The difference between style and fashion is quality.
Giorgio Armani

Photo by BitPicture via Flickr

I am sure you’ve heard about Social Media in the past six months. Well, that’s a bit too late as it’s been around for at least 15 years, maybe more. In 1995 I used to post on forums, chat over IRC and yeah it looked lots like Facebook. But hey since the latest fashion is here, now you think your event needs a Facebook Group. Here are few reasons to prevent you from committing Social Media suicide.

10. You haven’t got a clue

You just don’t know what this all Social Media thingy is about. Well, it’s like learning a new language. If you expect to get it in a week, you’re out of sight. Get someone to do it for you or give it some time.

9. They don’t have a clue

And by ‘they’ I mean attendees. If they don’t care, why should you? If they think Linkedin is the latest Alfa Romeo model, just don’t waste your time. Think about making a better event

8. You haven’t listened

If your attendees have talked to you about it or have been asking for it, you need to know where they are. Each target has it’s own networks. Listen first, then engage.

7. You haven’t got a Social Media Policy in place

If you run several events you need to have a standard approach to begin engagement on different platforms. That also applies internally. What are you doing to train your employees to use SM? 54% of companies ban Facebook, twitter etc. If you are among them change that first.

6. You love control

No, I am not out of my mind. It’s tough to find an event professional who’s not a control freak. I am. But you have to let it go.

5. You don’t read about best practices

Is Mashable on your Feed Reader? If you don’t know what I am talking about, start a daily reading practice. You need to get yourself updated with the latest trends, new services.

4. You think twitter is the answer

twitter is the Holy Grail of the credit crunch. The paranoid rush in getting twitter done for virtually every service on the market hasn’t spared events. twitter won’t make your event better if your event is boring. It may be of help to amplify it if you have a great format, as much as a small Ning of 200 people can. So don’t focus on one network because you heard it on TV. Know your options.

3. The maximum technology you embrace is printed badges

There is plenty of technology you can adopt to make your event better. Technology and Social Media go hand in hand. If you don’t innovate with technology you won’t get any SM benefit. Have a look at our Event Technology category or read about Augmented Reality, which is gonna change events for good.

2. You think ‘BarCamp’ is a cool pub down the road

Social Media help new, innovative forms of events. Unconferences and user generated events above all. We have been writing about this for the past 3 years. Time to do some research.

1. Your event is not worth talking about

If it’s no good concept, neither SM or traditional media will help you out. Read Seth Godin every day, that will help a lot.

RSVP management tools and carpooling was a match made in heaven. Interesting developments in the RSVP market!

News is that Eventbrite (which is a great RSVP management tool) and Zoompool (a ridesharing platform) have teamed up.

I guess it was a quite obvious integration path as introducing a ‘Mark Read’ button in Gmail, which, in the same fashion, took way too long.

This is a strong move by Eventbrite in the overcrowded Online RSVP market. I am very curious to see what amiando the European counterpart and my personal favourite will do. In the meanwhile here is the press release.

“Events are a great candidate for ridesharing because attendees generally aim to arrive and leave at roughly the same time,” said Donna Horne, ZoomPool’s co-founder.

“If you’re an event organizer who uses Eventbrite for your conference, business seminar, arts, entertainment or charity event, it makes perfect sense to offer ridesharing to your attendees. It boosts attendance and they’ll love you for it.

As an event attendee, ridesharing with a perfectly matched partner is a great opportunity to make a new social or business acquaintance — who knows where that might lead?”

We just discovered usedeventstuff.com and we loved it.

Better late than never, we stumbled upon Used Event Stuff (thanks @carmenhere for the tip).

Well we all know we produce an awful lot of waste with our events, specially the big fat exhibitions.

Here is their take:

We have seen the waste that is endemic to the industry: beautiful, usable goods thrown out at curbside at the end of the night. Nobody wants to waste all those goods, but designers and clients can no longer afford to keep or re-use materials because the price of storage is so high.

It is not just a waste economically, but is an environmental burden, as much of these usable goods wind up in a landfill. From beautiful event to garbage heap, taking decades or centuries to break down

Start thinking about it naughty boys and get involved!

It is a great idea of Lara and powered by the community.

Lara also had the idea to create an award for all the blogging #eventprofs and we were nominated in the Education Category .

You are more than welcome to vote for us if you wish, but most of all get to know other event blogs and their opinion. Some great peeps in there.

