Have you noticed what’s different in our second event? Besides having teh tarik instead of beer, we went with Eventbrite to manage registration. It is a great app for event organizers. The customer support at Eventbrite is excellent. I asked about a paperless option to answer a tweet from @warrentan who prefers not to kill another tree by printing out a ticket. I was told that you can store the 2D barcode (the square one) that is printed on your ticket into a mobile phone. The code can be read by an app on another mobile phone so folks can show that at the venue from now on. Vote Earth!
We had no idea tickets would be snapped up so quickly. The announcement was made on our blog, Facebook page and twitter. Tweets and RTs went out through out the day and all 100 tickets were gone in nine hours. This was definitely faster than Facebook because not everyone is on Facebook yet.
We decided to release another 20 tickets the following Monday for those who missed the first announcement (drop out rate in any event, especially free ones is anywhere between 20-30%). The registration page on Eventbrite for the extra 20 tickets was opened for only 24 hours. Naturally, not everyone from the first registration came but 100% of the second registration did.
Like any case study, it’s only good when there’s audience participation. You know how we usually shy away from raising our hands in public so we decided to maximize twitter and asked folks to tweet in their questions with a hashtag — #smcklQ. A tool from SAP was used to pull in live data into a powerpoint and Ben then quickly groups them into general areas for the panel then specific ones directed to a speaker and finally it was opened to the room where a mic was passed around. There were 23 questions from twitter (not counting retweets) and there were about 3-4 questions from raised hands in the auditorium. The average I’ve seen are 5-8 questions at regular conferences.
For those who couldn’t make it to the event, the presentations were recorded on video by Integricity and will be uploaded to the blog. Pictures are already up at the Facebook fanpage.
SMCKL meets once a month on the third Thursday of every month. Follow or contact @smckl on twitter for more info.
