Change is in the air! With a new year comes a new era in the evolution of Engage365, an online community for event and association professionals. Pathable is now the owner and manager of this vibrant, growing online space.

Since 2009, the Engage365 community has been created, guided and managed by Christopher Uschan and the hard working team at Omnipress.

What the community has grown into wouldn’t have been possible without their vision and leadership as well as the dedication from Community Manager, Jenise Fryatt. While Omnipress is staying actively involved with Engage365 on a sponsorship level, they are handing the ownership reins to team at Pathable.

The Engage365 community is already familiar with Pathable’s product, whether they know it or not: The Engage365 community platform (Homepage, Inbox, Conversations, Contacts, Schedule and more) has been running on Pathable technology since the community launched.

We want to acknowledge and thank Jenise Fryatt, who was Engage365’s Community Manager from December 2009 through January 2012. Jenise helped shape, nurture and grow Engage365 to where it is today, and we appreciate all of her dedication and hard work.

“I really enjoyed sharing, chatting and spending time with the members of Engage365 and I’m proud to have supported Omnipress in its vision to create an online community for event professionals interested in innovation. The spirit of generosity inherent within the community will be a driving force as Pathable takes it into 2012. I wish them all the best,” Jenise said.

We at Pathable are so happy to get the chance to be involved with Engage365, and look forward to a rousing 2012 and beyond. We will be unveiling a reinvigorated site update soon, so stay tuned for information on new features and more!

Yes, Pathable is offering to reimburse attendees up to $500 for their registration fee for any event, but we hope that’s only a small part of the reason attendees will jump at this program.

So why are they recommending Pathable to the hosts of events they attend in such huge numbers?

“Attendees are paying so much in time and money to go to conferences and meetings; they deserve to get full value out of their investment,” explained Pathable CEO Jordan Schwartz. “This new program is meant to ensure that they do.”

“People attend events to network: to meet new colleagues, partners, customers, vendors, peers and friends,” Schwartz said. “Pathable’s industry leading platform for building private, branded social networks for events makes that easy.”

“Unfortunately, it only works if meeting planners know to offer a Pathable network to their attendees,” he continued. “If they don’t, well, you have a lot of lost people fingering drink tickets, squinting at name badges and making awkward small talk at ‘networking receptions’.”

With our newly announced program, conference attendees can suggest Pathable to the organizer of the conferences that they attend. If the conference hosts decides to use a Pathable community for their event, the attendee who made the recommendation will get a “thank you” to the tune of their full conference registration fee, up to $500.

“The genesis of this program came from our conversations with event attendees,” Schwartz explained. “Every time we’d describe what Pathable did, their eyes would light up and they would say ‘I wish the last conference I went to had used that!’ Well, now they can make sure their next conference does. The $500 is just our way of saying ‘Thank You’.

The way we see it:

• Conferences want to boost their attendance
• Attendees want to be empowered to create the experience they need

This program will meet these needs and make everyone involved happy about the outcome.

We believe this new program will help attendees get the networking tools they want with the kind of monetary “thank you” that everyone can feel good about.

To learn more about our new program or to recommend an event yourself, click here.

Looking for new ideas on how to reach your attendees via social media?  Pathable has teamed up with the event promotion experts at Eventbrite, to bring you the “Master the Magic Formula to Engage Attendees and Drive Registration” webinar series on November 17^th and December 1^st at 11am PDT.

Please join us for a very informative webinar discussion on tips and strategies that really work to increase attendee engagement and registration. You’ll learn how to:

• Engage with your attendees via social media before, during and after your event
• Keep your social media and marketing strategy targeted and efficient
• Drive traffic to your event page and increase conversions
• Meet your goals by acquiring the necessary information from your attendees

And so much more!

Extra, extra, read all about it

Sit back and let us bring you up to speed on what’s been happening in the (virtual and brick+mortar) offices of Pathable.

Our Team is Growing

In Q3, a new team member joined the Pathable ranks. Please join us in welcoming James Gallagher, our new Vice President of Sales & Marketing. James has an extensive background in sales, lead marketing and account management, and we couldn’t be happier with the knowledge and drive he’s bringing to our efforts.

James noted in his bio that he enjoys the occasional sunlight in Seattle, which means that he’s not a vampire. Which is too bad, in a way, because it would have really added to our street cred. Welcome anyway, James!

