Enlivening Events

If you’re speaking at conferences or events, we certainly hope you’re using Haiku Deck (and your audience will thank you, too)! But there are plenty of ways to use Haiku Deck to circulate ideas, capture inspiration, and build relationships–even if you’re in the audience, or attending virtually.

Before the Event

If you’re organizing an event, creating a Haiku Deck is a great way to build awareness and excitement ahead of time. You can easily post these decks to your blog or website and circulate them (regularly) across all of your social media channels. Here’s a Haiku Deck created to build buzz for the LAUNCH festival organized by Jason Calicanis:

http://www.haikudeck.com/p/bmzILgFNtm/launch-festival-2013

Tips and best practices:

  • Prominently feature the name, location, and date of your event.
  • Include short testimonials from previous event attendees.
  • Include quotes from featured speakers (these can also be drawn from the session descriptions on your website).
  • Use a compelling mix of literal, evocative, and abstract images.
  • Highlight specific program highlights and sessions.
  • Mention and thank sponsors.
  • Include a final slide with the event website, hashtag, and other key contact info.
  • Use the public notes feature to add links or other supporting details.
  • Be sure to notify anyone you’re quoted or mentioned in your deck and encourage them to share with their own networks (Twitter works especially well for this).
  • Even if you’re not organizing the event, you can create a Haiku Deck to reflect on your goals and thoughts beforehand, like this one by Rafranz Davis.

More “before the event” Haiku Decks:

During the Event

You can also use Haiku Deck as a fun and unique idea-sharing tool, to capture quotable gems and circulate them with your networks.

You can create a Haiku Deck recap of a particular talk, like this one by Haiku Deck Guru Wendy Townley at the ALT Summit:

http://www.haikudeck.com/p/mLR57ctKTc/alt-summit-slc-2013-personal-branding

Another approach is to create a “highlights” Haiku Deck, with sound bites from a wide range of speakers. Here’s an example I made while sitting in the audience at the XConomy Mobile Madness Northwest Forum:

http://www.haikudeck.com/p/8Mn4tGzs9O/xconomy-forum-sound-bites

Here’s an excellent example by the Bruce Clay team, combining Haiku Deck slides with “live blog” links to offer in-depth coverage of SMX West 2014.

Capturing events with Haiku Deck: Example from SMX West 2014

Click to view the full Haiku Deck with notes and links

Tips and best practices:

  • Consider creating the first few slides of your deck to set context in advance, so you can give the speaker(s) your full attention.
  • You can either take notes and create your Haiku Deck later, or create your Haiku Deck “live,” giving it a final polish later before you publish.
  • Select a theme that suits the speaker’s style or talk topic.
  • Use a mix of literal and evocative images, or some abstract imagery that complements the topic.
  • If there’s an event hashtag, keep an eye out for photos attendees have taken that you can incorporate into your deck, or sound bites you might have missed. (Bonus: Tweets are usually short enough to fit on a Haik Deck slide.)
  • You can even make a Haiku Deck of sound bites if you’re following along virtually, via Twitter and an event hashtag–I created this one, of the closing keynote at IntegratED PDX, on the train since I couldn’t be in the room during the talk.

More “during the event” Haiku Decks:

After the Event

Creating a Haiku Deck is also a powerful way to reflect on a conference and share your observations, key trends, or things that inspired you. As you review your notes, you can build a deck that captures your experience, like this one by Haiku Deck Guru Simon McKenzie:

How to Enrich Conferences and Events with Haiku Deck

Click to view the full Haiku Deck with notes

Tips and best practices:

More “After the Event” Haiku Decks:

The Main Event

Of course, if you are up on stage, and you did use Haiku Deck for your slides (Hai-5!), don’t forget to share them with the event attendees using the social share and embed buttons–and with us! Send a link to your deck to gallery@haikudeck.com, and we’ll consider them for our Featured or Popular Gallery or our Pinterest boards.