/groups/euenergyweek/