As event marketing professionals, you’ve got to keep things fresh with new ideas or else you’ll fall behind. It’s your role to stay up-to-date with the industry standards! That’s why we’ve put together a list of 2009 conferences and exhibitions for trade show and event marketers. With all of the other things you need to plan ahead for, make sure to mark your calendar and save room in your budget. Before registering, you may want to consider the top 5 reasons why you should make an effort to attend:

1. Stay informed on the latest and greatest - Learn from your peers and the top leaders in the event marketing industry.

2. Make sure to network - Build your inside connections while attending conference seminars, mixers, and parties (sure, you’ll learn some interesting stuff while sitting in those sessions, but personally engaging in conversation with conference attendees is a huge benefit).

3. Pitch speaking opportunities - Your business can gain excellent visibility as a guest speaker (plus, you’ll be well-respected as a thought-leader), so encourage your executives to get on the speaker list.

4. Get noticed in the Expo Hall - Exhibit your products and evangelize what you do!

5. Drum up new business & maintain client relationships

*Special Note: Make one-on-one contacts with industry media - Conference organizers often provide a pre-registered press list upon request. This presents a great opportunity to meet reporters in person rather than pursuing them blindly with an email or phone call!

Here are some of the upcoming events listed in chronological order:

The Special Event 2009 will be held from January 28 - 30, 2009 at the San Diego Convention Center. This event is for any professional who produces events (weddings, parties, corporate events, and celebrations). There will be over 300+ vendors on the showroom floor. We attended last year’s conference in Atlanta, GA and were surprised by the huge extravaganza of entertainers, caterers, decorators…acrobats, balloons, and color galore!

2009 Event Solutions and Catersource Conference & Tradeshow will be held at the Las Vegas Hilton and Convention Center from February 22 - 26, 2009. This event will host more than 7,000 attendees and 1,000 tradeshow booths, this is the biggest show in the events and catering industry. Educational workshops/seminars with a wide variety of key learning sessions are available. You can now register here.

Exhibitor 2009 will be held from March 23-25, 2009 at Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. The event, which is hailed as being a “world conference and exhibition for trade show and corporate event marketers,” is produced by Exhibitor Media Group. 6,000 attendees and 300 exhibitors are expected to be there.

ISES Eventworld 2009 will be held from August 6 - 8, 2009 at the San Francisco Marriott Hotel in San Francisco, CA. 500+ attendees and more info will be provided as the date gets closer.

If you’re aware of any additional event marketing conferences that aren’t listed, please feel free to leave a “comment” and we’ll be sure to include it!

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Event Solutions magazine, a monthly trade publication covering the events, meetings and incentives industry, produces the annual Event Solutions Conference & Tradeshow. Through both the magazine and trade show, Event Publishing, LLC provides resources for everyone in the events industry and is best known for providing professional certificates for event planners and producers while delivering primary research to quantify and identify breaking trends in the industry.

Zvents was featured today, online, sharing how event marketers can reach the most of their target audience through Zvents’ local search and advertising network of hundreds of web and mobile partners.

Online marketing has become one of the best ways to promote an event and attract the right audience. Consumers are constantly searching the Internet for their specific interests, and as an event marketer, your goal is to compel attendees to get to your event.

Be sure to grab a subscription to Event Solutions after catching up on Zvents

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Hey L.A. Event Planners!

Zvents is exhibiting on June 5th at the L.A. Event Style Expo, and we’d love to meet you there! Get a free pass to the show (a $60 value!) when you register and use the promotional code PPLA. This special one-day event takes place at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Stop by the Zvents Booth (#530) and Mention this Blog Post and get a Free T-Shirt!

Show admission includes these special events:

10:15 - 11 a.m.
Keynote Presentation by Lynda Resnick
The marketing mind behind brands like POM Wonderful and FIJI Water, Lynda Resnick knows how to integrate events into successful branding campaigns. Matching the right events with the right customers is key to her success. During this keynote presentation, discover the strategies she employed at high-profile events such as the Academy, Golden Globe, and Emmy awards to ultimately make her brands household names. She’ll offer keen insights into today’s competitive marketplace and share tips for the ultimate event business success.

