Getting Your Event Online. Using the Web Before, During and After the Event.

(Disclaimer: I am the President of WhizSpark)

A few basic steps to getting your event online...

1. Find a design/development company that can produce a website with your content (eg description, Location, Date, Purpose, Sponsors, Speakers, Agenda, etc). You will spend several thousand dollars (probably tens) to get something up like this site by a full time web design firm. You can opt to use wordpress or movable type and put up a site like this. The average non-technical event planner would probably pay a consultant a few thousand dollars to get that done in a timely fashion. Or you can do it yourself on the cheap. WhizSpark has developed a simple, but user friendly design template for event websites. We currently put up the sites for our clients. And are working on making the design more robust and DIY.
   
2. Find a company that can help you send online invitations. There are DIY services like Roving's ConstantContact that are very robust. Currently, we handle the newsletter creation and deployment for our clients through our home-grown system. Again, working on improving this considerably in a lot of different ways.
   
3. Find a company that can help you do online registrations, collect custom information and accept payments. There are 100s of these. The leaders are cevent, acteva, regonline, ersvp. WhizSpark has this capability too.

That is all stuff you should do before the event. As you probably guessed, our goal is to build a system that accomplishes all three tasks: publishing, email communication and marketing and registration. Using separate systems (or companies) for these tasks is cumbersome.  How do you do email marketing if you don't know who already registered? How do you integrate the registration component inside of the website with all of your content? How do you maintain the brand identity of the event across all of these consumer facing services?

As we refine our tools and approach and work up the food chain from doing networking events to full blown conferences, I expect that the existing registration players will all be building out capabilities to do what we are doing. Where I think some of the exciting new development for events will be, is providing tools that will make the communication and  collaboration that occurs at the event: the main product of the event.

This past week, I spoke on a panel with George Eberstadt and Gregory Narain. George Eberstadt's company, nTag, focusses on the communication and feedback during the event between the organizer and attendees and between the attendees. Gregory Narain's system, SparkCard,  focusses on the collaboration that occurs after the event.

You can read all about nTag at the site. If you want to know more about what Greg has up his sleeve, you'll have to ask him, as he is in stealth-ish mode.

In addition to these two companies, both Ross Mayfield's SocialText and Kris Krug's EventBlogging are applying some existing technologies to events in interesting ways.

SocialText is powering a wiki for PC Forum for the 3rd year in a row. Socialtext has a blog and wiki integrated into their technology, which works. I don't think that a wiki is ideal for collaboration and communication for quite a few reasons, of which I won't get into. But, the blog/wiki integration is compelling. And of course, SocialText has some traction in this space.

Kris Krug has recognized the recent trend of people blogging from events and the associated benefits that the event receives as a result. His new PR service exploits the ease of publishing and aggregation - and has begun selling that to event organizers:

I really think there is a growing niche here for someone like me with graphic design, photography, writing, web development and IT skills to offer corporate event blogging as a service to companies putting on special events. What kind of events? Oh I don’t know… XBox2 launch party? Trade shows? Seminars? Maybe Bono wants to hire me to photoblog and write from backstage at on the How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb tour? The possiblites are endless. Corporate user conferences? Employee training offsites? NASA Lauches? Fundraisers? I spoke to several friends and contacts they agree that this is probably a hot idea. Anyone out there who wants to help me come up with some services and a site to address this space?

Yes, I would like to be involved, Kris.

Update: I had to disable trackbacks to this post as it is getting spammed like crazy.