Top technology uses in events
1- Quick updates via Twitter messaging through cellphone/wireless networks. Ally has a good post on this here.
2- Sensors for foot traffic calculations. This has been around for a few years, but its how the data is applied to streamline traffic, staff placements and reduce risks of bottlenecks thats important.
3- Interactive Video multi-channel dispay screens. Link this up with live web-casting and you’ve done a favor to all of those people who could’nt make it.
4- For parties, having LED lighting choreographed with music adds a level of oomph.
5- Gadgets for direct attendee data tracking to use during and post event analysis.
Wishlist:
6- Blue-tooth devises to track people from online networks (LinkedIn, Facebook).
Also, Julius wrote an interesting post on 5 signs your event is web 1.0. Great read!
Save money and touch up your event pictures yourself
You’ll hardly find anyone who doesn’t bemoan the perfect photograph being spoiled by that gigantic palm frond in the background or a fly landing on the cheek at the wrong moment to give you a mole that puts the black hole to shame.
We all have attics and storerooms full of junk but in all that junk are memories too. These memories are stored in form of old, battered and tattered photographs. No matter how well these treasures are cared for, time takes its toll on them.
wowApic comes to the rescue in both these situations. They not only touch up and improve your photos but also restore the old ones. They do it for a fee but as they have skilled professionals; if a customer isn’t happy with the result, they reimburse the money.
The site also allows you to earn money by becoming an “affiliate”. You can refer the website to other people or even promote it on your own website; either way you end up making some pocket-money on the side.
Such a website is nothing less than a treasure trove for anyone who is marketing or launching events. There should definitely be more of these. You don’t need to hire professional photographers charging exorbitant rates. All that is needed is a camera and someone to happily click away; an added plus is that both print and digital photos can be used. You don’t need to worry if an important personality is missing from a group shot or you have a curious onlooker ruining a picture. Thanks to digital technology, the missing person can be added and the unwanted can disappear into thin air. By allowing change of backgrounds, it allows you to pick and choose the proper setting for the event you are holding.
As wowApic allows you uploads from flickr, smugmug, facebook, fotopic.net, picasa, and photobucket, you can have all your previous photos upgraded as well. This in turn will help you revamp your image via your portfolio. It also allows you to update your web info quickly as rush orders can be met in only 24 hours.
Pre- and post-event activities can all be photographed and shared with the whole world. If your photos are attractive and eye-catching, your event is bound to be a hit. The opportunity to enhance the pictures yourself will allow you to have shots of each and every detail. It will also give you a chance to splurge all the saved money on some other arrangement which might have been dropped due to a previously tight budget.
Plurking events?
The website called Plurk is as quirky and eccentric as its name. Its tagline “your life, on the line” is definitely tongue-in-cheek as if offers to publish all your thoughts without censure and allows you to share your experiences with fellow plurkers. However, it favors brevity as it requires you to be concise by the limiting of each message to less than 140 characters. But as a plus it also allows you to share videos and send messages to mobile phones as well.
It is one of those social networking sites that is bound to make the event marketers and event managers thank their lucky stars. Through Plurk, a person can not only keep in touch with family and friends but also find and make new contacts, which is what social networking is all about. From marketing perspective, it means opening of innumerable doors and reaching people who otherwise would be inaccessible. Who needs grapevine and jungle drums when they can plurk.
As it has support for Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket etc., any marketing done on Plurk is sure to go places. Marketing through videos can become a whole new ballgame and building pre-event hype can be a whole lot quicker and extensive by using Plurk and all that it has to offer.
You can plurk links to your website or to a site especially built to promote an event. Using the private messaging system, marketers can send special notes or invites to important players.
Plurk allows you to share messages with the whole wide world or just a select circle, so event managers can send info to the general public or only to related groups as the event demands. It can help the managers perform better by keeping them on their toes as they will need to keep the information current. The feedback gained from post-event plurks can be very helpful in gauging the success of an event.
A few basic problems of Plurk should also get a mention here. As more people come online, it slows down due to the load. It doesn’t have the option of having multiple conversations simultaneously. However, these issues can’t mar Plurk’s huge potential as a social networking site through which business and marketing opportunities can be expanded to new horizons. It will allow event managers to feed in all that is hip and happening to the public the very minute it happens through internet and the even speedier mobile messaging so happy plurking!
Is Yahoo Buzz all Fuzz?
After opening up to the public, it seems Yahoo Buzz has been able to generate quite some traction around the product. To me, the six month wait was rather disappointing in the sense that they didn’t blow me away with anything innovative. So far, it seems to be at par with Digg, Propeller and others of their like.
In Yahoo Buzz any one can submit their interesting story to a link and have an opportunity to get buzzed by the Yahoo community. The stories are arranged by category and is very similar to the concept of digging. Stories on that topic will get an extra boost in the rankings. You can also discover most remarkable story or video or can share it with other social networks.
Is there anything different that they’re doing? If you’ve benefited from regular traffic spikes through Buzz, share your stories with us.