The Team

Julius Solaris – Founder and event geek. @tojulius on twitter

Anne Thornley-Brown – Anne is is the Linkedin Event Planning & Management Group Manager. She is doing a terrific job in ensuring quality within the group and she made sure we reached the target of 10,000 Members. She is @executiveoasis on twitter. Her specialties are Facilitated Business Team Building Retreats, Executive Retreats, Sales Rallies, & Incentive Travel
Her link: http://www.executiveoasis.com/

Kena Siu – Kena is an outgoing nomad specialized in Event Planning. She loves traveling, meeting & helping people. She specializes in Photography, Music, Cyberactivism, Food. She is @KenaSiu on twitter
Her link: http://twitter.com/KenaSiu

Jeff Hurt – Jeff is Director of Education & Events for a U.S. trade association and has more than 20 years experience in meetings, events and nonprofits. He writes about the convergence of Web 2.0, social media, meetings, events and education.
His link: http://jeffhurtblog.com/

Greg Ruby – Certifed Meeting Professional (CMP) and Certified Exhibition Manager (CEM) at the Baltimore Convention Center. He is fanatic about trade shows, exhibitions, conventions & venues. He is all about creating memorable events for organizers and attendees. All opinions expressed are his own.
His link: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregruby

We are thrilled to have such a great team working on the blog and we are sure it will make the journey memorable.

If you feel you want to be part of the team please use the Contact section.

It’s no new topic, we know. But lately Chris Anderson re-introduced it, Malcom Gladwell made a big deal out of it and Seth Godin gave the final word. On our end, Jeff Hurt asked us all a question and we are here to do our small bit.

Reality is event professionals are challenged by the current market conditions. The ‘I charge you 800$/€/£ entry ticket’ superb marketing technique apparently does not work anymore. Possibly because attendees are increasingly empowered to blog, tweet and share how crap an event was. That was not the case before social networks and media.

I was asked by Cece Lee about an alternative model for (virtual) events rather than charging a fee. Although I felt an urgency to keep it for myself, I subsequently thought that sharing results of a 3 hours brainstorming session could benefit our industry, even if 2 event planners will change their rotten practice and take action. Hopefully starting tomorrow.

One condition. And it is not about safeguarding my butt. What follows is the result of a small brainstorming session with few friends and event experts as well as weeks of reading. It’s not meant to be a guide. It’s not necessarily applicable to all sorts of events. It may not refer to what you do.

The idea is to think out of the box for once and stimulate your business practice to be innovative and disruptive. If you can think of more please do comment and add your perspective.

Borrowing the term from Trendwatching, have a look at how Bacardi goes to the source, pushes the boundaries of a close one-to-one relationship. In a user generated web 2.0, going personal is mandatory and could result in healthy business.

This is possibly the most used technique to reduce the cost impact on attendees yet not fully taken advantage of. Linkedin, Xing, twitter and tools like Make Your Mark Connect are just few of the available hundreds.

If you really need to sell and cannot make a revenue in any other way, consider layaway. The Coachella Festival implemented it successfully.

Find a relevant and interesting fil rouge. A meaningful and compelling connector. Start an association, a conglomerate, an online group or a social network. Charge for membership and give events for free. Combine with external sponsorships for better results.

You don’t have to abruptely give up your compelling desire to sell tickets. You can have a mix of free and paid events. Usually free events are great tools to promote what you do. You can aim big for free events and go smaller for paid ones. If you combine both and create an online community to manage engagement, you’ll be up and running soon.

Being in the VIP is always a cool thing isn’t it. Trade show Masters understand that quite well. Most trade shows open up access to the large audience and sell ridiculously priced conference schemes. At least you are not denying access and you are selling premium only to those masochistic enough to pay super premium for content.

Collaborative event planning is becoming a reality. On the wave of crowdsourced initiatives the power of the collective is gonna be increasingly relevant and challenge the big guys. Use events to generate compelling, shared knowledge. Use the vast amount of readily available technology to capture that content and then sell it in forms of audio, video or text.

Conceptualize a cool idea. A very smooth, innovative and ‘contaminated’ form of event. Create a website next to it. Start a community around your website. Sell the idea to sponsors and franchisees. Two great examples are Pecha Kucha and StartupWeekend

Event professionals’ attention to details is usually devoted to utterly useless and irrelevant matters. A sound merchandise strategy identifies the relevant item at the right time. Oversimplifying the concept, in a networking event earning a revenue from the bar seems obvious. Digging further, Orange and its Glastonbury Power Pump looks like a damn cool idea.

We learned by now the power of flash mobs. Capitalizing on having no fixed structure can cut costs tremendously on venue and overheads. Southern Comfort Pop up Night Clubs are a great example.



Note 1: This post also takes inspiration from the continuous reading of Springwise and BoxUK, which we invite you to subscribe to.