3 p.m. to 3:45 p.m.
Behind the Scenes at the GRAMMY Awards: What it Takes to Make Mega Events
In this session, Erick Weiss will moderate a discussion with top event producers from a cross section of industries: Branden Chapman, VP with the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, Len Iannelli, VP with Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, David Finch, CMP from Amgen and Judi Froehlich-Pascoe with Americas, BCD Meetings & Incentives and the eWomenNetwork. The discussion will focus on the commonalities and differences between the various industries and what it takes, behind the scenes, to produce world class mega events.

Panelists:
Erick Weiss, President - Honeysweet Productions
Branden Chapman, Vice President, Production & Process Management - The Recording Academy
Len Iannelli, VP of Special Events, Marketing - 20th Century Fox Film Corp.
David Wellington Finch, CMP, Sourcing & Compliance Manager, Meetings & Conventions - Amgen
Judi Froehlich- Pascoe, Director of Business Development, Americas BCD Meetings & Incentives Managing Director - LA eWomenNetwork

BizBash LA Event Style Awards 2008
4:30 – 5:30 p.m.
See the events that dazzled! Celebrate the year’s best events at the BizBash Event Style Awards 2008. Glimpse best practices and get new ideas when more than 15 event categories are honored for outstanding industry contributions.

Interested in the full conference program? Visit the BizBash site for more information about the day’s educational sessions, and use discount code PPCONF for a special rate!

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Last week we wrote about Eventbrite as an inexpensive and easy-to-use event registration and ticketing service. Yesterday, they announced the beta launch of the Eventbrite Partner Affiliate Network, which enables affiliates to earn money by referring event publishers and promoters to use the Eventbrite service.

While ticketing affiliate programs have been around since about, oh, Day 2 of the Internet, Eventbrite’s program puts a new twist on the model - an affiliate receives a cut of the revenue on every ticket sold by an event publisher who signs up for the Eventbrite service through the affiliate’s web site

If you become an affiliate partner, here’s how it works:

1. Run Eventbrite ads on your site.

2. An event promoter or publisher sees the ad, is intrigued by its promise of easy and cheap event registration and ticketing, and goes to the Eventbrite site.

3. The same event promoter learns more, says “Hey! This makes my life easier and helps me sell more tickets to my event”, and signs up to manage one of their upcoming events through Eventbrite.

4. Let’s say the event is a music festival, and 3,000 tickets are sold at $50 each through Eventbrite. The service fee for each ticket is $1.25. As the referring affiliate partner, you receive 35% of all the service fees collected (3,000 x $1.25 x 0.35), so you earn $1,312.50.

Eventbrite also offers a traditional ticketing affiliate program: if you sell tickets to their events, you earn a commission for every ticket sold through your site.

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Let’s face it, promoting events can be a lot of fun, but managing the event registration, ticketing, and attendee lists can be a real pain without the right tools. Today, more and more event participants expect to be able to register online for events, which means you may need an easy and inexpensive way to facilitate registrations, collect payment information, and manage your attendee list.

If you host small, infrequent events or large events (where there are few types of attendees), all you may need is an event registration tool that allows you to:

• Collect credit card and registration information
• Process credit card charges
• Set up a basic registration form that you can link to from your Web site
• View/export a list of people who registered for your event

Two services to check out are Eventbrite and Brown Paper Tickets.

Eventbrite

With Eventbrite, there are no set up or monthly fees, or ticket fees for free tickets or events. All major credit cards are accepted, and final payment processing is done through Google Checkout or Paypal. Some nice functionality Eventbrite provides is the ability to send email invitations, customize and brand your event registration page, offer discount codes and group discounts, track affiliate/partner ticket sales, and track RSVPs from invites.

Eventbrite also goes a step further and offers to publish your event in search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and…Zvents!

Fees: 2.5% of the ticket price, with a minimum fee/ticket of $0.99 and maximum fee/ticket of $9.95.

Brown Paper Tickets

As the “fair-trade ticketing service”, Brown Paper Tickets is here to change the ticketing industry, as stated in their Bill of Rights. BPT offers similar functionality to Eventbrite, and also includes 24-hour phone orders, assigned seating, password-protected prices, comp ticket and media pool ticket distribution, festival-style ticketing, and the option to print paper tickets (for a nominal fee).

