We’ve come across a fun study from Alloy Marketing revealing that the college class of 2112 is increasingly, well, green.  In more ways than one.  According to Allow, the 2112 class, now the largest in history with 13.6 million college students (18-30), has at its disposal a record $237 billion in consumer spending.   What’s fun about the dollars and cents you might ask?  Well, it seems an overwhelming proportion of those budgets are socially conscience, with a growing 41% (net) of respondents preferring socially responsible brands and opportunities.

Still missing the fun?  Perhaps ‘excitement’ is a better word; I don’t mean to imply we’re personally excited by the data, rather, that as college students settle into classes and prepare for the new school year, we’re pleased to have mtvU bringing local events and promotions to those college students with Zvents.  mtvU, which owns and operates the College Media Network, the largest interactive network of online college newspapers in the US (itself owned by MTV Networks and Viacom), has joined the Zvents network, adding 25 college Campus Daily Guides to the network of sites through which your events and local businesses can be promoted with a single listing.  The partnership makes it easy for students to discover what’s going on, where to go, and where to spend those disposable dollars around campus, connecting local and national merchants with those college consumers.

Coincidentally, Alloy Marketing specializes in marketing to college students through events, targeted placements, and specialized research.  The similarity between the study and our partnership was too great to ignore so we took a moment to find a few local businesses promoting socially conscience events to college students:

• Budding, Tempe, AZ ASU k-12 teachers can visit EarthFest Educator’s Night at the Phoenix Zoo
• Ann Arbor U of M students can catch a nearby Solar Presentation as a part of an environmental lecture series
• The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology hosts countless special events regarding the community and world in which we live
• We’ve even discovered commercial success with students’ most socially responsible apparel brand hosting runs at NikeWomen near Northwestern

Local merchants and event marketers can submit listings to the network from any Campus Daily Guide, benefiting from highly targeted, relevant marketing to this appealing demographic.

By the end of the year, mtvU will launch 50 campuses. For the initial phase, 25 universities across the country have joined the network:

• Ohio State University
• Arizona State University Main
• University of Maryland College Park
• University of Texas at Austin
• University of Central Florida
• University of South Florida
• University of Washington
• University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
• Florida State University
• University of Arizona
• University of Cincinnati Main Campus
• University of Houston
• North Carolina State University
• University of Colorado at Boulder
• University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• University of South Carolina
• Columbia University of Pittsburgh
• University of Kentucky
• University of New Mexico Main Campus
• George Washington University
• Northeastern University
• University of Nebraska – Lincoln
• University of Pennsylvania
• Northwestern University
• Emory University

To advertise on the Campus Daily Guides, contact mtvU directly or simply add an event!

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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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How’s this for the evolution of offline events to the internet? (I’m sure you can imagine why this caught our attention)

Founded in 1996, the Interactive Advertising Bureau represents over 300 leading interactive companies that actively engage in and support the sale of interactive advertising. What is interactive advertising you might ask? We’re talking about digital advertising, that which we’re dealing with online but more, that which you can leverage through emerging “interactive” technologies such as video games, DVRs (TiVo), search engines, and cell phones. When you promote an event with flash ad creative, that’s interactive advertising. Television commercials, print advertising, radio, billboards… all are passive forms of advertising; the audience absorbs the message and reacts or ignores. Interactive gives the audience a measure of control, influence, or interaction on the message you present to them; most would argue you are more likely to reach target audiences than with traditional advertising and you can certainly more effectively measure the performance of your marketing.

According to the IAB, IAB members are responsible for selling over 86% of online advertising in the U.S. The IAB supports the continued growth of interactive advertising as well as interactive’s share, and of its member’s share, of total marketing spends.

The IAB’s VP of Events helps build their conference, event and exhibition business (sounds a little like us!) in through with the IAB presents recommended standards and practices along with effectiveness research and education about the advertising industry and interactive advertising. You’ll have the opportunity to work with interactive advertising industry leaders, programming exciting and cutting edge topics regarding Web 2.0, gaming and mobile.

