Mobile application: the indispensable tool for your event!

Currently, the event attendees are expecting to live a real experience and being involved personally in the event. They are looking for something unique, memorable and are willing to a total immersion. The major advances in mobile technology have entirely transformed our way of life. Today, most of attendees carry smartphones and other devices which allow organizers to develop mobile applications in order to learn more about the attendee’s profile: session attended, favourite topic session, professional relations met and many more. Consequently, the event marketing departments have changed their practices from traditional to more digital ones.

Mobile applications invaded our daily lives, and using it for your event can be a real competitive advantage. Here you will understand what are the benefits of this tool and why adopt a mobile application to boost your event?



Before the event: it facilitates the organisation and the planning of the event

Source: freedigitalphoto.net

Months and weeks before an event can be very stressful. It’s a very busy period and until the end of the event you hope that you have not forgotten anything. In order to be well organized, several applications can give you tips and help you along the preparation. Those apps have different goals, and are more or less appropriate depending the size of the event.

You can manage your “to-do list” with “Wunderlist” or “Coolendar”, and in the case of bigger project management “Tom’s Planner” is a more appropriate tool which allow you to create Gantt diagram. Another great app “Super Planner” provides an estimation of the resources needed and available. The budget is also a “hot” spot to watch carefully. With “Check” you have the history of your payments and you keep an eyes on the state of your finances.

During the event, it increases the transmission of information and encourages networking

Source: freedigitalphoto.net

People attending to the events are forgetting the vast majority of the information provided. Indeed, a study made by Evenium shows that “after three weeks after the event, the participants will recall only 5% of the content”. In order to involve the attendees, you need to make them participate, think and reflect! 
In this case smartphone‘s applications are perfect to face this challenge. Indeed, we used to be connected all the time to our network. Actually, 27% of our time spent on the internet is devoted to social networks” in accordance with Evenium study. 
In addition, a mobile app allows your attendees to take advantages of integrated networking and social media tools in order to build professional relationships with other attendees. With an effective app, the event organizers can identify potential customers and identify their key interests by responding to specific needs, anticipate potential questions which increase the impact.

In a first place, an app like Evenium ConnexMe, allows to manage online registration, attract more participants, and especially to make guests interact by promoting networking. By giving their opinion, guests retain much more the messages and recall lasting content. In the same style, a new app appeared on the market a few months ago: Beekast. This app also allows organizers to create live polls and get result instantaneous, messaging with questions or comments and project them on a screen but it also solves microphone technical problems. Organizers don’t need to move the mic around the convention room, because microphone are replaced by attendees’ smartphones. The sound is transmitted in a real time and a speaking time management is also integrated. Those two apps increase significantly the interactivity in all your event!

Then we can highlight another fact: the difficulty of storing all the new contacts. Indeed, at the end of the day your pocket is full of business card and a week later you are lost searching through the piles. In this case, several apps as Presto BizCard or Camcard for example can help you. It works on an easy principle; these apps take a photograph of the card and perform optical character recognition (OCR) on the image to translate the contents to editable text. Then, you save them into the app's own database or into your smartphone's contacts listing.   

After the event, it improves the collection of feedback

Collecting and gathering all the feedback on speaker, event and sessions are easier with mobile apps. The apps are better for collecting feedback because they are asked when the users are at the end of the session after a short period of time. Thus, it is easy to express their opinions and improves the response rate as well as reduces the staff necessary to collect the paper responses. The use of a mobile apps such as Boast, IML, Crystal Interactive help event organizers to gauge customer expectations and understand participants reaction during the event.

Source: freedigitalphotos.net

To conclude, in our current society where people are more and more virtually interconnected, applications are a necessary step. It may sound paradoxical but they bring more interactivity and connectivity between attendees. Participants fell involve before, during and after the event. It’s also a powerful tool to simplify organizer’s life and provide better experience. We can also assign them ecological property, less paper or plan have to be print. However, the virtual still have some limitations! The Wifi has to be powerful enough to support big manifestation and we all know that even if smartphones become increasingly efficient, the autonomy remains limited. The risk to finish the day without battery, and therefore be depriving of interactions has to be taken in account!

Bedouk. (2014, 01 19). Une application mobile : l'outil incontournable pour votre événement. 
Retrieved from Bedouk: http://www.bedouk.fr/article/une-application-mobile-l-outil-incontournable-pour-votre-evenement.110186

Cap Gemini. (2013, 12 04). 7 applications mobile pour organiser son événement. 
Retrieved from Les Fontaines: http://www.les-fontaines.com/7-applications-mobile-pour-organiser-son-evenement.html

Leblogdelevenementiel. (2014, 11 05). Un microphone ? Pour quoi faire ! 
Retrieved from Le blog de l'évènementiel et du hors média: https://leblogdelevenementiel.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/un-microphone-pour-quoi-faire/

Power, M. (2013, 12 02). Mobile Event Apps – The Top 10 Benefits. 
Retrieved from Concep Empowerment Marketing: http://www.concep.com/the-top-10-benefits-of-mobile-event-app/#.VLkiMy6AqjY

 Eve Dellinger & Elsa Yenigotchian

An application that simplifies

A high profile, numerous and complicated event is always a hassle for both attendees and the event planner. The amount of work going into the planning is overwhelming, things need to be double, triple checked, while at the same time answering to the millions of questions and requests coming from both the attendees and the suppliers. This is a glimpse into a planner's chaotic life,where everything is timed and coordinated, never with a minute to spare.

