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!

The Layar application for Android phones was yesterday released and gathered the attention of the most popular tech blogs.

Layar is the first application to add tangibility to a powerful concept: integrating Online and Offline.

What is Augmented Reality?

Augmented Reality as suggested by Wikipedia:

Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time.
At present, most AR research is concerned with the use of live video imagery which is digitally processed and “augmented” by the addition of computer-generated graphics. Advanced research includes the use of motion-tracking data, fiducial markers recognition using machine vision, and the construction of controlled environments containing any number of sensors and actuators.

What does that mean for event professionals?

A number of things for sure. We mostly see the immediate application within conferences and exhibitions for networking purposes.

- Registering attendees with Face Recognition and associating online social profiles with their virtual badge sounds like a plan. We could soon experiment a live twitter where we can point our camera to an attendee and visualize balloons with thoughts from twitter.

- We could also think about associating a registered attendee with a particular networking/dating need and point the camera at the room to find our matching profile.

- Needless to mention the immediate benefits in terms of Health and Safety as well as logistics. Integrating the floorplan into the application would make it easy to find our way in a crowded exhibition.

- Sponsors at trade shows would be extremely happy if visitors could point their camera at the stand to download all the relevant info as well as reviews and opinions, or maybe special discounts.

- What about pointing the camera to a speaker during a session and be informed about books, shared online presentations and recorded sessions.

When should we expect that?

Sooner than you think.

The fact mobile applications are being rolled out to the market means that the trend could pick up soon.

6 years ago there was no Facebook.

We love to hang out at our Linkedin Event Planning & Management Group. Apart from great discussions and networking, we do create tangible knowledge.

The following is the effort of 15 event professionals willing to share with the World their passion for events.

Click on your present, download it and share it, it’s for free!

Link not Working? No worries

I enjoyed the crowd and we also built a community for the event which I invite you to join.

Julius Solaris @ Masterclass Social Media from punkmedia on Vimeo.

If you can’t see the video click here

If you can’t see the presentation click here

smeepe.net just launched and we are very happy about it.

In the SEO invaded Google and in the tricky jungle of Social Networks finding the right vendor, venue or PR for your event is becoming increasingly tough.

In our 9,000+ members Linkedin Group, we published a special offer featuring free registration for the first 5,000 vendors.

We surely did not want to exclude you from such goodness! So click here and enjoy it!

If you are not sure about what smeepe is have a look at the terrific video they put together!

Here goes a collection of what Julius Solaris, your host, thinks are the best tools to display live tweets at events.

5. Twitter Search + Firefox + ReloadEvery

Twitter Search is the visualization tool for the nostalgic twitter user and/or retro tweep. In order to make the page refresh automatically, Install Firefox add on ReloadEvery. If you don’t have Firefox probably you won’t read this because your browser has crashed in the meanwhile

Goods:
- Suits large screens
- Neat and detailed

Bads:
- Hard to read
- A bit dull, not fun.

4. TwitterCamp

We talked about TwitterCamp in the past. It’s a damn cool project and the fact it was implemented for a BarCamp and on an opensource basis makes it even cooler.

Goods:
- Highly Customizable
- Fun Interface

Bads:
- Could be slow in updates from time to time
- Looks like the project is not moving on

3. Twitter Fountain

What about that! Twitter Fountain looks slick and fancy. Very design oriented and definitely relevant to image conscious events.

Goods:
- Good looking Interface
- Clear and neat
- Flickr Integration

Bads:
- Embed only, does not work as a standalone page or software.

2. Twitterfall

Great Control with Twitterfall. You can play around with settings and have fun with customizing the experience.

Goods:
- Able to opt for a good speed of refresh
- Able to display ReTweets

Bads:
- Although highly customizable it still remains a bit dull

1. Visible Tweets

Visible Tweets is simply fantastic! This is what tweets at events should look like.

Goods:
It’s all good just go for it.

Bads:
Don’t see any.