Steve!

Exhibitors at events like SHRM’s Annual Conference & Exposition or the HR Technology Conference & Exposition go all-out while they’re at the event to build brand recognition and drive leads. Whether it’s hiring circus performers to dangle from the ceiling or bringing an Airstream with a fully stocked bar, these companies are looking to generate some buzz.

But the buzz doesn’t have to be limited to the trade show floor. Event marketing needs to take into account two audiences: those in attendance and those following at home.

Social media has made it possible for anyone with a computer or mobile device to share in event experiences. The sad thing is, lots of companies start their plans off with good intentions, encouraging social sharing, and even snapping a few photos of the booth. Then the event starts and things just get busy.

Don’t let the at-home audience become an afterthought.

Here are some tips to make your event exciting for those playing along at home:

• Take a cue from awards shows, like the Oscars. You might not have a fashion police, but you can catch keynote speakers, analysts, and bloggers for quick interviews and pictures.
• Include the at-home audience in your giveaways. Attendees who visit booths and like a Facebook page or register for a demo are often entered into drawings for big-ticket items. Run a similar contest online, offering different prizes for those participating remotely. Track those registrations separately and have a concrete follow-up plan.
• Gather a running commentary. Have all of your reps tweet or record their reactions to the event. Sound bites shared via video are great to keep people interested in what takeaways are most interesting or relevant.
• Send out a “See you next time!” follow-up. All social leads, including those who participated in the event, should get social follow-up. You can make a short video of the event recap, a “10 Things We Learned” asset, or even a webinar covering the takeaways. Make a special link that allows for conversion-tracking specifically for the social shares. Don’t forget to mention those followers who interacted with you during the event.

These are some tips to get you started. When you’re ready to take it to the next level, you can start thinking about how to combine a virtual event with the show. You’ll be making a comprehensive event marketing campaign that will be the envy of all the other exhibitors.

We wanted to make sure you had a hit list of easy ways to make your event marketing a sensation the next time you’ve got a trade show coming up. Throw out the old habits and focus your event marketing on these ideas:

• Identify your key messages
• Educate your reps
• Tease before and follow-up after
• Get your social media straight
• Don’t forget the WIIFM

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Want to learn more about bringing your brand to life at your next event? Request clearance at www.thestarrconspiracy.com.

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In our hyper-technological world, it’s easy to forget there are plenty of times B2B companies can market to prospects face-to-face. Trade show season is an opportune time to capture an attentive audience — and have some fun.

How to make it relevant:

1.     Target with messages your audience wants to hear. Trade shows are often when companies make big announcements and when major awards are presented. Let’s face it — not everyone can be Apple and have entire conferences dedicated to unveiling new features and functionality. B2B marketing is going to be more about benefits and the WIIFM. Build your event message around your audience, not your announcement.

2.     Make the event part of an overall campaign. Event marketing falls flat when your marketing is only focused on the event itself. Instead, focus on how to drive excitement beforehand and gain traction afterward.

3.     Measure responses throughout the campaign. When you can get real-time metrics on social responses, downloads, and visits, why wait until the end of the campaign to run analytics? Capture that data early and often. It could inform ways you tweak your message before you hit the expo floor.

How to make it memorable:

4.     Give ’em what they want. Trade shows might have a lot of educational value for attendees, but they also give them a chance to let their hair down. Some attendees even get a little crazy. You don’t have to shout, “Free booze!” from the mountaintops, but you can find a hook that’s compelling. Everything from charging stations to nap pods can help give your audience something they need while they’re at the event.

5.     Add a little something extra. Don’t just show up with a booth. You don’t have to throw a record-breaking party, but consider a VIP dinner or a prospect lunch. Even catching a local baseball game or hosting a trip to a major landmark will make your presence at the show memorable. It requires some pre-planning, but adding a high-touch experience can go a long way.

6.     Remind your audience later. Take pictures, capture video, and share the excitement after the event is over. You can even conduct a survey on-site and share the results in a report a few weeks later. Then you can invite attendees to your next event or even let them know when you’ll be in their city.

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When we worked together with Brandon Hall Group to create “The Future of HCM: 7 Trends That Every HCM Provider Needs to Know,” we knew we had to bring it. There’s so much confusion about HCM and its trajectory (spoiler alert: It’s growing), we wanted to give you an inside look at the way our minds think about the human capital management market.

