A little while ago, I posted about how I'd be soliciting advice through my blog to help WhizSpark choose a market and go after it. I've slacked on that intention. However, internally we've been talking quite a bit about it. There are a handful of markets/event types that we've narrowed it down to. And there are a bunch that we've crossed off of the list. And there are a handful of deals that we are working on with larger event organizations about applying our technology and techniques to their events. If one or more of these deals comes through, it would help us make the decision. But, we are also not pinning our success on the hopes that a deal like that will come through.
So, prepared to go it alone (or incremental like we are now), we are evaluating a bunch of markets.
One of the big ones that we are leaning towards is online seminars. Bull Dog Solutions does this and apparently, I have been told that they have a very healthy business. They focus entirely on online seminars for lead generation. Companies come to them and they guide them through the process of marketing the seminar and registering individuals using their tools. Bull Dog Solutions has a relationship with webex and livemeeting to handle the actual online presentation. I was told that Bull Dog Solutions is very hands on and they make good money at it. I don't know what their fees are like, but it is a managed service, so I imagine that they are up there. (I'd love to know if anyone has knowledge.)
WhizSpark is uniquely suited to market, promote and organize these types of events. (And we could make it self service.) As I've recently come to learn, lead generation is a huge and booming business. The [obvious] key to lead generation is being able to place ads online in the right spots in front of the right people and being able to measure conversion, where a conversion is a form filled out. I don't know if Bull Dog Solutions is doing this, but I don't think they are. Instead, they are relying on their customers to reach the audience. (Again, I'd love to know if anyone has knowledge.)
We can drive leads by buying online media, assuming that the lead is an RSVP (and other information that is unique to the event). (I talked about this w.r.t nightlife awhile ago.) WhizSpark is actually uniquely suited for promoting events and collecting RSVPs as leads or online payments. And we are uniquely positioned to enable multiple affiliates to serve ads or send email newsletters for a single event and the event planner can track the performance w.r.t the metrics that event planners care about: RSVPs or registrations.
Since we have ad publishing and serving, affiliate email marketing, and word of mouth tools integrated into our event websites, we are uniquely positioned to promote seminars via affiliates on the wider web. (See the extended explanation to understand how this all works.)
The last piece of the puzzle is building the affiliate network. We've started building an affiliate network for local event marketing and although our network is growing by a few customers and a few thousand subscribers per week, it is difficult to broker cross promotional opportunities for events among these people, with our current numbers of users. (This could change when we start letting people register without going through me, which is soon.)
So, learning from this so far, and being aware that we aren't going to drive a large amount of registrations or RSVPs from web/email affiliates with our current "local" approach, we think we need to focus our outbound sales efforts even further, and choose a market with a larger number of affiliates already online and familiar with being affiliates. We also need to choose more lucrative markets. Very few local events require online payment in advance. And that's how we will ultimately scale this business.
Why Online Events?
The reason that I like online events is because location becomes irrelevant. I sat down with a gentleman today that speaks at about 30 events per year all over the world. But, his topic is pretty niche and appeals to an audience that is not easily reachable, when accounting for geography. For example, if I needed to reach human resource managers in Chesepeake Bay, Virginia (or even single people there), I'd most likely not be able to identify a number of online media outlets that can reach that audience. (Yes, we could use cost per click at search engines, but the volume is still probably negligible.)
So, with online events, geography becomes irrelevant. And if I can now reach Human Resource professionals in any part of the world, I can start to partner with niche publication sites, bloggers, blog networks, etc. And I can start to reach my audience much more easily through a number of affiliates. I can also begin to develop a focus in vertical topics, like blog networks (and any media organization) have proven is a very scalable model.
Further, given the plethora of bloggers (and blog networks) that blog on niche subjects that are relying on adsense, chitika and YPN trickles to monetize their blog, and that I know how to build relationships with bloggers, we think there is a unique opportunity to leverage blogs as affiliates to reach niche audiences. And to pay bloggers well. In addition to the ability to track referrals from an individual blog and compensating them for the referral, an event invitation or notification is usually considered an appropriate thing to blog, unlike an ad for a company. As upcoming.org and eventful have shown, bloggers are happy to share their calendars on their blogs. And this delivers natural viral traffic.
