Fork In The Road Blog

Events: Technology. Design. Strategy.

Making your Cash Register Ring with (Event) Affiliate Marketing

At the risk of seeming like a Rick Calvert Groupie (I’ve already written about BlogWorld twice at TSNN.com: The “Networked Beat” Approach to Curating Event Communities and The Day That Banners Died: BlogWorld and the QR Code Trip), I’m going to take yet another shot at it. Earlier this month, I was able to attend the MTO Summit in Washington, DC where Rick Calvert, co-founder of BlogWorld and New Media Expo, gave a presentation on affiliate marketing for trade shows and conferences. He has used the techniques he described at his own event with impressive results. For all of those event organizers still unsure about the value of cultivating a strong community, this post should make you sit up straight in your chair.

Affiliate marketing is a system for rewarding individuals who recommend your event by asking their friends, followers, and colleagues to click on a link, banner, or widget on their blog or Web site. The link takes said friends to event registration or some other desired destination on your Web site. You reward the individuals (your affiliates) with cash. The new registrant receives a discount on registration or some other benefit. When done well, i.e. the program is transparent, the affiliates are ethical, and the discount is worthwhile, affiliate marketing works.

So, “What can event organizers sell with affiliate marketing?” Calvert asked the audience members:

  • Registration
  • Lead generation
  • Exhibit space
  • Sponsorship
  • Housing
  • Virtual events
  • Content

Your affiliates could be past attendees, exhibitors, speakers, trade associations, media, and of course bloggers. Affiliate marketing can also be carried out with email (and newsletters) eliminating the barriers for affiliates who don’t have their own Web sites. All of the “accounting” is done behind the scenes with embedded code and the assistance of third party Affiliate Networks such as ShareASale, LinkShare, Commission Junction, and AffinityClick who take a percentage of the transaction (10% or so according to Calvert).

Affiliate marketing isn’t an overnight success story. Calvert began in 2007 with revenue under $10,000. In 2010, his affiliate marketing efforts put nearly $120,000 (less the 10% commission) in his pocket. Besides the obvious benefit of revenue, affiliate programs help organizers market and socialize their events. If one blogger puts a link on his blog, and twenty people retweet the blog post, the event is marketed to at least twenty new people and so on. Discounted registration, hotel rooms, sponsorships, etc. would be hot commodities not to mention being able to fill hotel room blocks. Anyone heard of Groupon?

Like any marketing program, someone in your organization has to monitor the affiliate behavior (as much as possible), work with the Affiliate Network, and do the math. Obviously, if it costs more to offer discounts and pay commission and staff to execute the program, it may not be for you. However, BlogWorld with 3,000 attendees (mostly bloggers) was able to earn $100,000+ in a few years, what could larger events do?

The Takeaway: Today’s affiliate marketing isn’t like the MCI Friends and Family Offer of yesteryear where customers were “encouraged” to turn over the contact info of their family and friends to the telephone company. It is much more widely accepted and practiced than network marketing (multilevel marketing). It is another way to leverage the Internet and take advantage of social networks and yes, it is another way that a well-developed and loyal community built around an event CAN deliver tangible results.

Mobile Apps: Cool Tools or Money Makers? My MTO Summit Mission

mobile appsRemember the days when you attended a trade show with a hard copy of the show program and a highlighter? Drawing a pink line over the exhibitors you wanted to visit or the sessions you wanted to attend was almost a ritual—a cathartic process to help you feel productive. Then, everything went online and so much more information became available. The only problem was that you had to lug your computer around in order to use the tools until the iPhone came along and EVERYTHING changed.

Now, Smartphones including the iPhone, Blackberry, Android and others are the device du jour on the trade show floor. Mobile application developers have made great strides in developing applications that speak to the needs of event organizers, exhibitors, attendees, sponsors and even the surrounding business community. Event organizers have done their part by introducing these tools to the trade show and conference community and helping their stakeholders adopt them.

In recent months I have written about or learned of several of the breakthrough mobile apps for events. Here is a small sampling (I know there are others):

A2Z’s ChirpE allows users to access online show content and synchronizes event details and personal itineraries with Facebook.

Bartizan’s iLeads offers exhibitors such features such as voice and written notes, surveys and qualifiers, and the ability to integrate with Salesforce.com to track the number of leads gathered throughout the show.

Core-App’s Follow Me and Event Host is a native Smartphone app that offers networking, information sharing and marketing features for attendees, exhibitors (and now event planners and venues) including personalized schedules, interactive show floor maps, access to social media tools such as Twitter, coupons from local merchants, exhibitor advertising, and digital brochure storage.

