Are they hungry?

Photo by: woohooitsallie

If you have done your marketing correctly your delegates should be hungry. I am not talking about the buffet I am talking about your event.

Are the people attending your events hungry and motivated?

Are they impatient to know more about the event, to participate, to get involved to buy the sponsors product to talk about the event when they will be back in their office.

When you feel your audience is hungry it means you have pulled the right triggers.

How do you make them hungry?

Start by giving them control.

How do you make them hungry? Share your tricks!

The caviar of event managers

Photo by: el copilot

Negative Feedback.

Very tough to find, very hard to accept.

Without negative feedback I think I would have been a complete uncompetent.

If I have to think back at my education as well, I still remember those lecturers who had the ability to let you understand what exactly you did wrong.

My idea is that too many times we run away from feedback specially if it’s negative, possibly because we already know we have done something wrong.

The cathartic effect of having a customer telling you: “I did not like that” is our caviar today. Very scarce, hard to find and very expensive.

Please consider that it is a fact that when you are angry or not happy and you let someone know, it is because you care.

My suggestion is to open up our ears and enjoy our caviar next time someone shows up complaining.

Sorry but you’re not on the list…

I’ve worked for more than 5 years with entertainment and being more specific with discos and clubs. I became what was and still is called a “PR”, a person that gives away “invites” to cool friends to populate the night. I earned a small percentage on every invite turned in with my name on it. In one year time I started to invest my money in club nights and quicker got more control over the event management.

Soon I was in charge of making the list (of people not paying to get in) and selecting people that got admitted into the event. That gave me a tremendous amount of power. I was soon able to ask the doormen to avoid certain people getting in.

For a pretty long period of time excluding others meant being at the top.

As Jedi Master of Marketing Seth Godin states:

“Credit card companies have made billions by selling a card that others can’t get.

Politicians stand up and talk about their (exclusive) religion, or pit one special interest group against another.

And of course, the best nightclubs have the biggest velvet ropes and the pickiest doormen.”

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Jack Mardack and Eventbrite

Eventbrite is an online ticketing and registration platform for events.

It is one of the most adopted and therefore definitely worth a review and interview with its Director of Marketing, Jack Mardack.

How does it work?

Few things that I love about the service:

- There is no standard price. They earn a percentage based on your ticket price.
- It’s customizable. You can pretty much input as many details as you prefer. The event page is greatly adaptable and here are few examples.

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What the Cluetrain Manifesto taught me about events

The Cluetrain Manifesto is almost ten years old. I was actually surprised to see it was written in 1999 for two reasons:

- It is amazing to see how it is still relevant to both Internet and businesses. The words of the manifesto sound like a Web 3.0 startup’s mission. They got it right. The people who signed it saw 10 years in advance what was about to happen. Few things are yet to come but I’d bet we’ll shortly experience them.

- Crazy, crazy, crazy. Companies had in front of their eyes the chance to get the most out of the Internet and treat the customer in new, engaging ways. It was there, clearly written and explained. It is SAD to see how only few organizations have embraced these life changing concepts.

The Cluetrain Manifesto is free to read. How the most popular Italian and world’s top 10 blogger, Beppe Grillo, would say, download it, print it and start sharing it around. Give it to your boss, to your colleagues, if possible pass it to the person sitting next to you on the underground.

The Manifesto has a lot of things to say to those involved in events. I went through the 95 Theses and got few that I thought might be of interest.

- Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
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