If interested, get in touch with IAB’s David Doty at (david at iab dot net). The successful candidate will participate at the highest levels of management, manage events P&L, and direct industry events such as MIXX Conference Expo and Awards dinner, Leadership Forums and Luncheons, Innovators Roundtable Dinners, and the IAB Annual Meeting, the industry event focused on the future of the interactive ecosystem.

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Most event marketers overlook the tremendous potential their website has to promote events. Search engines, the overwhelming primary source of traffic to your site, depend on structured, exposed content yet event calendars are oftn the worst examples of this ideal (read: search friendly) format. Search engine optimization, the practice of improving the quality and design of content so that the engines index more than just your homepage, is easier than people think.

Think of a search engine as a library. Each page on your company’s website is a book in that library: some of the books are good, others popular, some miss covers or have been misplaced never again to be found by the librarian. Users are more likely to use a library if it is well organized and promotes the most popular books and greatest variety of books so they can easily be found. Obviously search engines want to promote you, your job is to ensure that your books, the event pages of your website, don’t have torn or missing pages and that the material is accessible, valuable and popular.

Unfortunately for you, search marketers and in all likelihood the SEOs (the person who provides suggestions to the web developers to ensure content is search friendly) at your company typically focus on improving the most important content on your site: the homepage, product or services information, and categories. In doing so, they quickly dismiss promotional content like online coupons, store event calendars, and store locators; namely, the content that draws foot traffic through the door of your local business.

Far too often, websites make an easy mistake by presenting in-store event calendars in a javascript application that allows them to easily update the content (just ask the developers if they use ‘Javascript’). Doing so ensures that search engines, the library, can’t index those pages; users will never find those pages and you miss out on the most significant source of traffic. Sure, customers who arrive at the homepage will see your prominent link to a “store event calendar” but most customers arriving online are there because they intend to interact online. You want to reach the offline customers using search engines to find your business.

To ensure that search engines such as Zvents and Google can index and promote your event details; forward this list of priorities to your in-house search marketing manager, the SEO, or take them directly to the web developers. Getting your event content designed and exposed with the following in mind helps helps your reach our millions of unique users searching for local things to do, in-store events, and sales:

• Most importantly, and to reiterate what we’ve just explained, do not use Javascript!
  • In fact, your developers should never use Javascript; tell them to avoid it like the plague
    • Are there uses for Javascript? Sure there are, but the lost search traffic outweigh any benefits you get from a feature that can be created in some other language (code)
  • Also avoid Flash and do not present the event details in an image or banner
  • Use text in simple HTML, dhtml, or CSS.
• Do not move your event calendar.
  • We should be able to find it at the same URL today and six months from now.Ensure a consistent layout of the event calendar and refrain from changing that design
• Design a simple template for the event calendar, use it to promote all events, and refrain from changing that design
• Clearly identify event details
  • Event name (just the event name, not your business)
  • Start time (with AM or PM)
  • Date
  • Short description and a link for more details
    • By the way, a link and short description aren’t necessary but they really help - the name, time, and date are critical (but that should be obvious)
• Location should be displayed separately and consistently
  • Business name (your event name is not Spring Sale at Macy’s Palo Alto - The business name is Macy’s Palo Alto and the event is the Spring Sale)
  • Address including city/state (it doesn’t hurt to use the abbreviation of the state and the full name)
  • Zip code

Think your calendar is ready to be crawled? Submit it to us and we’ll unleash the search bots to index the content. Know though that submission to a search crawler is no guarantee that you’ll get indexed. Engines may find problems with the calendar that prevent us from promoting it. To ensure you get indexed add your business listing directly then tell us about the events.