The Social Collective is a social networking and community platform that has partnered with mobile application developer DubMeNow to offer customized branding, sponsorship revenue opportunities, scheduling, mapping, functionality across multiple Smartphone platforms (including iPhone, Blackberry, Symbian and Android), one touch mobile-to-mobile exchange of e-business card information, social web contact info sharing, links to marketing material, video and notes, and messaging synched with the customized event social networking platform and Twitter.

Zerista is a full-featured white label social networking platform that is also Smartphone-enabled to offer personalized feed for real-time event updates and check-ins from personal contacts at the event, event organizer feed for real-time updates on schedule changes and other event-wide announcements, personalized messaging and networking tools, advanced attendee and exhibitor search functions, personalized schedule builder with public events and personal meetings, integration with an aggregation of popular social tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube.

These apps offer event organizers more of everything:

  • More productivity
  • More money
  • More attendees
  • More savings
  • More “green”

HOWEVER, in order to really take advantage of the interest in and demand for more of the same, event organizers must step forward to enter the discussion and let us know who is using these platforms, how they have benefitted, what new revenue they have earned and how much money they have saved, and whether these new apps are everything they have dreamed of or just cool tools to feel happy about (and get more press coverage for).

Hence, my mission for the MTO Summit in Chicago–to get to the bottom of this issue. As the moderator of the panel titled “Are Mobile Applications of Value to Events?” Chris Brown (NAB), Megan Tanel (AEM) and Rick Calvert (Blog World and New Media Expo) will be prepared to answer these burning questions and I will “help” them do it.

Hey, inquiring minds (like mine) want to know.

Keeping the Love Alive: Three Community Nurturing Tactics Offering an Intimate Connection

Blogs, Facebook fan pages, Twitter posts and YouTube videos are some of the most talked about ways to nurture an event community year round as long as you don’t break the cardinal rule of new media which is “share, don’t sell.” Producing compelling content that stimulates community conversation (usually over the heads of most college interns hired to work the social media levers at some associations and event organizations) is a requirement no matter what platforms you use. There are some other tactics, however, that trade show and conference organizers are using to keep the love alive year round.

This discussion can’t go much further without talking about virtual trade shows. I wrote recently about the National Association of Broadcaster’s virtual event DigitalVision 2010 designed to kick off major interest in NAB’s large face-to-face exhibition and conference scheduled for April 2010. In my earlier post I wrote “Brad Williams, vice president member benefits and development for NAB, has been researching the virtual option for at least three years to address the need to create a year round experience for show participants. ‘We do a great job with the physical event, why not utilize technology to touch our audience year round? Exhibitors want to touch prospects year round and attendees want information year round,'” he says.

The use of virtual trade shows and conferences as “filler” between physical events is somewhat of a new approach for face-to-face event organizers. Several had erected 24/7/365 portals (courtesy of the BDMetrics 365 platform and others) that never met expectations. This new virtual strategy could be 365 “Lite” in that the periodic virtual event content is fresh and occurring live.

Crosstech Media (does the name Chris Brogan ring a bell?) is netcasting (television-like programming over the web) for their events. For example, their ITEC conference portfolio which delivers education and networking on hardware, software, networking & mobility technology for businesses is using what it calls ITEC TV. The weekly show, hosted by Bill Sell, vice president and general manager of CrossTech Media and general manager of ITEC and ExtremeLabs analyst Tom Henderson is a discussion of news items and interviews of guests from across the technology spectrum. ITEC TV does a great job of giving viewers (the same audience for the ITEC conferences) a weekly fix of technology news and watching them live (the casts are archived as well) and feels like you’re watching, well, TV.

Rick Calvert’s BlogWorld and New Media Expo is using an online radio program called Blog World Expo Radio on the WS Radio platform to keep the love alive with his social media community (aka potential BlogWorld and New Media Expo attendees, speakers, exhibitors, media). The weekly live show (Fridays at Noon PST) is hosted by Jim Turner and the topics revolve around “speakers, exhibitors, sponsors and news makers in the social media space,” says Calvert. Not surprisingly, BlogWorld Expo Radio was broadcast live from the BlogWorld show floor (brilliant way to get attendees at the live event to become fans of the radio show afterward) and from the bloggers lounge of the famous SXSW Interactive Conference (nice crossover audience).

The Takeaway: Virtual events (trade shows, TV and radio) are more interesting when they’re live. Although the archives serve a very important purpose, there’s some kind of mental connection (the kind you want to have with your community) when you know someone is at the other end of the line dishing it out at the same time you are taking it in. Precisely because of that intimate connection, NAB’s virtual show, ITEC’s TV show and BlogTalk’s radio show are great tools for community nurturing and ultimately for driving attendance at their physical events. They are also opportunities to deliver content to community members that haven’t quite mastered the social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook (I think there still are some) but can easily work a browser.


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