The EventMingle Blog

We've made some changes to our home page on our EventMingle Community Platform.  The idea was simple, display our members recent activity from other sources on the web.  We started with Twitter and plan to add Buzz, Linkedin and maybe Facebook.  Here is a screen capture of the new layout:

The RECENT ACTIVITY section displays the most recent content on the site.  This could include new member and vendor notices, new vendor press releases, blog entries, comments and product additions.

This design is still in beta, let us know your thoughts via email to support@eventmingle.com or by leaving a comment.

Our entire family is on Verizon, so changing to AT&T wasn't really an option for me. So I purchased an Apple iPod Touch in order to check out a lot of the apps and watch as Apple changed the game in mobile business.  Now, I must admit, the Touch has really grown on me - but it's because of the applications.  Apple understands this. It's in their DNA.  Just ask Guy Kawasaki, right?

The iPad is a usable device. It's clean and elegant - no doubt about it.  However, I believe the applications will drive sales for this device.  I do see a day when my Doctor will walk in the room with an iPad. It will have my entire medical history, x rays, and even bar charts of weight history to illustrate why I need to watch what I eat!  I see a day when Safeway/Vons (which has free WiFi in most of their stores) will have an app to show me exactly where an item is in the store or help me with my grocery list and point out items I've purchased in the past that is now on sale.  My point is, in a couple of years I think everyone will be experiencing an iPad through applications.

If I had an unlimited R&D budget, here is what I would do with an iPad application for EventMingle:

1. My entire EventMingle Daily Planner, with all of my time based activities (with alerts), would be available to me in real time. As people use the "introduction" feature in EventMingle, I would get real time alerts with access to their member profile.  The "to-do" manager would allow me to check things off as I meet people, see products and visit exhibitors.
2. Exhibit Hall walking map with all of my Exhibitors from my Daily Planner highlighted so I could figure out the best way to walk the floor.
3. Streaming Keynote addresses and Conference sessions so I could watch the video live while drinking a non-fat Latte. Along side of the streaming video would be a live Twitter feed from the audience so I could get immediate feedback to their presentation.  If I wanted to attendee two conference sessions at the same time I would just watch one of them when I got back to the hotel room or store it and watch it on the flight back home.  And yes, I would still want to see any archive of the Tweets sent during the time line of the actual session.
4. Exhibitor product demos so I can see their latest products without necessarily visiting their booth.
5. Web cam channels from the Press Room so we could all watch press release announcements in real time.
   

Those are just a few ideas.  What would you add?

...Jim
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Jim Harrer
CoCreator, EventMingle

I have been talking to a lot of tradeshow producers since our November newsletter.  It’s nice to see the level of interest in our new EventMingle Community Platform.  One key issue that has come up in my discussions is the confusion around social media applications as they apply to the tradeshow industry and how EventMingle Community Platform can work in conjunction with those sites to attract, retain and inform your community of attendees, exhibitors, and speakers year around.  I thought I would use this newsletter to share some of my thoughts with you on how to make your event a year around resource using EventMingle and other social networking sites.

Is Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter your best social media strategy?

Many of you are busy creating Facebook fan pages, LinkedIn groups and have set up a Twitter account for people to follow.  These are all good and necessary actions if your attendees, exhibitors and speakers are using these social media tools.  Each of our tradeshow clients are seeing an uptick of participation on these sites, as it relates to their event, but the numbers aren’t earth shattering.  Is it worth your time to have a presence and be active on these social media sites? Absolutely! For a couple of reasons:

1.     Each of these sites has thousands of potential participants for your tradeshow. Anything you can do to gain new attendees, exhibitors and speakers in this economy is a must. Approach each of these sites as a source for more attendance at your event.

2.     Customer loyalty. You need to go where your customers are. They’re on these sites and will want to see you participate on them.

3.     There will be a percentage of people attending your event who will want to network and participate with other people attending your event. So, if someone uses Facebook and they attend your tradeshow, they will have a place to meet other attendees who have found your fan page on Facebook.

While these sites are very good sites for potential attendees to learn more about your conference, they do not go far enough to engage and retain your customer base year around or to provide a platform for members of various regional shows to interact with each other and to provide a single source of information. 

How does our EventMingle Community Platform fit in the overall social media strategy?

We created our social media community for tradeshow producers who desire to build a social networking community around their specific brand. By the virtue of their events, they have the ability to create a useful, relevant community of buyers (attendees), sellers (exhibitors) and industry experts (speakers and media) all interested in a specific industry.

If you host multiple events, regardless if their time based (Spring/Fall) or Regional (East/West Coast) or a combination thereof, it even gets more compelling to host a year-round community where people can interact across boundaries. Attendees of the fall show want to be able to network with exhibitors of the spring event. Exhibitors want to be able to get their new product announcements out to your event attendees year-round. By expanding your tradeshow brand to a year-round, industry focused social networking community, you’re actually creating a reason for attendees to attend more of your events and for companies to exhibit more often.  Even if an attendee only attends one event in one region, while a supplier might attend a different event in another region, both the attendee and supplier will have access to the full community, thus creating more value for both parties.