Pathable 2.0 is Almost Here!

If you follow our blog or subscribe to our newsletter (and why wouldn’t you?), you know that Pathable is releasing a 2.0 version of our award winning product in Q4. Don’t worry: if you’re not up to speed on Pathable 2.0, our chortling CEO can tell you all about it.

Our first customer launches on the updated platform next week, and all new customers in November and onward will be on 2.0 as well. We are so excited to bring Pathable 2.0′s complete mobile experience, lightning fast speeds and updated interface to all of our valued clients, returning and future. Interested in learning more? See for yourself how Pathable can build your online community – whether you have 10 events per year, 1 event, or even none!

Updated Website

If you’re reading this blog, you’ve no doubt noticed another of our news worthy announcements – the re-launch of our first generation website. We’re still the same Pathable company, but with an identity facelift. We encourage you to check out our newest case studies, see some pricing examples and download some of our great resources for event organizers. We’re happy with our new look but always encourage feedback. If you have thoughts, please share them!

But Wait, There’s More…

You can continue to expect more great things from Pathable into 2012. Keep your eye out for:

• An educational webinar series with one of our valued partners
• More insightful case studies
• Industry specific whitepapers

Not only are we hoping to help make your events and online community better, we’re want to help make your job easier through support and education. Because we sure love what we do, and believe everyone should feel that way about their job too.

Pathable 2.0 will:

• Create year-round customer communities from multiple event communities
• Bring the full power of an event’s social network to all your mobile devices
• Sets new standards for speed and performance (6 – 10x as fast as previous versions)

Excited? So are we. Last week I sat down to chat with self-described tireless visionary (OK, I made up the “tireless visionary” bit) Pathable CEO Jordan Schwartz; he divulged the “why” behind Pathable’s updates, and just what has him geeked out and giggling.

Q: Pathable seemed pretty great as it was. What prompted these updates?

A: Over and over, customers were coming to us and saying “We have great engagement and participation in our event community – thank you! But the event itself is over now; how do we keep that engagement and excitement going year-round?” In other words, they were asking “How do we leverage our event community into a membership community while taking advantage of the momentum and engagement we’ve already built?”

Frankly, we didn’t have a great answer. Sure, we could leave the community running, but there were a number of architectural and user experience decisions we had made early on that didn’t lend themselves to year-round communities.

In 2.0, that’s been solved and then some. We are now the only provider of social networking services that allow the organizer to host multiple event-centric communities and a year-round membership community under a single organizational umbrella: consistent user profiles, single management dashboard, but separate, overlapping membership lists.

This means that attendees and organizers can take their connections, discussions, and engagement that swirl around the in-person event and leverage it into ongoing engagement and on into the next year’s event site.

Q: What new features in Pathable 2.0 are you most excited about?

A: Besides the multi-event communities, there are two things that are giving me the giggles.

The first one is kind of geeky. Pathable 2.0 is part of a new breed of web applications like Twitter, BitTorrent and LinkedIn Mobile that are effectively browser-based applications instead of traditional web-server based services. I won’t bore you with the tech details, but there is one big impact you’ll see: the site is blazingly fast. A page that might have taken 3 – 4 seconds to load in the past is now ready in literally a few hundred milliseconds.

The second one is mobile: we know how pervasive iPhones, iPads, Droids, and other mobile devices are, and we know how critical on-the-go information is when you’re walking down a hallway, trying to figure out what room to go to next, or who that guy that just said “great to see you again” to you was. Our new system supports all major mobile platforms with the same speed and level of functionality you find on the web site. That means we can provide before, during and after engagement for all attendees.

Q: Pathable’s a pretty innovative company that’s won really cool awards in the events industry. Why do you stay focused on the events space rather than branching out and building technologies for other industries?

Botox is a the toxin produced by the botulism bacteria and has a paralyzing effect when injected into muscle. Cosmetically, this means that those muscles that draw the skin together into the dreaded folds known as “wrinkles” remain relaxed, giving the face a smoother, more youthful look.

But here’s the hitch the study uncovered: those muscles do more than crinkle a face, they actually help us to understand and experience emotions. The mind appears to observe the body to determine how it feels. If your mind notices that your body has a smile on its face, it deduces that it feels happy and you experience that happiness. If your mind notices that your body has a pit in its stomach, you may believe that you are worried.

