Raleigh TweetUp Helps State Fair Break Attendance Record

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Historically State Fairs are a big draw for young and old alike and in North Carolina the State Fair has been entertaining visitors since 1853.  But long-standing events like state fairs have been challenged in recent years to extend their appeal to twenty and thirty-somethings,  to build excitement, and draw in new attendees.  But if the success of the 2009 NC State Fair is any indication, event planners can breath new life into an old event with the smart application of social media. If you are an event planner, you will want to take note of a few of the strategies the @ncstatefair and the #triangletweetup employed to add a new dimension and a lot of excitement to an old event.

TweetUps are events that bring people out from behind their Twitter profile and provide a venue for them to meet IRL (translation: In Real Life).  Such meetings have grown in popularity since Twitter went ballistic and are held regularly across the globe. But as an innovative group of social media evangelists and event planners in Raleigh recently demonstrated, a TweetUp can add a viral dimension to already existing events.  In fact, they proved that  TweetUps not only create significant buzz around an event, they can also help shatter previous attendance records.

Karlie Justus, Public Information Officer of the NC State Fair, told us that the TweetUps impact was tangible.  She noted, “People came to the fair who wouldn’t have come otherwise.”  In fact, attendance at the NC State Fair on the night of the TweetUp was the highest Thursday night on record for the 156 year old event.  With 108,929 people on hand, the fair blew well past  both the 10 and 20 average attendance rates of 89,173 and 73,658 respectively!

So, you might be wondering how Twitter, other social media, and a TweetUp combined to create such a frenzy around this year’s fair.  While we didn’t attend the event we found a lot of  digital footprints that gave us some clues.  Of course a nice chat with Karlie Justus, @KarlieJ by the way, helped fill in some of the details.  Here’s the scoop as we understand it, if we got anything wrong, we hope Karlie and others will let us know.

1. Twitter is one part of a comprehensive social media strategy.

As we understand it, the team at the NC State Fair were the first state fair in the country to adopt social media. For them, it began just a few months prior to the 2008 event, too soon to have a significant impact on last year’s event. But, as you can see, it was the right time to have a big impact this year.

Twitter is one part, an important part, of a social media strategy that includes the main NC State Fair website, a blog, and a presence on YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr. Such a distributed presence provides multiple venues for the fans of the state fair to gather around and engage with the fair in multiple ways. It may sound like a lot to manage and it probably is, but events like state fairs appeal to a wide range of people who have varying habits. So, rather than setting up shop on one network and requiring potential fans to come to them, this event set up a presence where their fans and potential followers already congregate. Together, the multiple social profiles help build anticipation in advance of the event while creating and sustaining interest and momentum during the multi-day event.  And, just as important, they provide multiple real-time channels for providing customer support during the event and feedback critical to the ‘after event’ evaluation.

2. Tight Branding!

Branding gurus will tell you image is everything, while that isn’t exactly so, it really helps you stick in the minds of others when your branding is ‘tight.’ In this case, the State Fair and its TweetUp partners nailed it with a compelling and tightly coordinated name: The Deep Fried TweetUp!

Deep fried foods are synonymous with state fairs and are one of the most talked about aspects in the media. Who hasn’t seen Suzie Stand Up Reporter talking about the new fangled fried items on the midway. In this case, not only was the TweetUp given the Deep Fried moniker, so was the NC State Fair’s blog.

3. Team Up with Smart Tweeps

@KarlieJ told us that Twitter, and social media in general, was still new to some members of the state fair team when they jumped into social media before the 2008 event. Along the way, Karlie and others had learned social media etiquette and techniques through a series of social media breakfasts and TweetUps in what is a burgeoning social media community in the Triangle area of North Carolina. Through various venues she came to know and trust the team that was leading the successful #triangletweetup.  So, for the state fair, it was a no brainer to partner with a team that knew what they were doing.