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We’ve just turned up the dial in Los Angeles, powering events for LA.com and giving users and marketers access to one of most vibrant and exciting cities and online destinations. Scour LA is the first-stop resource on where to go, what to do, what’s new and what’s classic in southern California. Run by MediaNews Group’s California Newspapers Partnership, which also includes Gannett, one of the largest newspaper and broadcasting companies in the U.S., and Stephens Media Group, an industry leader in newspaper publishing and multimedia, LA.com features Zvents’ comprehensive event, movie, venue, and restaurant indexes delivering a highly relevant search experience to users looking for things to do in LA.

Whether playing at Steamers Jazz Club and Cafe or the revered Hollywood Bowl, local bands, singers, agents, managers and promoters can submit events through Scour LA or Zvents and benefit from promotion in both online destinations. Advertisers and marketers targeting southern California can reach this coveted audience with contextually relevant, prominent display ads throughout LA.com’s guide to the arts, nightlife, and culture.

Visit Scour LA to discover what’s playing at the classic Orpheum Theater or find movie premieres at the old movie houses from Hollywood’s golden age or one of the major multi-plexes such as AMC’s Magic Johnson Crenshaw 15. And who could visit LA without keeping an eye out for celebrities?? You might have just such an opportunity to catch a glimpse of Justin Timberlake at his CD release party at Arena Nightclub.

Search local events with Scour LA and Discover Things To Do.

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When I first started working on Zvents, I didn’t have a full appreciation for the subtle differences between public events and personal events/calendaring. Since both public events and personal events are typically presented visually to users with a calendar, we can probably treat them identically, right?

Wrong. We quickly encountered many differences between them as we developed our data model and UI. One major area where public and private events are different are in their repeat patterns. Repeating events are a very important feature for both personal and public events. In the case of public event search, it’s important to collapse repeating events into a single entry in your search results (unless otherwise requested) otherwise they tend to dominate the results. Whether an event belongs to a repeating series also impacts relevance scores.

When we first added repeating events to Zvents, we did a quick survey of the repeating events UI in use in many popular applications (Outlook, Yahoo! Calendar, etc.) We settled on a combined approach, similar to the one used in each of these programs. It turned out, however, that this model wasn’t a good fit for the public events space since public events tend to recur at much higher frequencies and using much more complex recurrence patterns. A play or movie often recurs at multiple times within a single day, often at different venues. None of the recurrence models in standard personal calendaring programs could adequately represent these patterns.

We just enhanced our model to handle the complexities outlined above. It is now possible to associate multiple repeat patterns with an event. It means the UI for entering events is slightly more complex, but we think the additional flexibility is well worth it. check it out on the event promotion page.

-Shane

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We’ve been busy at Zvents lately, mostly with building a bunch of cool new functionality to make our users happy. One of the neatest new things we’ve launched is an embeddable dynamic calendar which can be used on any website. If you’re reading this blog, you are no-doubt familiar with the blog calendar widget that we announced at our launch.

We’ve received a lot of requests from folks for a calendar object that was larger and useful in contexts beyond a blog sidebar, and so last week at the When 2.0 Conference at Stanford, we announced and demoed Zvents venue page or a Zvents group page and created versions that anyone can embed on their own website. We’ve put up some demo sites on Blogspot to show this functionality. Based on our ongoing work with some great folks up in Tacoma, here is an example venue calendar for the Tacoma Museum of Glass, and here is an example group calendar for the shared Tacoma Arts Calendar. We’re also able to build these against a saved search, as shown by this jazz music calendar for the SF Bay Area.

Some cool features of these calendars:
* Switch between 1-day, 3-day, week, and month views
* Scroll dynamically forward and backward in time
* Readers can get RSS feeds and ICal directly from the hosting page
* Mouseovers on the 30-day view show details for daily events

These calendars are a perfect way for venues, community organizations, bloggers with aspirations, and small media sites to quickly and easily create a never-empty, highly-relevant events calendar for their sites. We haven’t yet rolled the interface into Zvents.com so that you can create your own, but we’re happy to spend 10 minutes making one specially just for you if you contact us at business@zvents.com.

-Shane

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