Charlie White over at Mashable wrote a great post in December about branding in the era of social media. In it he included an infographic from a market research study conducted by AYTM Market Research about how internet consumers prefer to get information from brands via social media. In short, it’s all about participation and strategic engagement.

So why is it that these concepts can’t be used to generate interest and excitement around live “social” events like conferences?

Last week I attended the GreenBiz Forum San Francisco and was shocked by the lack of social engagement at the event. Greenbiz is a great media property and has been a go-to source for breaking information and insights into the cleantech industry for years. But beyond an oddly worded Twitter hashtag, #grnbiz, that according to TweetReach was only used by twelve people all day long (three from Eastwick!), little was done to encourage online social engagement at the event.

As a media organization, I expected event organizers to harness the collective mindshare, and social channels, of conference attendees to promote the event. Given that many of the speakers came from business that sell products via the web, like eBay, Adobe and newcomer Nest, I expected that they too would have pushed social engagement intensely to drive company and brand awareness. But it didn’t happen. Why? It wasn’t like event attendees didn’t have the tools or web access—most people were tapping away on their computers and iPad’s and Wi-Fi access was free.

It could be that event organizers wanted conference attendees to engage, socially, with other people at the event—a novel idea.  More likely it was just a missed opportunity to put in action a few of the tips that Charlie White highlighted in his post about branding in the social era.

History shows that social networking works at conferences. AlwaysOn, which holds two venture fests in Silicon Valley every year, was one of the first organizations to project comments from selected bloggers on a screen about a presentation while the presentation was taking place. It was live commentary. AlwaysOn was doing this before Twitter was invented.

Social engagement can also help overcome that familiar problem at conferences: everyone has questions but is too shy or afraid to ask them. Social media tools allow attendees to anonymously raise uncomfortable questions or criticisms they might not otherwise air if they have to stand up.

So what could have been done, socially, to better promote the event?  Here are nine quick ideas:

• Ask conference attendees to include social information, like a Twitter handle, at the time of online event registry. Use this list to begin engaging with the top 10 influencers on Twitter a few days in advance of the show to build buzz
• As part of a corporate sponsorship, ask that sponsors provide a product coupon or voucher to everyone that attended via Twitter or Facebook
• Create a Twitter hashtag that maps to your brand and promote it at the event! In this case, the #grnbiz could have remained the name of the publication, #greenbiz, for clarity
• Ask attendees to vote in real time on what they think constitutes One Great Idea. (A staple of Greenbiz conferences are startups touting novel, groundbreaking ideas.)
• To the right or left of the main stage during the event, project the live Twitter stream so that conference attendees can see what people think of the event in real-time
• Solicit questions for speakers via Twitter, and promote them across social channels
• Post pictures and speaker video on Twitter and Facebook as they happen
• Upload speaker presentations to SlideShare
• Keep the conversation going with attendees after the event by engaging with them through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This is a quick and easy way for people to further engage with event speakers as well as event organizers