Once your EventMingle Community Platform is up and running and participants start participating, the site takes off with user generated content.  Some of the content includes:

·         Companies add their products, services, press releases, whitepapers and brochures.

·         Attendees update their profiles, comment on products, and participate in the message forums and online polls.  Attendees can blog about topics of interest to them.

·         Speakers will also blog and collect information to update their presentations.

As the user created content begins to get loaded, Google, Yahoo and Bing will begin to index all of the content making your custom social network a rich destination for information seekers. This content will attract new attendees, speakers and exhibitors who should be attending your events. As people meet other community members, your events will give them an opportunity to actually meet in person. Since people and companies can join your EventMingle community through our open enrollment system, you’ll have another way to attract new attendees and exhibitors. Unlike a static web presence, your EventMingle community engages these new participants with other event participants making them a member of your community. The next logical step is for them to attend or exhibit at your event.

As a tradeshow producer you invest a substantial sum to bring together buyers, sellers and experts for your event. Once the event is over, they scatter only to let some re-connect on social media sites like Facebook’s fan pages or LinkedIn groups.  Why?  Your event becomes a small community, why not extend those to the web where your brand can remain center stage?  Your event participants remain engaged between events and you generate revenue between events.  You want to use other social networking sites to help attract new exhibitors and attendees, but EventMingle is the perfect site to help retain, educate and exchange ideas year around, keeping your tradeshow in their mind all year long.

How EventMingle generates you additional revenue.

·         Vendor Listings – Companies want to reach your buyers year-round.  Your community includes attendees who invest in traveling to your events. There is no better qualified list for companies to prospect.  Each of your exhibitors receives a free Basic listing on your community that they can upgrade to a Premium listing. Premium listings last a year and give companies these additional features:

·  Company Logo ·  Detailed Description ·  Staff Directory ·  Sales Leads

·  Press Releases Distribution ·  Whitepapers ·  Product Brochures ·  Sales Prospecting

·  Product Directory ·  Featured Vendor Placement ·  Featured Product Placement ·  Searchable Database

·         HTML Email Marketing – EventMingle has several features that makes it ideal for matching buyers with sellers. First, it has its own built-in email management system which means we can allow companies to market directly to members without giving out any private information. Next, members can opt-out to receive information and can also hide their profiles from vendors if they choose. Members can indicate which product categories they’re interested in, so vendor communications can be extremely targeted and relevant to the member’s interests. Since the majority of these members invest time and money to attend events, it is the preferred audience for most vendors and makes it an ideal place for vendors to target their HTML email campaigns.

·         Banner Ads – EventMingle supports several banner ad placements on each page. Ads can target specific demographics like current attendees for a specific show or companies who plan to exhibit at a show.  Several banner ad packages make it easy and affordable for companies to advertise on your community.

These possible revenue sources easily pay for your investment to get your EventMingle site up and running and will yield a return on investment over and over again.  How much money your site can generate depends on your events, industry, and your ability to market your EventMingle community.  Let’s look at a sample model that you can adjust based on the size of your tradeshow community:

Item	Assumption	Price	Total Annual Revenue
Premium Vendor Upgrades	750 Exhibitors - 60% Opt-in	$1000	$450,000
HTML Email Marketing	10 Campaigns per month	$750	$90,000
Banner Ads	20 annual banner contracts	$1,200	$24,000

In addition to this revenue, your EventMingle community will also add additional attendees and exhibitors for each of your events which will add more revenue not included in this model. Feel free to adjust this model with assumptions you feel more comfortable with, or call me and we can build a custom model together.

Remember, each custom EventMingle community built is managed 100% by us.  All the professional services, development, customer support is handled by us. All you do is build a couple internal processes to send us registration and event content.  And unlike our competitors, you always own the content, not us.  EventMingle Community Platform can provide you with an additional revenue stream and complement your tradeshow all year long by providing value to both the exhibitors and attendees.

If you would like to see our new platform online, check out My.Interop.com. If you would like additional information, please visit our EventMingle Community Platform website.

To learn more and receive a custom quote, please call Jim Harrer at (949) 607-0980 or email me at jharrer@specialtymatch.com

Social networking solutions like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have become important tools for many of our clients. Tradeshow producers are being asked to deliver more value to exhibitors and attendees alike. Failing to come up with new ways to engage your event participants is not an option.

Best Practices in event-based social networking solutions.

Since 2005 we have been working with leading event producers to create powerful, useful, online communities for their event participants. We have built more custom social networking communities around tradeshow events than any other web development firm on this planet. We consistently get 60% opt-in rates from attendees, speakers and exhibitors - almost twice that of many of our competitors.

A little over a year ago we started to get asked for a version of EventMingle that could support multiple events within a single industry and act as the leading online community for that industry between events. We realized after talking with many of our clients, this wasn't going to be some easy EventMingle hack. Creating a useful social networking community for attendees, exhibitors, speakers, buyers, suppliers and press/analyst/bloggers that would become a leading online destination for a specific industry would require thousands of man hours using the best web designers, architects, database and programmers we could find. After a year of planning and development, I'm pleased to announce The EventMingle Community Platform - A complete hosted/managed application designed specifically for the trade show industry.