It sounds backwards, but this was illustrated years ago in a clever experiment. Researchers had subjects hold a pen between their upper lip and nose. The muscles involved are similar enough to those used for smiling that it had a similar effect: subjects reported experiencing jokes as funnier, and themselves as happier, than subjects without the upper lip curl.

What this new study showed was that part of understanding how someone else is feeling involves mimicking their facial expressions. In doing so, you experience the emotion that you are observing. Someone pulls back a smile with one cheek and squints, what does it mean? You unconsciously mimic it, see how it makes you feel, and then intuitively understand how they feel.

Botox, by paralyzing the facing muscles, makes it more difficult to engage in this emotional sampling, and thus impedes empathy.

Now, I know what you’re saying: I was a hospitality major, what do I care about Psych 101? And what does all this have to do with Skype?

Stick with me, tiger.

Here at the Pathable offices, there aren’t really Pathable offices. Most of our employees are remote: our staff lives in Seattle, Chicago, South Carolina, California and further. And yet, we manage to maintain a fun, close familial feeling. How? Skype.

We use Skype video chat every day, from our morning “all hands meeting”, where there might be 12 separate video images simultaneously, to the smaller, ad hoc meetings where someone “just has a quick question”. As part of our company culture, we strongly encourage video chat for these types of communications even when audio would do. Why? Because we recognize the importance of being able to see facial expressions to really understand how someone else is feeling. Are they worried, nervous, confident, scared? You can’t pick all that up through tone of voice (and certainly not through black-and-white letters). And believe me, if I know someone on my team is worried, it’s important for me to know it and ask why.

Which brings us to Face-to-Face Meetings (thanks for your patience).

As meetings are moving more and more to the “virtual” with on-line only participation, either through webinars, chatrooms or 3D environments, we see a corresponding drop in the quality of the interpersonal communication. I can learn the same material from a webinar as I can by sitting in a classroom, perhaps, but if I’m attending an event to network and build relationships with my peers, I need to be able to see the person I’m talking to, and I need to be able to shape my own face to match if I really want to communicate with them in the truest, deepest way. A stone-faced avatar in a 3D environment explaining how excited he is to see me won’t lead to the same kind of relationship as a wide-eyed, broad-smiling human doing the same.

Which is why face-to-face meetings are so important and can’t be replaced by existing virtual meeting technologies. At Pathable, we seek to enhance this experience, by helping people meet the right people in person, and then stay connected with them after the event is over. Someday, perhaps, group video, virtual environments or even, perhaps, robotic avatars, will change that, but until then, see you at the show.

Because the EventMobi solution is a mobile web application, as opposed to a “native app”, event attendees don’t have to visit an app store to install a special application. They simply open their mobile browser to the same address they use for their desktop web experience for the event and they will automatically see a mobile optimized version of the site, including:

• Full conference schedule
• Speaker profiles
• Exhibitor listings
• Interactive Tradeshow Floor Map with “pin drops” for individual exhibitor booth
• Twitter and RSS Feeds

They’ve done a beautiful job with the interface, and we’re very pleased to be able to offer it integrated with the Pathable community solution.

Want a see for yourself? We’d be happy to give you a tour, just click here to request a demo.

After giving it some thought, I realized that the answer to that question hinged on the answer to this question:

Why Do People Pay Thousands Of Dollars
For Something They Could Have For Free?

Let’s start with this puzzler of a graph:

Yep, both Facebook and LinkedIn offer Event Pages, where you can describe your event and people can mark that they’re going. You can even send messages to the other attendees through these services. And, yep, that’s Pathable over there on the right, also offering a way to let attendees connect and network. And yep, there is a cost to the event organizer.

So why on Earth would somebody choose to pay for a Pathable community when they could just use Facebook or LinkedIn?

Meeting Professional International’s (MPI) WEC 2010 conference illustrates the answer neatly. For this conference, MPI created a Facebook event page, a LinkedIn event page and a Pathable community.

How’d they do? Let’s take a look:

The graph on the left shows the number of attendees who “opted in” to the network: nothing automatic, this is just attendees who consciously and deliberately chose to join the community site. On the right, the number of public messages sent within the network, a great measure of engagement.

