It’s another cold day on Cape Cod and a great time to work on your business plan for 2010. Since we are a tourist destination, a lot of businesses rely on the summer season to get their cash registers ringing or they come up with creative ways to get a ringing in the off season with special promotions and events. Most business owners send out a postcard, a newsletter, or an electronic newsletter promoting their event. That is just the tip of the iceberg to market your event. Here is a list of tools and websites you can use to enhance your event promotions and get others to promote the event for you.

 Facebook Events– You can create an event on your facebook fan page or profile with all the information, photos, website links etc…and send an invitation to all your fans and or friends about the event. Once your fan receives your invitation, you want to come up with ways for that fan to SHARE the event with his or her friends to create that many to many connection and get others to promote your event. You can also export your event(say to Google Calendar) or copy and past the url of your event to your website, blog, etc…In addition to posting your event on Facebook, you can use facebook ads to promote your event to a specific target group. For example, if you are having a wine tasting event you can target people over age 21 on Cape Cod.

 Twitter’s key is retweeting and hashtags. With all those followers you have with your twitter account you can ask them to help promote your event by retweeting it for you. Perhaps offer an incentive for retweeting. Another key ingredient is to use an effective hashtag for your event and promote it. Create a new hashtag but be sure it isn’t used by someone else already.

 Online Web Sites – Socializr and Evite are free online services providing innovative ways to share event and party information with your friends. You can also post your event on upcoming, Garysguide (for business events), or local Cape Cod Web Sites like Cape Cod Today or Cape Cod Times.

 Google Calendar- Lets you create invitations for special events, send those invitations to friends, and keep track of responses and comments all in one place. You can export your facebook event and import it into your Google Calendar.

During your event be sure to have someone take photos and videos so you can post your media and thank all those that have attended. On facebook you can create a photo album of your event and then tag people. Once a person is tagged it shows up on their wall for their friend to see. You can also upload photos to the Flickr account and post videos on YouTube (Vimeo and Viddler are also good alternatives). Post recordings of your live video streams as well (you did have a live video stream or two, right?).

 We’d love to hear your comments about your next event and what ideas you used from this blog post. If you have any other suggestions for promoting events, please share what you know.