Industry conferences put more miles on a public relations person than any other professional activity. Road warriors all have hard-earned tips and tools they employ to smoothly navigate these valuable experiences. Here are three I use and recommend PRSA 2012 International Conference attendees check out. Bonus Tool: If you don’t have the PRSAICon 2012 app, be sure to download that here.
Keep Conversations Straight with TweetChat
We all have our Twitter go-to, but I usually switch over to the web-based TweetChat for events. It’s easier to participate with the content compared to Twitter’s own site. And unlike, TweetDeck or Hootsuite, it automatically appends the event hashtag onto your tweet. Best of all, it eliminates other Twitter-based distractions by filtering out all other unrelated tweets.
Reduce, Recycle with Cardmunch
Some use apps like CardCloud to eliminate the need for business cards. But it requires the other person to have the app. So it’s nearly impossible to eliminate the need for business cards. Cardmunch takes pics of business cards you receive and humans transcribe the info for free. The app is owned by LinkedIn so if the contact has a profile, it pulls this info in as well.
Evernote Helps You Capture Content
We all have ways we record helpful information from conference presentations. I’m using Evernote to write this post. It’s web-based and it syncs to a mobile app. This ensures you can use it without wifi. And it allows you to capture text, audio and images. So regardless of your note-taking style, it’s able to capture it all and centralize the content in a single place.
Those are my top three. Other tools like Yelp, and sites like Google Drive or Dropbox can also be lifesavers. Let me know your tools and tips in the comments.
Kevin M. Dugan, APR, is director of marketing for Empower MediaMarketing. Advising clients as large as General Electric and Xerox and as small as marketing startups, He has been immersed in digital, social media and content for nearly a decade. Blogging since 2002, he’s best known forThe Bad Pitch Blog and is a national source on social media, quoted on CNN, WSJ and more. Follow him on Twitter @badpitch
