EventVue, a company that builds online communities for conferences in order to improve conference networking amongst individuals, has launched a new product called Discover designed to help conference attendees find friends who are attending the same event. The goal of Discover is to work with different companies’ APIs, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Contacts, and Yahoo! Contacts, to help identify matches.
Discover is a simple widget that conference organizers can install on their sites to showcase an event’s speakers, sponsors, and attendees. It’s currently in private beta testing, and only selected conferences are using the widget on their sites, according to a company blog post. It’s interesting to note that LinkedIn’s API is a private API that only a handful of companies get access to, and EventVue was one of the companies given access to the API.
EventVue Co-Founder Josh Fraser says that the product can actually help get more attendees to visit conferences, explaining:
“Over the past 2 years, we’ve heard from conference organizers that their biggest challenge is getting people to register for their conference. These conversations have had increased urgency in the past year as the economy has brought a lot of cuts to conference travel.
We heard this enough times that we finally decided to do something about it. EventVue Discover helps conference organizers market their events and get more butts in seats. We learned from talking with organizers that the most effective way to market an event is to get attendees to encourage their friends to attend. Discover lets attendees see who they know is attending a conference from their social networks and makes it easy to invite their friends.”
EventVue was part of the inaugural batch of startups under the TechStars incubator program, and offers direct integration with some of the largest online ticketing services Eventbrite, RegOnline and Acteva.
I hope this helps; but, large conferences and trade shows have two registration attributes that will make it difficult. First, for many events 70+% of registrations occur in the last two weeks before an event, even though plans may be made far, far in advance. This limits word of mouth/widgeted opportunities. Second, registrations are often made/controlled by a third party (exhibitors, sponsors, event planners) and not the attending individual. These registrations often have misspelled names or purposely disguised e-mail addresses making the matching process very difficult.
Those are both valid points.
One of the features we think can help with the first issue is our subscribe functionality. You can give us your email address and we’ll send you email notifications when your contacts register. This helps draw people back in who are considering attending but were waiting to see if they know anyone else who is going.
There are flaws with using email addresses as primary keys, but we’ve been surprised by how well it works. For example we can automatically find LinkedIn accounts for 70% of conference attendees just by their email address. While not perfect, Discover gives far more transparency into who is attending than is currently available for most events.
hey edward-
I’m a beta customer of Discover – and wanted to address your points:
1. we should make a distinction btwn conferences and trade shows. They’re different animals. Conferences should be demarcated by quality content and the quality of networking at the event. That makes Discover perfect for conferences.
2. I think your point about how you *know* where a registration comes from is a very valid one. Obviously, people may use Discover once (or multiple times) and then register at a later date – with seemingly no explicit connection to having used Discover. Or, alternatively, they may use it, and then have a 3rd party register them (and disguise their identifier).
both are valid use cases – and one’s that EventVue’s CEO (rob johnson) and I were actually discussing just this morning.
bottom line: The “conference” business is forever altering because of social media, and most conference organizers that I know are drowning in how to deal with it all. Discover is a good starting point for a startup like EventVue to begin finding the right partner-conferences, so that they can go jointly tackle the problem.
I think they’ll have plenty of takers
2 cents,
ejn
We explored this idea when we were building Confabb a few years back. We found that only a small subset of conference attendees cared about who else was attending. What they cared about more was a guide to the parties, speaker ratings and talk transcripts, videos and slides.
The SXSW conference has been doing some very innovative things in the past few years. Their session-voting stuff is really intriguing, which allows prospective attendees to log in and rate which panels and sessions will be accepted.
We should talk. I’d love to hear more about what you learned.
Well, the functionality doesn’t need to be used just for conferences but also for any sort of eventss, like concerts, sport events, parties, etc.
Good point Andrea…. but doesn’t Facebook already do this for the more traditional events? (admittedly not across multiple networks but still)…
Looks great to me, It gives me a chance to see people with whom I would like to network at conferences.
Have few additional great ideas on top of that…
Cheers,
TringAll
Josh from eventvue is a fantastic guy who I met at glue conference this year. They’re a cool company and I’m almost reluctant to be a little critical… but anyway.
The problem with any of these social tools in engagement. Looking across the different networks that the discover tool uses, I can see that there are around 10 of my contacts either attending this years or event or who have attended previously. bear in mind I have many hundreds of contacts in LinkedIn and Twitter in the US tech space. Of those 10 or so, I know for a fact that several are not going to the event in question this year and so perhaps only a handful are actual attendees this year, and any that have the foresight to actually register early, chances are I know who they are and have spoken to them about the event already.
