A month or two back, I co-hosted a webinar on Best Practices in Community Management for Event Planners with Jeff Hurt of Velvet Chainsaw and Tamara Mendelsohn of EventBrite.

The original plan for that webinar to be co-hosted by well-known social media consultant and speaker Jessica Levin, President and Chief Communicator over at Seven Degrees Communications to co-host, but a last minute emergency pulled her away. We are very grateful to the ever-reliable Jeff Hurt for pinch-hitting at the last moment.

Now, we’ve got a chance to retry our line-up, as Jessica and I will be co-hosting a Best Practices in Community Management for Events webinar for members of the Engage365 community tomorrow, Wednesday, May 5th at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET. It’s free and open to all, so please join us:

>> Register for Best Practices in Community Management for Events <<

We’ll be sharing tips and tricks from our combined experience managing a variety of on-line communities, with an emphasis on how they apply to event communities. Should be fun, come along!

One of the most common pitfalls of hosting an on-line community for your event is what we call the “Field of Dreams Fallacy”: if you build it, they will come.

Turns out, even with a great technology solution like Pathable powering your your community, it still takes some attention and planning to crystallize a vibrant, successful community.

We’ve been at this for several years and, in that time, we’ve seen many successful communities and some less so. In the hopes of helping others jump quickly to more effective community management without as much of the trial and error, we’ve created a free, downloadable whitepaper, Best Practices in On-Line Community Management for Events.

Please follow this link below to download it. It’s free and, while it’s certainly drawn from our perspective of having worked with Pathable-based communities, it’s based on universal principles we’ve derived from observations of communities across the Internet and from interviews with community managers of all types.

>> Download the Best Practices in On-Line Community Management for Events Whitepaper <<

Amiando has quickly become one of the world’s leading ticketing and registration services. Based in Germany, they’ve grown through Europe and, more recently, to the United States and beyond.

Ever since Pathable collected our EIBTM Worldwide Technology Watch award in Barcelona this past November, we’ve been enjoying the new opportunities that serving a worldwide market offers. That’s why we’re so pleased to announce our new strategic partnership with Amiando today.

Event planners who choose Amiando for their ticketing, registration and event management can now enjoy a seamless integration with Pathable communities. As attendees register for the event, Pathable’s API-level integration with Amiando will automatically create accounts for the attendees so they can start enjoying the full suite of social networking services we offer. Be sure to read Amiando’s blog post announcing the partnership, as well.

Welcome Amiando!

Pathable, the leading social network provider for conferences and events, is adding account executives / sales associates with deep event-industry background to our team. We have offices in Seattle and San Francisco, but we can support remote employees working from almost anywhere, it’s just important to find the right fit for our team. Interested? Drop us a line at jobs@pathable.com.

Inside Account Executive

Reporting directly to the VP of Sales, this role will be responsible for driving lead generation, lead qualification, and web-based sales. The individual will be the “first point of contact” for sales activities including but not limited to sales incoming calls, incoming sales emails, marketing driven lead campaigns, and the individuals own direct solicitations. Once an account is closed the individual will pass along the customer to an Account Manager for implementation and follow-up sales.

Essential Job Functions

• Serve as a key member of the sales team driving direct revenue opportunities and lead qualification.
• Directly responsible for moving leads through the sales process to full closure. Individual will be front line for the following lead categories:
  • Inbound Phone Calls
  • Inbound Emails and Web response
  • Web scheduled Demonstrations
  • Tradeshows
  • Marketing Email campaigns
  • Webinars
• Ability to make monthly sales objectives that fall into two primary areas:
  • Monthly lead objective for qualifying leads
  • Monthly sales objective
• Familiarity and understanding required for a disciplined use of SalesForce.com.
• Provide integrity and credibility as the “first point of contact” for sales generated leads and prospects
• Provide market intelligence information to sales management on competition and market dynamics.
• Provide input and insights into how to make the process more effective or more efficient