While I don’t want to give up all the goods that we go into — you’ll have to download the white paper to find that out — I do want to call out one trend that’s super interesting to me: the consumerfication of HR tech.

If I think about the HR tools I used when I joined this space a little more than a decade ago, I remember going through some pretty painstaking training to get up to speed. There were no employee portals. If anything, I was the employee portal. When HR technologists built products, they built them for me: the HR guy.

Now? HR technology is trending toward being accessible not just to employees but also contractors, vendors, incoming employees, and job candidates. No surprise, these users aren’t willing to take a three-day training course on how to use these systems, either.

Want to know more about the trends that will be impacting the future of HCM (and what you can do to be prepared for them)? Take a look and give us a shout if you want us to walk you through our excitement about the all of the opportunities in this market.

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Let’s face it: The human capital management market has changed a lot in the last few years. With mergers and acquisitions, new entrants and exits, the landscape is changing more quickly than ever. HR buyers have needs and budgets, but what do they want — and what are they seeing in the market?

The Starr Conspiracy has teamed up with research and analyst firm Brandon Hall Group to deliver key insights into this evolving market. When you download “The Future of HCM: 7 Trends Every HCM Provider Needs to Know,” you’ll get the inside scoop on:

• What trends are keeping HR buyers up at night and how they will look to address them in the coming years
• How changes in performance, learning, and recruiting practices are evolving the solutions in this category
• Why a more agile approach is going to be critical to stay successful in the HCM market

Download the paper today to get insight into all of the trends you need to know to stay competitive in this ever-changing market.

Learn more about The Starr Conspiracy and Brandon Hall Group online.

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In late 2011, SAP announced that it was buying SuccessFactors for a cool $3.4 billion. Consumer tech blog TechCrunch panned it as the most boring tech story of that week. Check out the link if you think I’m exaggerating.

While a lot of people who’ve invested their careers in the HCM industry were outraged at the pithy reporting of such an important acquisition, we here at The Starr Conspiracy saw the purchase as just another opportunity. After all, HCM is a growing market.

In 2006, the HCM market was at $6.1 billion and was largely dominated by a few players. After some down years during the recession, HCM has continued its climb. This year, HCM surpassed $8 billion.

IDC has predicted that growth will continue in the HCM market through at least 2016. That growth rate (just above 8 percent) will leave the HCM market at somewhere around $11 billion in three years. Considering that market share in most HCM solution categories is now split among dozens of significant, profitable players, that increase is nothing to sneeze at. In fact, emerging HCM segments, pursuing a market share strategy could result in market dominance.

While tech blogs obsess over the latest Apple gadgets and consumer software, we can quietly work in the background with the best players in the HCM space and capture a piece of that big pie. Maybe that has you hitting the snooze button on your alarm clock, but it gets us excited here at The Starr Conspiracy.

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In the last 18 months, there has been significant merger and acquisition activity in the HCM space. That part is not a secret. What might be more of a mystery is why we view merger and acquisition activity in general much differently than an industry analyst or investor would.

In what’s probably a surprise to no one, mergers and acquisitions are rarely done for branding reasons. In the best situations, complementary brands are a happy accident that comes from an acquisition driven by finances, legal wrangling, customer acquisition, or product integration.

For customers and prospects, though, the brands and resulting changes are important. A few issues that come up during the merger and acquisition process that can drive perception changes in the market include:

1. Brand misalignment — When two companies with very different brands merge, everyone wonders which one will come out on top. When Sprint merged with Nextel, Sprint was seen as plodding, Nextel as agile.
2. Brand baggage — When one company brings some seriously bad brand juju to the table, it can impact the resulting acquisition. If your organization is willing to partner with a company with that bad of a brand, your customers and prospects can question their own perceptions.
3. Merger success — A brand can be burnished — or tarnished — by how successful the merger is deemed. When AOL bought Time Warner, the deal ended up stinking for everyone, and it impacted the brand.

Mergers and acquisitions have a huge impact on the resulting brand and make an already volatile situation even more difficult to manage.

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I don’t know if you heard, but we bought a building and moved into our new HQ this week. Oh, you did hear? Cool. Good to know. Well, we can’t really help but talk about it — I know I bought a house six months ago and I still find a way to discreetly tell someone every day.