Coral Tree Wine Bar - you have to be kidding me
When I read this in upcoming.yahoo.com I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“You see someone you are attracted to on the other side of the restaurant. You want to approach that person but what do you say? Now its all about a simple click and hello. At our mixer, EVERYONE will have a device with their personality embedded in it. You approach someone you want to meet, press a button and point it to each other. The next thing you know is you are talking! Great ice breaker.”
No, really!. They claim to have an audience comprising of late 20s to early 40s. A mature age. An age when starting conversations or breaking ice isn’t always such a big issue. Or is it?
Even if it is, two valid issues:
1- the idea of pointing devices at people at a real event in the real world, and waiting for them to quickly read your “profile” and then decide how to react to your introduction is rather silly. This can work in virtual worlds, but not in real life - not in this way atleast. Perhaps they could have built devices that track people of similar interest for you - that would’ve worked better.
2- “device with personality embedded in it.” - Um, your entire personality embedded on a tiny screen that people can read from afar? Are we really that shallow?
Its good to see that people are trying to bring technology and social media into their events, but its not always so interesting to see how they fail to bring the right value out of it.
No offence to any excited attendees.
Have sites like WedDepot and MomentVille changed the wedding planners landscape?
I was discussing with a colleague about how wedding planning has changed from what it used to be in the old days. Social media has changed the event planning landscape so much, that gone are the days when planning a wedding took months and arrangements were a headache with everybody on tenterhooks praying for everything to go without a hitch. Now all this can be done by a click; well a number of clicks to be exact but from the comfort of your home without you ever stepping out of it.
WedDepot:
I came across some interesting web 2.0 websites that were specifically designed for people who are planning their special days. WedDepot offers everything from pre-wedding events to honeymoon arrangements, in fact, even to a newly-wedded couple’s first home. It is a comprehensive website with a sassy interface and a large number of options to attract interest of even the most hardened bachelors. It is definitely a microcosm of the macrocosm as it brings together all wedding-related topics under the sun and presents them as a neatly wrapped up wedding present.
On one hand it discusses frivolous matters like: dove release, fireworks and ice sculpting, but it also means business as it offers tools like a wedding checklist and budget calculator.
WedDepot is a good way to get started with wedding management plans. It offers articles, photo galleries and info on bridal shows and wedding expos. It provides a list of vendor options for each subject, be it invitations, jewelry or the wedding dress. The portfolios of all these professionals are available and one can pick and choose to one’s own taste and convenience. It is also open to new entrepreneurs who are interested in getting their business listed.
This gives an opportunity to buy and sell stuff ranging from stationery to cake toppers. It even tells how to build a free wedding website.
MomentVille:
The topic of wedding websites brings me to another site called MomentVille. It provides a platform for building a wedding website in just three simple steps. It is attractive because not only is it free but also has no expiry date. It offers several different themes to choose from and a person can upload videos, slideshows and music along with photographs. The user can share the joy of his/her happy day with friends who can subscribe to the website and receive an email anytime the site is updated. It also lists several vendors for all sorts of wedding-related finery like invites, jewelry, shoes and even for cruises and hotels.
How Event Marketers can make the best of this trend:
All this bodes of a new world in which everything can be done if you have a computer and access to internet. You now have professionals who are willing to offer their expertise and skill to help you. Event marketers and event managers can use websites like WedDepot and MomentVille to maximum advantage. Marketing of wedding-related events like bridal fashion shows, jewelry exhibitions, opening of a new beauty salon, re-vamping of an accessories shop through such websites is sure to be a hit and is guaranteed to attract serious buyers. These two websites provide all the basic guidelines to any event marketer and manager on how to go about their business thoroughly. They show that everything needs to be well thought-out if they want to be taken seriously. All areas need to be covered and no stone is to be left unturned if an event is to go smoothly without any pre-wedding jitters.
It’s also a great way to get access to potential clients. If you can openly demonstrate your marketing services via these channels, then a lot of serious clientele can get access to you for planning their weddings. You can also get a chance to add these people up in your contact lists.
Searching for media files with FilesTube
Yes - so we’ve all seen youtube and other such websites make it big in the online world. A good search engine for files was inevitable and it was only a matter of time before someone launched it.
Our businesses require active research, and often times it requires alot of file transfers, downloads and exchanges. These files are from multimedia files to content, PDFs, podcasts and so on. FilesTube’s slogan “Download Everything” pretty much sums up what they have to offer.
So all of you who have to research often and find themselves on Google invariably most of the day, can bookmark this site for their daily site-visiting as well. Its good. Its fast. And it offers a whole bunch of things for downloading that we’d have difficult finding elsewhere.
This is especially good for event managers who want to upload videos of their events for other people to view and download. Great stuff!
“All Marketers are Liars” - Seth Godin speaks at Google
Seth Godin is the author of six bestsellers, including Permission Marketing, an Amazon Top 100 bestseller for a year and a Fortune Best Business Book. His newest book, All Marketers are Liars , has already made the Amazon Top 100 and has inspired its own blog.