Now, this month, a company has finally decided to come up with a product that seems to be useful to both parties. A new application will be able, in the future, to satisfy the attendees need for information while giving support to the planner and the ability to multi task even more. OneClick, the mobile division of the Destination Media Group, along with Passkey, the industry's leading provider of online group reservation technology, have teamed up to create the first turnkey mobile application for event, destinations and planners. This invention should enable the planner to create a customised mobile site with valuable content that can be accessed by attendees, exhibitors and clients.

Imagine a conference where you would be able, just with a click of a button to see the agenda of the conference, or even better, find the a specific restaurant. Would save you a lot of time and paper.

The new platform is compatible with Apple's, Android's and BlackBerry's operating systems and EventSphere, a company specialised in housing and meetings fulfilment, will be the first to launch this "gadget" to the event industry.

The event industry is developing at a fast pace, always being in need technology to support it ,innovation being a vital component. So far, most of the innovations brought to the sector have been primarily focused on the attendee and less so on the planner itself. This little application will be, for starters environmentally friendly. Nowadays everyone from the 10 year old child to the 80 year old retired guy across the street, have in their possession a smartphone. This application would allow attendees to access information on their phones, and in doing so minimise the paper trail that such an event generates. This new application might represent the birth of the new green way to run a conference.

Another positive outcome of this application would be the planner's state of mind. It has been once said that the attendee, once present at a conference or meeting, regresses to the state of a child, seeing the planner as its "parent". Having all the information ready to access at any time, would mean that the planner would not be bother with such questions as "Do you know where I could get a hamburger?", minimising the stress level.

It seems that this application does not carry any negative aspects to it and will be more then beneficiary to the planner and the event industry. In case we have omitted something or disagree, feel free to comment.

Event planning 2.0

Event planning 2.0

We chose this recent article 2-2010 (latest version) because it deals with the sensible and clever use of social media strategy among the MICE INDUSTRY. Indeed, even if Internet and digital communication have been used in events since 2004, this industry just began to use the social media to improve their communications, to create new distribution channels and finally to allow interactive communication and networking. The Gesellschaft für Marketing GmbH in Berlin has its own definition for this new phenomenon, they define it as the “user generated content” (UGC). Nicole Simon, a web 2.0 expert from Lübeck, compares this progress from Internet to the web 2.0 as from static to dynamic. The German digital economy association – Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschft (BVDW) distinguishes between 4 different ways of using the social media: Networking; Contribution; Sharing; Messaging. Facebook has already more than 500 million active users; Tweeter counts about 750 tweets/second and 112 million active blogs with 120,000 new ones every day.

How can marketing departments use these trends in order to provide new tools to the event planners? Surveys have shown that in the USA spending in social marketing will increase by 34 %/ year until 2014. The event and meeting industry has to take advantage of this situation.

The new ROI stands not (only) anymore for Return on Investment but for Risk of Ignoring, which empathizes the importance for event planners to care for these new trends, vital for the successful survival in the MICE domain. Only organizers who will be able to adapt to the challenges, which present the new technologies, will be able to correctly exploit the new opportunities.

Event planners will still use predominately traditional tools to communicate as telephone, e-mail etc., nevertheless they cannot ignore the current trends in order to hit new target groups. Interactive tools enable event planners to communicate and share information about for instance good speakers, venues, former events and latest event information. It is therefore important to integrate social media at each stage of the event planning: before (social media monitoring: to benchmark the competitors and to analyze the environment), during (to share content and allow UGC) and after (to spread feedback to the attendees as well as the prospects for future events).

Some other examples could be easy communication about the event program and program changes via Twitter in order to keep all participants updated, setting up a help desk via a blog, it will present technical support for registrations and assure that everybody has the same knowledge level before attending an event. Furthermore, the new technologies enable sharing, networking and voting during the event. Thanks to these tools the so far passive audience can be turned into active participants. Moreover, tools as Skype will enable the integration of far away speakers to the meeting.

As a conclusion we can say that the article shows the importance of staying updated with the current technologies for all members of the MICE industry. A refuse could result in important losses of performance for the event planners. Nevertheless, we all have to keep in mind that these changes require a large amount of expenditures, know-how and man power. Constant monitoring, technical infrastructure and support need to be provided. Social media consultants and specialists can provide their help.

Resources: http://issuu.com/germany-meetings/docs/gcb-mag-1002-en issuu?mode=embed&layout=http://skin.issuu.com/v/light/layout.xml&showFlipBtn=true

image : http://www.markevanstech.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/social-media-consultant.jpg