I concur with what Cameron says above about how many people actually care who is attending an event and even more so with Edward – I come to these events from the other side of the world so always plan early – many of my colleagues in the space decide a week before the event, creating a swarming effect in this case is close to impossible.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the tool, it’s a cool example of the use of APIs in a personally contextual setting, the problem I have is that eventvue have spent lots of time building something that is going to be used by a small subset, of a small subset of the digerati – is that enough to build a profitable business on?????
There’s a more interesting way, which my company has been working on, to go about this.
With social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn you still need to know of the person (email, name, etc) before you can virtually connect with the person. Our solution doesn’t require you to know anyone before hand, because everyone in our custom social networking deployments are already friends.
Conference organizations have a huge edge in that they have all of this data on their attendees, regardless if you’ve registered a minute before the conference starts or got to early bird special.
The route that I’ve taken is to combine this data with the functionality that people want (guides to parties, session schedules, ratings of the sessions, etc) and functionality that they don’t know that they want… yet… such as friend feeds and things of that nature.
The conferences can then do away with the printing of their schedules and speaker profiles, because all of this information is available in real-time on a conference branded web site. The website consists of the schedule, speaker profiles, parties, special offers, vendor information, and (of course) social networking components. The beauty of this system is that everyone is already a “friend” or contact and the friend feed displays information in both real-time and past-time. If you want need a fourth for your round of golf, or want to discuss tax credits with like minded CEOs you can do that just by posting an update into the local social pool.
It does away with linking all of these various social platforms and focuses the communication channel on individuals who are at a conference who most likely share your same business problems, successes, etc. This is where social network is now out of the general and into the specific.
Of course you need to have kiosks available for non-smart phone folks to check their schedules and whatnot at the conference – but it’s a piece that can be easily donated by a vendor.
I don’t care who is going to a conference. I don’t care about the parties at a conference. I don’t care about the speakers at a conference. I don’t care about the location of a conference. I don’t care who I’ll meet at a conference.
The only thing I care about is the content. And all conferences I’ve been to in the last 5 years have had incredibly lackluster content aimed at the lowest common denominator. Who gives a zegnatronic shit?
People go to conferences for all sorts of different reasons. There are plenty of people who attend solely for sales leads and biz dev. For people like that, our product is invaluable.
It’s true that when we ask people why they decided to attend an event, the content is usually one of the first things they mention. However, when we survey people after an event they usually say that greatest value they got from going were the connections and the relationships they made.
@joshfraser – Congrats on the widget! It seems to me that it would be useful for attendees that have already registered, too. Right? Or would they already jump into your EventVue system?
Also, I agree with you that people attend for a wide variety of reasons! In doing some research, I was surprised that many reasons that people give for attending events are social. Here is the link to a lively discussion on reasons people attend conferences: http://interact...nd-conferences/
- Sam
@Ben.
I guess FB does it, but I don’t use FB… so such a tool would be useful for me because it is crossplatform and because it is agnostic to platforms.
I cna think of ways in which this functionality can be useful in business and non-business related activities.
For me it’s not only important to know who is going to a certain event/party/etc. but also who has been to the same event last year and connect to them.
Eventvue is not free tool to conf managers, it costs, there are many free conf networking tools why would any one pay for these tools?
Facebook is the place our conf attendees network, and got used to it! Good luck Eventvue…
EventVue Discover is completely free to use. We only charge an affiliate fee if we are successful in driving new registrations and making you more money.
I’ve looked at Eventvue and it was pretty interesting. As an organizer the problem was the lack of integration with registration systems. And the registration systems that they link with (and others) like Cvent are RIDICULOUSLY expensive–after multo haggling they still wanted $6-10 per registration. If you’re doing a couple of thousand registrants a year, it’s literally cheaper to pay someone to build an entire system including a social network that integrated with it than to use CVent or Eventbrite for 2 years.
My hope is that Eventvue in its next generation integrates with an as yet unbuilt Salesforce or SugarCRM App and lets all this happen at a reasonable cost.
On the other hand, I’ve got some great code that does our little conference very well and achieves the most important thing for anyone there — seeing the attendee list and enabling attendees to privately email each other. 90% of the other social networking stuff is covered elsewhere…