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
Thanks to all you joined us Wednesday for the Social Media in Events Webinar, hosted by James Spellos and Jordan Schwartz, along with special guest Alan Levine. For those who could not attend, we recorded the entire session:
Resources
We also promised to provide links to the various resources we mentioned during the webinar. They are below. There are two in particular that I’d like to draw your attention to:
-
TwitterDinks (at right), a brand new Twitter visualization from Pathable co-founder Shelly Farnham. It’s a beautiful ambient representation of Twitter accounts, with density of leaves on a tree representing number of tweets, the presence (or absence) of heart fruits representing the tone of the tweets, and similar representations for individual tweets, numbers of followers / friends, etc. TwitterDinks is in private beta at the moment, but can request to be notified when it is released publicly by e-mailing shelly@wagglelabs.com.
- Pathable Tracker: A free tool from Pathable that lets you track all the tweets associated with a hash tag, automatically calculate reach and download the full set of results as a CSV file for analysis in Excel, archiving or other purposes.
Twitter Tools
Conference-wide social networking tools
Conference-wide social networks, or “white label social networks”, let you build a community for your attendees on your terms. By providing a space where attendees can get to know each other before the event, our findings show you can increase attendee satisfaction and intent to return. You can restrict the communities to only those who have registered for the conference, brand them, integrate them into your existing web presence, etc. Pathable is one such service, but we covered several other examples, as well.
Other Resources for extending community
- Flickr: Tag-centric photo sharing
- Second Life: Virtual 3D world (can be used for virtual conference viewing)
- Storymap: Collaborative photo album creation
- Del.icio.us: Social bookmark sharing