Note 2: Ranking is not relevant – make your own ranking if you want!

Tweetcamp 09 from Julius Solaris on Vimeo.

You can check all the tweets from Tweetcamp here

You can find the Flickr pics here

Blog Posts:
TweetCamp London 2009
Internal Communications at TweetCamp
Tweetcamp 2009
Impressions of TweetCamp
Tweetcamp – My first Unconference
TweetCamp
Tweetcamp: Online network moves to offline community

And Audioboos:
http://audioboo.fm/boos/34228-impressions-of-tweetcamp
http://audioboo.fm/boos/34225-review-tweetcamp-london-09
http://audioboo.fm/boos/34039-tweetcampboo-tweetcamp

Photo by smannium via Flickr

The much discussed role of twitter during presentations, led us to believe that some piece of software was soon to be released.

And there we go, keynotetweet has appeared. It is an open source Applescript that syncs with Keynote and sends a tweet of the notes associated with a slide when that particular slide comes up on the screen.

This is a major breakthrough towards online/offline integration and engagement. Death by Powerpoint is a sad reality. keynotetweet stimulates participation horizontally by making the presenter an active participant in the conversation rather than yet another superstar/mega expert.

We feel that twitter undermines that front lecture style so averse to Web 2.0’s shared knowledge environment. keynotetweet brings it on and we can’t wait to see more software going this way.

We had a blast with iPhone earlier this year. Now the time to show you how your Mac could become an extreme productivity tool and get your events done.

10. Mindnote

Successful events are carefully planned. Mind Mapping initiates the process of planning. It helps in skimming ideas and identifying KPIs. Mindnote is a great tool to draw nice looking and effective mind maps. It comes with a free version which covers all the essentials. Go for it!

9. iGTD

If you are an event planner and never heard of Getting Things Done, now the time to catch up. The famous book started a series of dedicated applications. Most of them are extremely pricey and not worth the money. iGTD is a great Project Management tool and it comes for free, so give it a go.

8. Notebook

You planned your project and rationalized it. Right about time to clear the clutter and start doing things. Notebook is a light application that helps in clearing the clutter on your desktop. Get back your focus.

7. Klok (Adobe Air)

Reality is that an increasing number of event professionals are now freelancing. If this is you, you should track the time you spend at projects and bill for that. Popular Mac or Windows applications that track time charge big monies, but you can get Klok for free. It runs with Adobe Air (which makes it Windows, Mac or Linux compliant). If you don’t have Air installed, Klok will install it for you.

6. Appointments

OK, you are up and running. You are meeting suppliers, clients and stakeholders. Appointments saves all the relevant info about your contacts and alerts you of upcoming meetings. Never be late again!

5. NeoOffice

For those who don’t like or cannot afford Office/Openoffice/iWork, NeoOffice is a specifically Mac designed office suite for your docs, spreadsheets and presentations.

4. Anxiety

We love To Do applications. We think that To Do List are the most effective way of getting things done. Anxiety depicts a feeling that you have experienced if you run events, but also empowers you to get rid of it by delivering instead of procrastinating.

3. Jing

Virtual Events, Webinars, Screencasts and the like are trending topics within the industry. Jing enables screencasting and video recording easily and for free, which is not usually the case in this software niche.

2. Caffeine

One of the most annoying features of the Mac is the Auto-Sleep function. That gets event worst if you set up the Mac for a presentation. Caffeine keeps your Mac on and on and on….

1. Chicken of the VNC

If you work with two computers, it is extremely likely that you may forget files on Machine A when you are using Machine B. VNC technology allows to access Machine A remotely over the Internet. Chicken of VNC (gotta love the name) is one of the few free apps (usually you pay hundreds of $/£/€) to do that. So next time you are at your event location you can easily access your office computer and retrieve vital information. Stress free!

Photo by Funadium via Flickr

Picture a cheap, insipid detergent brand. Imagine the marketing team struggling to find a new flavor for their boring product.

Our studies say that Marseille Soap is perceived as natural and refreshing. We should flavor our detergent with that.

Some customers will be definitely attracted by it, they will give it a go and buy it.

Later on, with the same easiness of mind they will switch to some more appealing flavor.

Now picture using the real deal. Savon de Marseille. As inexpensive, organic and effective as it is. Picture the fact it has been there for 600 years, not because it was ‘a flavor of something’.

If you attach new forms of events such as Pecha Kucha or Unconference to your boring event, you may win some interest in the short term but it is gonna be a hell of a nightmare to retain that interest.

Build a Marseille Soap factory, sell the real deal!