Be a leader while strengthening your brand.

Call it a competitive advantage or a defensive play to maintain your position in the marketplace. Our EventMingle Community Platform will allow you to:

• Sponsor a year-round community for vendors, suppliers, buyers and business leaders for your specific industry.
• Stay in front of leading companies who should be exhibiting at your events.
• Support multiple events within a single online community. Create a single, year-round online destination for all of your event participants.
• Generate additional revenue via your custom community even between events.

If you would like to see our new platform online, check out My.Interop.com. If you would like additional information, please visit our EventMingle Community Platform website.

To learn more and receive a custom quote, please call Jim Harrer at (949) 607-0980. 

EventMingle
2751 NW Horizon Drive
Bend, OR 97701

We started this journey back in 2005 when we first released EventMingle – the first event-based social network to bring together attendees, speakers and exhibitors.

When we started building these event-based social networks we all thought the communities would only live around the upcoming tradeshow. Over the past 4 years we have built a ton of EventMingle communities designed to help participant’s network with each other. Our new Daily Planner which we released last year was a major hit with attendees who wanted to manage all of their time based activities and to-do list.

This past year we started looking at our communities and the attendees, exhibitors and speakers that use them and asked, “How can we make this better?” We asked this question in our forums and we heard the same thing, again and again – “don’t take the site down after the event”.

Welcome to our new EventMingle Community Platform – beta. This is the first phase, designed to combine the best features of our current EventMingle Tradeshow Edition with popular community features. We’re pleased TechWeb has agreed to be our first beta site with the launch of My Internop.

EventMingle Community Platform is the first community system to support upcoming events, event content, company listings, product listings, press release monitoring and standard social networking features. I hope you find it a useful, relevant application.

Please visit our new EventMingle Community Platfom site for more information.

Thank-you for your interest in EventMingle.

Jim Harrer
Co-Creator, EventMingle

I was a speaker at PDC 2008 and DevConnections 2009 which are two technology conferences that focus on Microsoft development technologies. Typically when we speak at such conferences a few months after the conference we will receive speaker scores so we can judge how well our talks were received. This is done by the attendee filling out some paper form during the talk. With the economy slowing down and people cutting costs this service was not available when I spoke at DevConnections 2009, however there was still a great way to see how the various speakers were doing at the conference by using Twitter. It is now a very common practice for people to send tweets to a tag which is just some common text added to a twitter message that has a # sign in the front. For example #pdc or #devconnections are examples of tags used for the above two shows. This allows someone with a twitter account to basically say so me all the tweets that have #devconnections in them. This gives the user a list of all the messages that are being posted about the current event. This can be awesome data because people will be chatting about which sessions they are going to, which speakers have great presentations, which exhibitors have cool products and more.

 

Because of this we have just made Twitter a first class citizen in EventMingle. First off we have added a field in everyone’s profile where they can fill in their twitter user name if they have one:

This allows us to add some extra functionality in EventMingle. For example if someone views a profile they can click on the persons Twitter link to view their Twitter messages:

This in itself is super exciting until you start taking advantage of the various ways to search for people inside of an EventMingle event. Here is a search page showing a list of all of the people in a given event that have twitter accounts with simple hyperlinks that allow access to their twitter messages:

 

We also highlight on any user search inside of EventMingle if someone has a Twitter account using the same type of listing as I’m demonstrating above. I’ve saved the coolest feature for last and that is that we have added a full twitter client inside of EventMingle that is designed just around events. When we build an EventMingle community we have the ability to configure that community to have a twitter tag like the #pdc or #devconnections that I mentioned earlier. If one of these tags is defined we will add a Twitter tab to the community that provides a listing of all the tweets on Twitter that are sent to that tag. Plus we provide a simple place for attendees to enter a message and post to that tag. We automatically will add the tag to the tweet if the user does not specify it. Here is an example of what this looks like:

Jim and I think this is just the tip of the iceberg and we plan on looking at other cool ways to integrate Twitter directly in EventMingle.

 

Scott Hunter

EventMingle Co-Founder

Attendees need a compelling reason to use event-based social networking platforms like EventMingle. Meeting people and business networking isn’t always enough to get people to interact before they leave for a tradeshow.

Part of our goal over the past year has been to focus on giving tradeshow attendees the best tools possible within the EventMingle environment to help them organize their time and to-do list.

Now with a custom exhibit hall walking map, attendees can print their color coded map which highlights the booths on the floor they want to see, making it easier to navigate the show floor.

If you would to watch a short training video for attendees on the use of the map, click here.

To read the full press release, click here.

We’ve been building these custom event-based online communities since 2005 and its clear attendees want it all.  Our EventMingle Maps application is another step in creating the ultimate online software platform for the tradeshow industry.

If you would like to schedule a Webinar to review all of EventMingle’s features, please give me a call.

Jim Harrer, Co-Founder, , 949.607.0980, sales@eventmingle.com

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