We’re wrapping up our first week in the new space, and I can tell you TSC HQ is buzzing with thoughtful housewarming gifts from neighbors new and old and our excitement for newly found elbow room and natural light.

We put together this video to show people what it’s like to work for and with The Starr Conspiracy — it’s a quick glimpse into our 12 times “Best Places to Work” winning culture.

But enough about us … tell us what you think about us:

And to recap the introduction to our new space, check out the posts from this week and the new photos below: 

• Building a Headquarters That Inspires The Starr Conspiracy
• We Practice What We Preach: Employer Branding in Work Environments
• Building a Home Surrounded by Good Neighbors
• Our Culture is What Makes Us, Us

In all seriousness, we have received so many welcoming gifts, calls, cards, and emails from our neighbors and friends of TSC. Not to mention comments, tweets, likes, and shares on social for our story about the new building. I can tell you that the agents of The Starr Conspiracy are utterly whelmed and touched.

If you want to send a note to our team, tweet @StarrConspiracy and your message will be shared with everyone here.

Thank you for sharing in our enthusiasm. It’s not lost on us.

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Developing a corporate culture needs to have purpose and intention behind it. But it can’t be forced.

We know fostering the right culture for your company is a delicate balance between proactively developing it and growing it from the spontaneous actions of your employees. It’s something we work at daily.

If culture isn’t something you think about when designing your employees’ experience, then you’re missing the point. Culture is critical. In fact, it’s so important to us that we strive to make sure candidates will fit into the culture first. Lots of people have the talent to get a job done, but can they get the job done with us?

A key component to our own culture is helping employees develop friendships. You’re more productive if you like who you’re working with. And when you spend more time with co-workers than you do at home, it’s nice to know you’re seeing a friendly face each day in the office (or on Google+ Hangouts).

Building a new headquarters was the perfect opportunity for us to ask — are we fostering the culture we want our employees to experience? Culture changes over time, so you have to revisit it regularly. Can you recognize what makes your employees unique? What drives their loyalty? What elements of your culture might have faded over time?

Supporting your culture means encouraging your employees to participate in its development. You give them workspaces to collaborate and Nerf guns for a dart war. You celebrate their achievements and make giant posters of the employee of the month. They create visions for the future. And you also take their ideas and feedback.

We’re ready to keep creating a dynamic culture that always looks ahead. And we’ve given our agents a place where they’re part of the development, too.

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When the leaders of The Starr Conspiracy were looking for a place to plant their flag, they knew it had to be someplace special. And it had to have a little character.

“When we moved to Magnolia Avenue,” said Mark Mitchell, partner, “it was pretty sketchy. But we’ve always been out on the frontier. Hell, Fort Worth was the jumping-off point for the actual frontier.”

Our new office on South Main is another example of literally building our identity into our work environment.

The South Main neighborhood will go through a similar transformation that the Magnolia Avenue area experienced — growing from a historic part of town that just needed a little TLC, to one of the hottest and most sought-after real estate areas in the city.

But being an early mover into an up-and-coming neighborhood isn’t just about finding the right place for our agents. It’s about finding the right neighbors — other individuals and businesses who are also looking to transform the neighborhood.

Local urban redevelopment pioneer Eddie Vanston has already converted the abandoned Sawyer Grocery building and Miller Manufacturing building into a series of retail spaces and apartments. Our new next-door neighbor, Amphibian Stage Productions, has kicked off a great show season, with more events to come.

Neighborhood retail spaces are already filled with several locally run businesses, including Stir Crazy Baked Goods, The Salon Upstairs, Thumbtechs, J.O. Design, and Robert Kelly Architects. On Saturdays, the Southside Urban Market showcases local artisans as part of its food and arts experience.

Coming soon will be the opening of the Supreme Golf Warehouse, which will include loft apartments and a beer garden. The neighborhood is also welcoming organizations like Fort Worth B-cycle and Happy Tomato Fresh Salsa to the warehouse’s office and retail spaces.

“South Main reminds me of Magnolia in just about every way,” said Mark. “There is a lot of pent-up interest, but a lot of opportunity as well. We were able to get more space, design the space how we wanted, and support the community all in one action. It was a no-brainer.”

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