Tags: sethgodin, google, all marketers are liars
Sosius makes collaboration fun
I’ve been covering a lot of web 2.0 sites recently - not because of any other reason then the fact that I’ve been checking them out myself. Whenever I come across something that I find interesting, I like to share it with you guys so that you can look at it as well. We have another blog running in the parallel at eventslisted.info called The Event Launch Guidelines. We share different resources, tools and tricks for levering social media in the event launch process.
Sosius is basically an online workplace for your team. It offers great storage and security for your content and discussions so that nothing between the creaks and is properly secured. You can access and work on your important files from anywhere in the world (and from any PC). This is great for people on the go.
Whats more is that Sosius has been built from the ground up using an open architecture and includes a powerful API to allow you to extend and customize the interface as well. If you really want to use it as away to manage your team, then you can get some tech people to customize it around your existing workflows.
Event management requires a lot of planning and collaboration. Often times the team isn’t always in the same physical space and we have to resort to emails and phonecalls. The issue with that is that the information becomes too spreadout to be accessed or referred to later on, and risks not having the team on the same page w.r.t your work expectations.
Sosius has been designed to solve these very problems and is thus quite a life-saver in many regards. I would encourage all event managers and promoters to atlease check it out for themselves to see if their teams can benefit from it.
You can set up a free Sosius account with 200 MB space.
10 reasons why every company should host virtual events
There has been an endless debate on whether or not to jump on the virtual events bandwagon. We’ve seen examples of how companies like Microsoft and Nokia hosted their virtual events. We’ve also seen how companies like IBM have such a dominant presence on virtual worlds such as Second Life.
If your company has a large enough user-base or prospect lists but you can’t justify the costs of holding live physical events, then you should consider going virtual. It’s time for us to drop our inhibitions about virtual events and face the facts. Here are some to begin with:
1- There are actual calculatable benefits of virtual events, like increased productivity time, reduced carbon footprint, zero traveling time, increased volunteer participation, zero geographical boundaries and bigger audience attendance.
2- Ability to engage people more interactively on a one to one level. When networking, you can have conversations with multiple attendees at the same time (just like in IMs) and yet make them all feel you are talking exclusively with them. It’s also easier to locate contacts from your existing Twitter, Friendfeed, LinkedIn or Facebook networks. Those are people you may not necessarily recognize in real life, but will be able to find easily in a virtual setting.
3- During these interactions you can share material, knowledge, presentations, PDFs, photos and other files. You can also add content recommendation systems.
4- One of the biggest post-event challenges is to analyze the attendee’s data. Virtual Events makes it much more advanced and quantifiable. You can see exactly what each attendee did, where he went, who he talked to, what material he downloaded, what questions he asked, what conversations he had with others etc. This is all valuable information that can help you understand your audience better and follow-up with them accordingly.
5- Using all of the information about a prospect or user that you gather, you can then easily categorize them according to how interested they are and how much they already know. You can then add them into your sales pipelines in different lists depending on their current relationship status.
6- Event marketing in virtual events is much lower than live physical events. According to Brent Arlsaner, VP of Marketing for Unisfair, a virtual events coordinator; virtual events generate leads at about $23 per head count.
“Take our client Quest Software’s first virtual event, which generated leads at a $23-per-head count. Marketers know that $23 per lead is a pretty impressive return on investment.”
7-If you are pressed on time, it takes on average one third to one fourth the time to organize virtual events as opposed to physical events. Less organizing time, means lesser headaches and lesser overhead costs.
8- If you want to hire booth staff or volunteers, you can get cheaper options from across the globe instead of being restricted to geographical constraints. All you have to do is put up a job post on Elance or oDesk and review the candidates that apply. You can pay only for the actual work done rather than for the number of hours.
9- The registration and ticketing process of virtual events is simpler in nature since it eliminates the need for paper tickets completely. This can be integrated with a payment system to make the entire registration process a seamless experience. Instead of tickets, you can simply grant access on the doorway when someone logs into the event space.
10- You can market richer content which is available on the spot instead of waiting for the event to be over. Some attendees may immediately add the pictures to their flickr, friendfeed or blogs. Pictures of the event or attendees can be taken and passed around during the event with your clients/sponsors brands visible in the background. This will give the clients or sponsors an added incentive to advertise or sponsor the event.
Is this why companies like On24 are coming up with virtual event platforms for other companies to host their events? What other virtual event platforms can be used?
I would like to take this debate a step forward with you guys. If any one of you has hosted virtual events, please share your experience with us here. If any of you have had a chance to market virtual events, what challenges did you face? If any one of you faces barriers to entering the virtual events world, let us know what they are. Together, let us try to evaluate whether or not this is the future of events. I’m tagging some notable people in this domain, Julius and Eugene to get the conversation ball rolling. Let’s hear all of you out.
P.S: Its okay to disagree.
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