Obviously, the Pathable community earned an order of magnitude greater adoption and engagement. But why?

It’s not magic. We see four factors at work here:

• Registration Integration: Pathable communities don’t force you to join the network, but by integrating with your existing ticketing and registration system, we can make it part of the natural workflow for the attendees to do so. By “channeling” the user into participation, you increase the momentum and value across the network.
• Event-centric features: A number of attendees start by joining just for the ability to browse the tradeshow floor or to build their personal conference schedule, sessions they plan to attend and one-on-one meetings. The community that grows with these members is an afterthought for them, but one they appreciate once they’ve joined. By providing easy to understand end-user value independent of the “social networking” components, Pathable communities “make sense” to attendees intuitively.
• Business Relevance: I don’t know about you, but when I think “Facebook”, I think “Farmville”, high school antics and idle musings. When I think “LinkedIn”, I think about job hunting and people trying to sell me something. By providing you with a network that has your brand, and your brand alone, we set the tone and expectation that it’s going to be a topical site where I can interact with my peers as colleagues about my business. That’s a lot more attractive to potential users than weekend beach pictures and viral quizzes.
• Privacy and Security: When I add someone to my rolodex of people I do business with, I don’t send out an e-mail to everyone in the world letting them know I’ve got a new “friend”. I expect my business relationships to be private. That extends to something as simple as what events I’m attending. It’s fine if people who will be there know I’m there (heck, unless I break out the Groucho glasses, it’s going to be hard to hide), but I don’t need my competitors tracking my movements through my Facebook updates. That’s why private, secure communities tend to do so much better in the business context than Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

So, did we create something great? Yes, indeed we did. Is it the next Facebook? No, it isn’t. And that’s exactly why we’re so proud of it.

The winner in the “Best in Networking and Community” category was Pathable for creating a very active online community for people to network and meet before, during and after a show. The solution is integrated with all major social media and includes an interactive conference calendar, mobile access, exhibitor and sponsor pages.

Stephen Nold, president of Tarsus Advon, had this to say:  “We are pleased to recognize the technology providers that have taken this industry to the next level of innovation. They have helped to reduce costs, streamline business processes and generate revenue streams in what has been a challenging time in the meetings industry. We congratulate them and thank them for their contributions.”

You’re welcome.

“Pathable has built a very compelling experience for the event organizer, enhancing the attendee networking experience beginning months before the event itself and resulting in a sustaining community after it’s over,” said Pathable CEO Jordan Schwartz. ” The Social Collective has built a great reputation and business, serving world-class clients including Oracle and SXSW. But the needs of events are increasingly complex, and it’s simply better for everyone to have a single, combined effort to meet those core needs while we enhance and extend the existing solution.”

“We’ve always had a great respect for the solution Pathable has delivered to event managers, so we’re very pleased to be able to offer that to our customers today,” said Chris Bucchere, co-founder and CEO of The Social Collective. “We’re proud of the part we’ve played in revolutionizing how event attendees connect, and now consolidating efforts under the Pathable platform will be a boon to our existing customers and those to come.”

The acquisition expands Pathable’s reach in the events industry, already firmly placed on the foundation of direct customers as well as reseller relationships with industry heavyweights such as Active Events (www.activeevents.com/), Cvent (www.cvent.com), Omnipress (www.omnipress.com) and Amiando (www.amiando.com) and heralds a trend toward a standardization of the experience. “When you’re going to a conference, you don’t want to be thinking about which social networking solution the host has chosen and whether it will be effective at helping you connect with the other attendees. You want that layer to be invisible and effortless. Our offering has always been focused on letting the event and its attendees take the spotlight,” said Schwartz.

There are over 200 million attendees at conferences, conventions, tradeshows, meetings and events in the US alone, according to the Conventions Industry Council. Social networking is becoming an in increasingly important component of serving them.

Pathable, Inc., a privately held Seattle-based company, was founded in 2008. Since that time, it has served hundreds of events, including those of Microsoft, SAP, GE Healthcare, Meeting Professionals International, and Dell, with a private, branded on-line event communities that allow attendees to connect, schedule meetings, choose their session schedules and visit exhibitors for months around a face-to-face event.