Social Media Best Practices and Trends for Building Event Buzz was presented by Erica Campbell, Director of Social Media for Dominion Homes Media at the NAAEI Affiliate Education Conference in Colorado Springs on August 23, 2012. An event — be it a networking gathering, an online program, fundraiser, or class — is by nature a social affair. People attend to connect, interact, and share with their peers. People join social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest to connect, interact, and share with their peers. Using social media channels to market events and programs is a great strategy for getting attention and building excitement at low-cost to promote your events to a larger audience and build fans. Erica Campbell discussed how to leverage social media and become part of the consumer dialogue. This session addressed the latest strategic insights in creating a center of excellence, social media best practices, improving consumer engagement, reputation management and other emerging opportunities. In this session, attendees learned how to accelerate and increase event registration; create more customers for less marketing spend; and automate and streamline attendee and exhibitor data and content collection.