eriksr on April 30th, 2007
So you’ve developed a nice podcast for your client. It uses a talk show 
format, it has attracted some attention, and you are pleased with your results. But, you wonder, could you be doing more with the medium? Yep!
How you use podcasts is only limited by your imagination. So here, to tweak your imagination, is 10 new ways you can podcast.
Podcasting: Stand up and be heard
- Messages from the client CEO and other key company executives
- Interviews with product designers, key research & development staff, and other experts
- Audio press releases
- Keynote speeches
- Seminar recordings
- New product announcements
- Product and service seminars
- Recruitment information, such as FAQ with new hires designed to entice new recruits
- Tutorials
- Personalized welcome messages to new users
eriksr on February 23rd, 2007
Here I am again, reviewing another conference/event aggregator — GoingToMeet.com. You can find the other entries on event aggies here, by the way. Boy howdy do I wish I’d found this one a year ago! Anyway, with every good thing comes some bad, so let’s hop to it, shall we?
But first, my bias
I know there are a ton of public relations professionals out there who specialize in all sorts of wonderful industries. Food, law, energy, politics, and so on. Me, I know tech…so if an event aggregator has all the shows I’m familiar with, they get a gold star in my book…but that may not be the case for you. Your mileage may vary.
GoingToMeet: Thorough Enough
There’s not a ton to say about GoingToMeet — and in this case, it’s a good thing. The site has a painless, no-nonsense interface that gets right to the point. You can search for events with the search box and, nice touch folks, save your searches as RSS feeds! There are a wealth of entries, and I was able to recognize all the important shows from the data security, telecom, computer, ECM, and IT service industries. Also, most of the entries I saw contained the contact information for someone at the event organizer’s office — name and phone number at the least, sometimes you even get an Email address. Awesome. General information about the event — what it is about, when it is held, and where, is available and good enough to give you a sense of what’s happening.
The site also has a “subscribe” option that can send you alerts via Email on a weekly or monthly basis regarding newly added to your area of interest.
Read the rest of this entry »
eriksr on February 15th, 2007
A few days ago I wrote about how you can use event aggregators to support your event 
monitoring/speaking opps plans. Well, Joshua Lerner, CEO of BusyTonight.com was kind enough to write and give me a heads up about his own service which I had totally missed.
Let’s get BusyTonight
I had focused on Upcoming.org in that previous entry. Upcoming’s schtick is that users manually add the events that show up on the site. BusyTonight, on the other hand, uses the magic of computers and programming. I’ll let Joshua’s note to me speak for itself:
Our approach to event aggregation is unique - we crawl the Web for events on unstructured HTML pages. We identify the relevant features - title, date, description, location, etc. - and make it all available for browsing and search by keyword and category. This results in more events than any other site - we already cover the entire U.S. and are scaling up our Web crawl to include more than 100k sites that contain event listings.
Kudos to BusyTonight for creating something so thorough. Unfortunately, a few problems (from a PR perspective) get in the way of this site being a resource I would highly recommend.
Yes, the site is chock-a-block with with events of all sorts. It’s got festivals, discussion groups, and probably even major conventions. I say probably because it isn’t easy to figure out how to sort using a range of dates. You can…but you have to type this, as an example: 2/16 - 12/30. It’s not clear how you can search beyond the current year — something that becomes critical around the summer when we start planning for activities in the new year.
Also, when you get to the site, it appears as though you’re forced to search by city — you can choose to search all cities only after the fact. The same applies to the categories. And, as with all search engines, some of BusyTonight’s results are bunk. I came across some sort of timeshare thing while doing a search for tennis related events.
Bone throwing
I’ll give them a couple of bones, though. BusyTonight is generous with its RSS feeds — you can create a feed based on any kind of search in order to be alerted to updates relating to it.
BusyTonight also offers something called an EventRoll. Eventrolls are bits of code you embed on your blog or Website that inform visitors about events happening in your city or college. Unfortunately, the execution is poor — from a PR professional’s perspective. You don’t have the option of filtering events by topic and you can’t affect what shows up.
Ultimately it’s clear that BusyTonight is, in its current state, aimed at a more casual audience. It certainly succeeds in that regard, and it does have some limited use for our research…but like I said before, these tools should be a part of your event toolkits, rather than the core of them.
eriksr on February 13th, 2007
I do hope you’re constantly on the lookout for new or upcoming events for your clients…and for yourself. What better way to connect your client with potential customers? And, if you can wrangle a speaking opportunity for them, you’re on your way to building some genuine thought leadership. And, let’s not forget, they are a great place to meet new people to form connections with.
But I know your pain, really I do. There are so many bloody events out there — how can anyone keep track of them all? The answer is not so simple. For an event program to be successful you need to keep track of dozens, if not hundreds, of Web sites. Fortunately, a new breed of content aggregators are coming to our rescue. Sites such as GoingToMeet, Eventful, Confabb, and Upcoming are making it easy to find industry conventions/events. Although I’m only going to review Upcoming today, I’ll go into detail on the rest soon. Stay tuned.
Upcoming: For your Web 2.0 & Anti-establishment needs
However, I believe you should add Upcoming.org to that list. It’s free, has a clean interface, and I think has the potential to turn into the events aggregator of our dreams.
Upcoming is a social events (hah!) tracking/sharing site. After an event is added by a user, it gets its own page (check out the Web 2.0 Expo for an example) where readers who have created accounts on the site can state if they are planning to attend or simply “watch”, leave comments, and so on.
At the moment the majority of events tend to be smaller Web 2.0 and tech conferences, activist get-togethers, and even the odd wine tasting. So, for the moment, this isn’t the kind of resource you check every day. However, I believe that, with Yahoo!’s backing (they own the place), this site could turn into a winner.
format, it has attracted some attention, and you are pleased with your results. But, you wonder, could you be doing more with the medium? Yep!
