Do you promote your events online? If so: do you do it intuitively or do you follow a certain pattern? 

I have recently realized that the NetSquared Local Warsaw (NetWtorek) group has our own way of doing things, and I would like to walk you through it. As in happens with community work, especially in the social media age, there is no one way of doing things. Iit is difficult to go by the book -- you always have to be flexible enough to meet your audience needs. However, I hope this local Polish example can be a good starting point for a longer discussion on how to promote NetSquared Local events.

Once I wrote it down I started to wonder -- Did I get it right? Did I forget about anything? How would it vary if applied to a different sort of event? There is no better way of checking that, than talking to someone about it, possibly a someone with a similar experience. In this case I decided to turn to you, dear NetSquared community.

This post is the first in a two-part series. This one focuses more on the to-dos, and the timeline of it, in the other one I will try to focus on good and bad practises, and call out a few case studies.

This is how it flows:

• The first thing to do is to discuss the topic/ idea within a group. We do it online via our e-mail list. Once that is done, we usually write a short promo and put it on a Google Doc (or other cloud service), so that we can all edit the text in real time.
• When the content is ready I publish it on our (Netwtorek.pl) blog. It is our main point of reference content-wise, and we publish promos as well as summary posts or videos there. 
• The first social media we hit after publishing the post is Facebook. We usually post the promo on the NetWtorek wall, and then cross-post using various profiles including our personal ones. We also create a Facebook event, and invite friends to come. 
• Because not everyone is on Facebook (its scope especially doesn’t cover the NetWtorek audience that chooses not to use the social network), we hit Diaspora, an alternative open sourced social network.
• If we say Facebook, we usually say Twitter too. And so we customize/personalize the message, and post it on Identica.  Identica is a social microblogging service similar to Twitter, built on open source tools and open standards. We do not want to exclude people from my event by limiting ourselves to the mainstream channels only!
• Once we are done with promoting the event via NetWtorek channels, we usually re-tailor the message and put on all of our personal social media profiles. We also encourage the key players in the field to share the information with their own personalized audiences.
• We don’t turn our back on slightly more mainstream media. By slightly more traditional I mean important online portals like, in this case, ngo.pl -- the biggest Polish ngo portal. We would usually also try some luck with a few tech focused online magazines.
• We always try to document the event, so that we can share it with those who didn’t make it to the meeting. If we don’t use the online streaming, and the live chats during the meeting (which we usually don’t), we do film it. If the speaker agrees.
• Once the event “happened” we prepare the follow-up blog post where we include the video too. Then we go through a similar procedure that applies to promoting the event “before” to the “afterwards” phase. We try to always thank everyone that was involved in making the entire thing happened.

This is our way of doing it -- what’s yours? Have you ever written it down as a process or do you “just do it”? Share your thoughts in the comments, we would so much want to learn from you (and so would the others). Also: stay tuned for the second part to come. If you don’t have anything to add here (be it in a form of a post or a social media message), maybe the next post will inspire you.