Requirements

• 2+ years in the conference and event industry in a customer-touch position (including sales, customer service, or support)
• Experience in the technology field, and in particular, experience in translating technical products and services into meaningful value for customers and prospects.
• Proven success in qualifying and selling a product to new customers
• Proven ability to successfully communicate company goals and vision to customers and prospects
• Superior communication and demonstration skills, be it verbal, written, or collaborative.
• Self-motivated professional who operates well in an empowered, dynamic, and fast-paced environment.
• Hands-on knowledge of traditional and electronic communication mediums.
• Creative and strategic thinking skills to help introduce, develop and promote new ideas into corporate vision, marketing strategy and programs.
• Driven to succeed. Motivated to be highly successful in a goal-oriented community.
• Ability to juggle multiple projects, prioritize effectively and meet deadlines with minimal staff support.
• Strong organization, planning and execution skills with an emphasis on successful delivery against established goals.

Desired but not required

• College degree

How long have you been working in the events industry? Five years? Ten? And why are you in it? Because you love it!

If we’re talking to you, and you’re

It’s one thing to create an on-line community space where attendees can mix and mingle before an event. It’s quite another for that community space to thrive and become the kind of satisfying hub of activity that an event organizer wants for their conference.

Succeeding at the latter goal requires not just a strong, flexible and appropriate technology platform, but a little bit of art, a little bit of science and a little bit of magic.

Having helped hundreds of events build successful on-line communities, we’ve learned a little bit of the art, a little bit of the science and, dare we say, a little bit of the magic.

A couple weeks back, we had the honor of participating in a webinar with Jeff Hurt of Velvet Chainsaw Consulting and Tamara Mendelsohn of Eventbrite. In it, we attempted to codify some of the lessons learned over the years, in the hopes of making the event on-line community experience better. The focus of the webinar was not Pathable communities, specifically, but on-line event communities in general.

For those of you who missed it, we recorded it and make it available here for viewing at your convenience. We hope you find it useful!

Keeping appointments at a conference can be daunting. In addition to your 1:1 meetings, you’ve got keynotes, educational sessions, break-outs, workshops, meet-ups and now tweetups. How are you supposed to keep it all straight?

Help has arrived! Pathable, the on-line community and social network service for conferences, now offers 1:1 meeting scheduling for attendees integrated with your conference agenda.

• Attendees see each other’s free-busy times to choose a time that works
• Unified view of 1:1 meetings and personalized conference schedule
• Upload documents and materials for other meeting attendees
• “Subscribe” to your Pathable schedule from Outlook, iCal and others, so that your master calendar is always up-to-date
• View your full schedule, including public talks and private meetings, on your iPhone or Blackberry or generate an easy-to-read, printable PDF

And it’s been built with the same attractive, easy-to-use interface that so many conference attendees have applauded.

Now your attendees can get to know each other, start conversations, meet-up and stay in touch, all within your event’s private community.

Seeing is believing. We’ll be hosting a special webinar to demonstrate live exactly how this feature works, and how easy it is to integrate into your event’s web site on Tuesday, February 16th at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET. Register now for the webinar! (Or catch one of our weekly full product demo webinars).

This past week, LinkedIn released their new, updated API to the public developer community. This has freed us up for an announcement, as well: Pathable has been working with LinkedIn for several months (while the API was in beta) to develop our new LinkedIn integration features, and we’re very pleased to announce and release those features today.

One of the first questions event attendees ask (after “where’s the conference”) is “who else is going?” Part of the fun and value of attending a conference in person is catching up with old friends and recharging business relationships with some face-to-face time. But how do you figure out, from the giant list of attendees, which are the ones you know?

When you register for a Pathable conference community, Pathable will (with your permission) automatically check your entire LinkedIn network against the attendee list and let you know which of those people will be there. It’s that simple.

Those of you who are familiar with Pathable will know that we’ve been offering the same ability to identify which of your Twitter friends are attending for some time now, and that Pathable also encourages your attendees to tweet a link to their profile (and thus your event) to their Twitter network.

This effectively enlists your attendees as your “viral marketing army”, spreading the word about your event to your attendees’ social networks.

