Posted by John
Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:16:00 GMT
Many event organizers that we work with are very concerned about their event's attendance. What's worked in the past is often no longer working. As a result, event organizers are working harder than ever at finding relevant content and expanding their audiences.
We hear many questions about content - What topics are compelling this year? Should we stick to the tried-and-true or branch out to new topics? Which speakers will be a draw this year? Should we change our format?
Equally common are questions about building out the audience: How can we increase repeat attendance? How can we appeal to the younger members of our audience? What can we do to retain current exhibitors and attract new ones?
We've worked with a number of events that are growing - some of them significantly. When you step back and look at what they are doing differently than their peers, you see that the event organizers are addressing these questions creatively and early on in the planning cycle.
A great example of this kind of approach is outlined in Chris Brogan's excellent post The Art of Butts in Chairs.
Posted in Conferences, Features, Events | Tags attendance, audience, conference, content, exhibitors, networking | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by John
Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:48:00 GMT
We recently worked with an academic association on their annual conference. One of the unique aspects of this conference was its international audience: more than 50% of the attendees were from outside of the United States. The conference attracted more than 1,000 attendees from over 30 countries, with significant representation from Europe, India, and China.
Given this global audience and the fact that our software is currently English-only, we were curious to see how well our software tools would be adopted. We shouldn't have been. In fact, we saw that international adoption was the key driver of activity within the community. Many of the most active users were from around the world. Within less than 48 hours, close to 20% of international attendees were already activety using the system.
There's a more general observiation here. For conferences with geographically dispersed audiences, web-based social event tools like Zerista's add a significant amount of value to attendees.
Posted in Conferences, Events, Politics | Tags case, conference, conferences, event, international, networking, on, pattern, recognition, social, software, studies | no comments