Your Turn
So, to kick this off, I've been talking to some bloggers and blog networks about what kind of online seminars they would like to help market, what would appeal to their audiences, how large of an audience they can reach and what topics, speakers, formats their audience would likely attend. And if they would pay to attend and how much.
I've gotten a lot of great feedback from a handful of people on some
very specific ideas. We've yet to land on an idea where we have matched a sponsor company or speaker with a large or (large group of) affiliate(s) that can drive traffic for their target. (We're getting close, though.)
So, I'd like to hear who else would be interested and in what capacity they'd be interested in participating. Feel free to write me at pcaputa at whizspark dot com or leave a comment. Thanks in advance.
Our next step is to identify some online seminar formats and topics. I'll blog more about some specific concepts. But, I'd like to get some feedback on our general logic and conclusions above. And figure out who would like to be involved. Who wants to be involved will guide us significantly.
Ultimately, we think that bloggers should drive this process, more than the topic or format. For example, if there are 200 entrepeneur bloggers interested in helping to promote a business plan pitching seminar where an investor speaks about what they are looking for in an investment, than that might be the way we should go. If Dane Carlson of the business opportunities blog wants to do a seminar about franchising opportunities, than that's probably a good thing for us to work on, given that he can drive the attendance among his large number of subscribers. If Michael Arrington or David Beisel wanted to host an online soiree of sorts where startups present what they are doing, and Michael and David were interested in marketing this, than that might be a good place to start. IF Root.net wanted to do virtual mini versions of Vaulstock, that'd be a good place to start. If Creative Weblogging or Darren Rowse wanted to do an event where they told the rest of us how we could make a living blogging, than that'd be a good starting point. If Seth Godin or Mark Cuban could look past my past transgressions, an online seminar with one of them would surely sell out. If people would pay to watch Marc Canter and Ghandi make love, then.... you get the idea.
Eventually, I think this could actually be as lucrative of a revenue stream for bloggers as ppc ad networks or even blogging at a blog network (not hard to beat, btw). And I think it is a more natural process. After all, many bloggers are (or strive to be) thought leaders. And many bloggers are connectors, naturally inclined to bring people together. As much as blogging has done that, there is a huge gap between blogging's ability to bring people together and a conference's ability to bring people together. While it is impossible for us all to fly to Silicon Valley each week, it is very possible that a bunch of us can tune into an online seminar each week. And as online interaction tools get cooler, cheaper and closer to being face to face, it becomes a lot closer to the wonderfulness that occurrs at the real thing.
So, I put the task in your hands? Do you want to program these things together? If so, what are your ideas? If we prove that we can scale this promotional process, we'll make the entire process of putting on an online seminar low cost and self service, providing the tools to the people with the initiative to make it happen. And we'll step out of the way. Like blog publishing tools have, this could change the way we all interact. And put a lot more power in the hands of the people.
Extended Explanations of WhizSpark's Functionality
Extended explanation of ad serving: Event planners can publish
banner ads to their WhizSpark event website through the browser based
event website builder. On the event website, anyone can log in and grab
html which includes the banner ad hyperlinked to a unique URL with the
individual's unique WhizSpark id. The link goes back to the event site.
That affiliate can place the banner ad on their website. Anyone that
clicks the banner ad from the affiliate's site is tracked as being
referred by that individual. When they login, register, RSVP, we record
who referred them. It's easier to understand if you go see it. You must log in to get the unique id.
Extended explanation of affiliate email marketing: Anyone can manage their email lists, opt ins and opt outs, sending html newsletters and tracking performance. We've also enabled affiliates to send invitations to their email lists for other people's events. The information is not shared with the event planner. But, the performance is. So, each event planner can recruit as many affiliate email marketers to send the event's creative to the affiliates' lists. And the event planner can monitor conversions to RSVPs or registrations.
Extended explanation of word of mouth tools: WhizSpark is set up to let others invite others to events. Each individual can track the responses of the people they invite. As mentioned above in the ad serving explanation, they can also grab banner ads. For a large music festival in the area, we served over 55k impressions as a result of about 150 individuals posting these banners on myspace. Event planners can also upload rewards that reward people for doing this. It can be done through giveaways where each time someone invites someone, or invites someone that registers, or refers someone from their banner ad, they earn a chance. Or it can be done through rewards, where people earn points towards a prize. Again, the metric can be the number of invitations sent, clicked, visitors referred or registrations.
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