As an IT service management community manager at BrightTALK, one of my main goals is to engage the community members by creating quality and timely content and providing the opportunity for interaction with thought leaders and influencers that are keen to share their knowledge. Staying current on the evolution of the IT landscape and building high-value relationships with industry experts is also key. For this reason, I recently attended one of the largest physical events in the ITSM calendar, the Service Desk & IT Support Show in London (SDITS12). These are my personal highlights and takeaways from the event:

Networking with thought leaders

The event was a fantastic opportunity to catch up with many IT professionals, especially the numerous thought leaders that are involved in the ITSM community on BrightTALK.

Here are some highlights from the presentation and some additional resources on the topics presented in it.

Audience By Community - Create a destination for your thought leaders to consistently add content that they can embed to extend the reach of your online community.

• Webinar - How to Build and Monetize an Online Event Community
• Blog post - The new face of online communities

In 2009 I shifted my focus to creating a program for using our technology to generate our own demand and set the goal to run one webinar per week related to best practices for using webinars and videos to support marketing and sales objectives and to help build a business. Some might call this “eating our own dog food.” It was a humbling time as the program was sourced by just two marketing professionals and everything was manual including lead scoring, lead uploading and sales enablement. We certainly felt like we had something to prove and our small team eagerly took on the task of building the most sophisticated webinar and video demand generation program.

While all of the data to help you optimize your webinar program has been available for download from the beginning, it was easy to take after Columbus and not process the data available to you effectively. Now summary charts give you a map for understanding your webinar performance. Here are three ways you can use the data generated by webinars and videos to gain actionable insight to help you improve your program.

Pre-event promotion

Twitter

Tweet 2-3 times per week during the month leading up to your event. Your tweets should include a catchy phrase or title, the handle (@BrightTALK) of the presenters and their companies, the date and time of the event and the URL to your presentation.