We’re pleased to announce today that this viral marketing tool has been extended to LinkedIn, as well. Attendees can now update their LinkedIn status from within the Pathable community site, telling their LinkedIn contacts that they’re attending, providing a link to your site and your event’s hash tag.

Of course, Pathable never tweets or updates status without an attendees explicit, prior permission, but we do streamline the process so that attendees who want to take advantage of it can do so with a single-click. We’ve seen this feature become a very successful part of many event’s social media strategies, and look forward to extending its reach to LinkedIn.

Please contact info@pathable.com with any questions.

We’re very proud to announce that Pathable has been chosen as the winner of EIBTM’s WorldWide Technology Watch Award for 2009. We are thrilled to have earned the recognition, not only from such a well regarded event as EIBTM but from a judging panel whose opinion we hold in such high regard. It serves as a great confirmation that the work we’ve put into improving the conference social experience for attendees has been well spent.

From the EIBTM issued press release reads in part:

Pathable, an on-line community and social network for conferences and events, has scooped EIBTM’s WorldWide Technology Watch Award for 2009.

Pathable’s community allows attendees at conferences and events to communicate with each other, striking up conversations around all aspects of the event from educational sessions and materials, common interests and relevant topics, providing them with an easy way to get to know each other before they physically arrive on site. Pathable helps by making recommendations, aggregating twitter and blog feeds; it even tells attendees which of their Twitter friends are registered.

By integrating with major registration providers, each event’s own branded website and other social networking services, the Pathable experience becomes a seamless part of the overall conference experience from purchasing the ticket and participating in the community to sealing a business deal.

Corbin Ball, chair of the judging committee, tell us that there were some excellent products representing a range of ideas and innovation in this year’s 46 applications. “Technology innovation continues to present great tools for the meetings industry, which bodes for improved efficiency and better customer service for events.” Runners up included Vision Tree (using mobile technology to provide a range of attendee and event services), Sherpa Solutions (a low-cost active RFID badge with precise location tracking and the ability to easily bookmark attendees, booths and products with the push of a button) and BusyEvent (a low-cost, wearable, social networking, expo-lead management, session tracking, and audience response/survey tool).

I haven’t been to Barcelona in some time, looks like it’s time to dust off that guide book.

There are so many social media tools for promoting and building community at events: Twitter, Hootsuite, wikis, live blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more every day. It can feel a bit overwhelming.

That’s why we’re offering a series of webinars intended to provide practical, hands-on examples and instructions on the key tools (as well as help in figuring out which are the right tools for you).

• Practical: We’ll focus on live demonstrations of tools.
• Interactive: We’ll take questions from the audience throughout the demonstrations. If you don’t get something or have a drilldown question, ask.
• Free: We genuinely enjoy working with these technologies, and it’s a pleasure to share our knowledge and enthusiasm.

The first webinar, “Social Media for Events: Tools and Tricks”, is scheduled for Wednesday, September 30th at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET.

>> Register for the Webinar <<

We’re very happy to announce our strategic partnership with Cvent, one of the largest providers of event management and registration services. Cvent properly boasts they help over 14,000 planners manage 175,000 events, surveys and marketing campaigns every year, and we’re very proud to have been chosen to provide social networking services to those customers.

As we’ve said before, we realize that social networking services are a piece of the larger picture of a successful event, a picture that includes registering and managing attendees, managing vendors and speakers, site selection and more. It’s a piece that’s becoming essential, but part of what will make it successful is when it fits in with the other pieces. For example, attendees don’t want to have to re-enter their personal data, once to register for the event and again to register for a social network. Likewise, event planners have enough on their plates without manually transferring data back and forth. By integrating with Cvent, we ensure that Cvent’s 14,000 meeting planning customers have the option of offering social networking services to their attendees seamlessly.

In the very near future, an attendee at an event that doesn’t offer a social networking solution will be asking “what’s wrong here?!” We’re happy that Cvent customers won’t be hearing that complaint.

If you’re a Cvent customer, please talk to your account manager or contact Pathable directly about how we can turn on Pathable integration to your existing Cvent service.

Official Cvent – Pathable strategic partnership press release