Unfortunately, Brown Paper Tickets does not publish their event information to any of the event sites or search engines (Hey BPT, we’d love to hear from you if you want to give your clients this option).

Fees: 2.5% of the ticket price, plus a fee per ticket of $0.99.

Event Registration Services For More Complicated Events
Planning a more complex event, such as a conference, trade show, or series of events? Idealware wrote a fantastic in-depth post about the features and benefits of several event registration and ticketing tools, including Acteva, 123SignUp, Cvent, and RegOnline.

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Southern California Media Partners In Zvents Network

Yesterday we posted about how Zvents syndicates its listings to over 200 media partners. Following up on our promise to share more regional information (while we update our Media Publishers page!), below is a list of our current media partners in southern California and the greater Los Angeles metro area:

• Orange County Register
• LA.com
• Daily Breeze (Gardena)
• High Desert (Victorville)
• Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (Ontario)
• Los Angeles Daily News
• Pasadena Star-News
• Press-Telegram (Long Beach, CA)
• San Bernadino Sun
• San Gabriel Valley Tribune
• Squeeze OC
• Whittier Daily News

If you have a SoCal business or want to promote events happening in southern California, listing on Zvents (or a Zvents’ media partner site) will automatically share your listing with all the media partners in the Zvents network, including the local media outlets listed above.

Ready to list your business or events? Sign up for a free account today!

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Earlier this week, I spoke with an account manager from a local public relations and marketing agency about Zvents, and realized the need to better explain a key benefit of our service. She thought the listings she entered for her client’s business and events showed up only on Zvents. That’s when I realized that we needed a post on the benefits of Zvents’ syndication, pronto.

Did you know that any event or business listing added to Zvents automatically gets syndicated to our 200+ online media partners?

Here’s how it works: if you list your business or event on Zvents or any of our media partner sites, your listing shows up on ALL of them. Enter one listing and it shows up in over 200 places. That’s it.

Three Benefits of Listing on Zvents:

1. Your Listing is Promoted Everywhere. At Once. As a business owner or event promoter, you only need to enter information one time, and it is automatically pushed to over 200 media outlets.
2. Saves You Time. Instead of entering or sending the same event information to multiple media outlets and websites, you can enter it on the Zvents network in one fell swoop. Also, when you edit your listing information, it updates all the listings at the same time.
3. Increases Your Chances Of Getting Promoted In Print. Many of our media partners are newspapers, whose editors use the Zvents database as the starting point for selecting featured events for their print editions.

As an example, let’s look at one of my favorite local ice cream shops: Ici in Berkeley, CA. This tiny shop elevates ice cream to another (heavenly) level, with unusual flavors such as Rose Pistachio, Burnt Caramel, and Malted Vanilla. If you are in Berkeley, make sure to stop by – it’s amazing. And full disclosure: I don’t know the owners or anyone who works there – it’s just GOOD.

Ici is listed on Zvents - but because it’s on Zvents - it is also automatically listed on several other Bay Area media websites:

• Contra Costa Times
• InsideBayArea.com (the online site for several Bay Area newspapers, including The Oakland Tribune, Tri-Valley Herald, San Mateo County Times, The Argus, Daily Review and Alameda Times-Star)
• Marin Independent Journal
• Palo Alto Daily News
• Petaluma360.com
• San Jose Mercury News
• Santa Rosa Press Democrat

Ici listing on Zvents:

Ici listing on InsideBayArea.com:

(Notice the description and the photos are the same on both sites.)

Hopefully, at this point you’re saying to yourself: “Okay, I get it. But my business is already listed on Zvents. How did it get there, and how can I take ownership of it?”
Zvents is a local search engine, and part of what we do is actively search the Web for information that is useful to our users. If your business is already listed, you can get control of it by signing up for an account (it’s free) and sending us a message.

We’ve launched a lot of new partners in the past couple months, and are in the process of updating the list on our ever-growing Media Partners page. In the meantime, we plan to post about the partner networks in various areas of the country. Want to know which media is participating in your area? Leave us a comment, and we’ll let you know!

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