Triangle Tweetup started running in 2008 with the leadership and guidance of Social Carolina and the social media thought leaders at #OurHashtag whose mission is to bring together community, marketing and technology to provide platforms for connection and engagement, both online and off-line.  While the #OurHashtag website is a little lean on content [these guys must be pretty busy] we can see that those behind it include Wayne Sutton, @waynesutton; Jeffrey Cohen, @dgtlpapercuts; Kipp Bodnar, @kbodnar32; and Ryan Boyles, @therab.

4. Grab Some Hashtags

Of course with the folks at OurHashtag on board you would expect that grabbing and leveraging hashtags so you can follow the Twitter conversation around your event would be part of the strategy.  We may not have found them all but we noticed heavy use of #deepfried, #triangletweetup, and even #bacon in honor of, wait for it… chocolate covered bacon that was served at the fair this year.

5. Get the Local Media Involved

A state fair is always a media event, but social media and TweetUps at state fairs is fairly new.  The team leveraged this, among other PR angles, to get the word out about the TweetUp itself and the fair in general. This included television coverage by local affiliates and newspaper outlets.  This coverage added depth and credibility to a hoard of blog posting that was going on leading up to and during the event.

6. Plan a Killer TweetUp

Meeting IRL is always fun – but when you are holding your TweetUp as part of a larger event it is probably best to infuse your TweetUp with the character of the event.  Here are some of the strategies that the Deep Fried Triangle TweetUp employed to do just that:

• The event was planned for the night that the Fair was doing a food drive for the local food pantry.  Entry to the ‘VIP feeling’ TweetUp tent was free provided that attendees donated 4 cans of food.  It was a banner night for the food pantry and attendees got a ‘feel good’ too!
• Deep Fried State Fair food was in abundance during the TweetUp
• A Deep Fried scavenger hunt got tweeple out of the tent and exploring the state fair’s many offerings. Prizes were awarded to those who completed the hunt
• State Fair oriented swag was distributed and included, among other things, custom twitter badges
• Face painters were on hand to decorate attendees with a range of fail whales and Twitter birds.  See some photos here.
• Project a live stream of tweets using your event hashtags – people love to see their tweets on screen and the more buzz the better!

7. Use Twitter to Serve Your Guests

Through out the state fair, @ncstatefair was a central clearing house for providing swift visitor/customer support. If a visitor was frustrated trying to locate a chocolate covered bacon vendor an inquiring tweet got a quick and helpful response with directions.

8. Use Twitter Contests to Build Event Chatter

Prior to the event, free tickets to the fair were planted at various locations around the city.  The team sent out tweet hints on where people could find them and the first to claim them replied with victorious tweets.  Additionally, this strategy worked well to drive people to the fair’s sponsors who served as the final destinations for some of those seeking free passes.

During the fair, Twitter based contests around fair trivia (twivia?) and hunts rewarded being socially connected at the event and encouraged retweets, twitpics, and replys with hashtags to keep the buzz going. Engaging people while they were at the fair helped increase and reward followers of @ncstatefair.  Wanna bet they’ll still be following next year?

So there you go fellow TwitterFools – a brief case study, if you will, of how the NC State Fair and its TweetUp partners developed a social media strategy that helped them blow previous attendance records out of the water.  While the TweetUp itself attracted 300 registrants and almost 200 people on event day, the buzz they created in both social and traditional media helped boost the event to all time highs. It was’t the TweetUp itself that put them over their attendance record.  No, we submit it was the buzz created by thousands of tweets, retweets as well as the photos and accompanying comments on Facebook, MySpace and Flicker that helped create a new sense of excitiment around the event.

By deftly integrating social media as a real-time tool to support visitors, engage and reward followers @ncstatefair has helped build a loyal following across several social media networks.  These are avid and happy followers who helped promote the event this year and will, in all likelihood, be on board to do the same next year.  To all involved: job well done!

While we did our best to track down all the details of how the NC State Fair leveraged Twitter we may have missed a few details.  We apologize in advance if we missed anything critical and we invite those closest to the event to share them with us and our readers in the comments. Of course, if you have another point of view on how Social Media played out at the 2009 State Fair – we’d love to hear it.

Until next time be well and TweetUp your events!

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