Building a Face-to-Face Social Networking Company in St. Louis

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Supposedly, you don’t find a lot of high technology talent in St. Louis. Supposedly, it’s all on the coasts where the money and the ‘cool’ people are.

Turns out . . . that’s not true.

With much of the business technology attention focused on social networks and mobile devices, what would a 6-person software company, based in St. Louis, know about how to revolutionize the world wide events industry using those very same tools?

Turns out . . . a lot!

With their start in offices underneath a hot dog stand, St. Louis based BusyEvent is growing their 3 year old company through local investments and Fortune 1000 clients. By being a better, faster, cheaper and greener way to run an event, BusyEvent is weathering the economic storm, hiring talent and ‘keeping it local’.

Recently I had a chance to speak with David Schenberg, CEO of St. Louis based BusyEvent:

David, tell me about BusyEvent.

· Hi Greg, thanks for taking the time to learn about our company and what we’re doing in the live event, social networking world. We’re focused on the Business-to-Business Tradeshow & Events industry along with the consumer “Show” industry. In April, we introduced a product called Event Bookmarking (http://www.eventbookmarking.com) which pairs a Facebook-like software service with a key-fob sized remote control called the BeLinker. Imagine going to an event and being able to efficiently collect all of the people, products and ideas that you were interested in and then, rather than trying to carry home a tower of business cards, loads of brochures and other minutia, you could login to your Event Bookmarking page, reach out, connect, share and learn more about the things you were interested in . . . that’s Event Bookmarking and, it’s also available on mobile devices.

Where does the social networking aspect come in?

· Typical on-line event social networks make you create another profile on their system and then provide match-making tools to help the attendee get involved with threaded conversations, Twitter following filtered by hashtag and other elements that attempt to build a community around the event. From our perspective, that’s only the start . . . We saw attendees putting in all this work to create a profile, make themselves known, participate in conversations and attempt to connect with other people and then, at the start of the event, the on-line only social networks walk you to the front door of the event, pat you on the back and in essence say “good luck”! And that’s where Event Bookmarking is different. In addition to all of the ‘pre-event’ social networking elements, Event Bookmarking helps you carry your personal and professional networks on-site, find and interact with the people, products and ideas that you are interested in and then, helps you leverage all of that effort post-event where you can build real opportunities and connections. Bottom line, we take a 365 day view of an event and focus on the 3-5 days on-site that is the crucial time when all of that effort matters.

How did you come up with this idea?

· After working in the events and experiential marketing industry for the bulk of our careers, my business partner Brian Slawin and I realized that tradeshows and events have been run, pretty much the same way, for the past 20 years and technology has only brought an incremental increase in efficiency. The onslaught of social networking and social media habits really demanded that there be a clean handoff from what people naturally do on-line to what people do on-site and post-event. There’s a tremendous amount of costs associated with events and historically, much of the value has been ‘left behind’ at the event venue. A year ago, we began outlining this trend in an article titled “Tradeshows, Where Good Leads Go To Die” (http://www.busyevent.com/blog/?p=18) and, almost a year to the day, we launched Event Bookmarking at one of our favorite client’s events.

That was kind of gutsy . . . rolling out a brand new social networking technology at your favorite client’s event?

· Yeah, well, we really had two things going for us: 1) We knew what we wanted to develop and our developer team is just the most outstanding group of people we’ve ever worked with and 2) Our client’s are very supportive of our ideas knowing that we will do whatever it takes to make them successful. Prior to the official launch, we did a lot of testing internally and then supported two smaller events that allowed us to beta in a live environment and we learned a great deal about how people use and accept social networking tools.

How did it go?

· Well, against what we’d promised, our client gave us a solid B+ and signed a long-term contract to continue the relationship in support of the Event Bookmarking system. They’ve been a client of ours since Day 1 and they’ve really pushed us to make sure the technology we bring is relevant to a return on investment. Frankly, since we’ve been managing their events for more than 2 years and we’ve embedded a number of our software tools into their learning and training process, out of necessity, we invented Event Bookmarking with the goal of cutting the cost of traditional event management in half.

In half . . . did you accomplish that?

· At the event in May, where we launched Event Bookmarking, all 3,200 attendees from their entire worldwide system used Event Bookmarking. During the 3-½ day event, the system captured more than 35,000 connections; person to person, speaker to attendee and on the tradeshow floor. All of the people, products and ideas that the attendees were interested in and bookmarked were instantly and wirelessly transmitted to their PURL page (Personal URL) which has now become a private social network for the entire company. Since “BeLinking” occurs in seconds, the system was able to provide real-time reporting on what was happening so that they could take action when it mattered – now – rather than waiting to hear about something after the event. In addition to our client being really pleased, several of the expo vendors told us that this was a vast improvement over anything else they’d ever used for leads capture and management. Now, post-event, we’re seeing all of the traffic to the Event Bookmarking system as attendees download presentations, interact with the exhibitors they met, share information with colleagues and most importantly, create a community that will enhance the client’s business and provide measurable ROI to their exhibitors. So, yes, I’d say we more than accomplished the ‘in half’ part and likely better than that.

And, what have you learned?

· What we learned is that at the core, our ideas about face-to-face social networking, using a combination of web and on-site tools and the desire that people have to connect, are right. In any economy, event managers want to produce a quality event and make a profit. To do so, they need attendees, exhibitors and sponsors. Each of those stake holders want something; connections, information, leads and opportunities and they want to accomplish all of that as efficiently as possible. For instance, people don’t want to spend the time to fill out another social media profile . . . so, we’re integrated with LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to make that easier. Our tech savvy clients want tools they can use on their mobile devices, others just want a ‘thing’ they can use, so, now we support both. We’ve also figured out how to reduce the adoption cycle so that an event occurring next week can utilize Event Bookmarking. We’re also getting very good at monetizing the data stream and presenting information in context that allows exhibitors and attendees to connect more easily. And most importantly, we’ve figured out how to make Event Bookmarking highly cost-effective for the group or company managing the event. However, the biggest thing we learned was a huge mistake that we almost didn’t avoid. Our initial concept was to be web-based, just like all the other event social networks, but we quickly realized that the real opportunity is on-site, at the event, face-to-face. So, since a mobile device was our ultimate goal but we realized that the software had to be easy to use and provide reporting and real-time interactions, we took the unusual step of providing an inexpensive wearable device that, just like the mobile device version, offers social networking, audience response and expo lead management. Had we not been willing to provide a hardware platform, as an option to our clients, I think we’d be less successful today and certainly, the future of our tools would look differently than they do today.

So, what’s next and what do you see for the future of face-to-face social networking and BusyEvent?

· We’re really focused on helping event professionals create and manage more efficient and profitable events and event attendees know more about the people and products they’re interacting with. Right now, we’re in the midst of developing a mobile device based event management system that allows attendees to arrive, check-in using their mobile devices, receive all of the necessary credentials and then be immediately connected to the secret conversation that goes on at every event. If we had to put a name on it, we’d call it “proactive awareness”, essentially matching people with other people and ideas before and during an event and then carrying those relationships to a private social network after the event that makes everyone’s experience more profitable and worthwhile.