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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We’ve been cooking up new ways to promote local businesses and events, and we’re thrilled (exhausted and relieved!) to announce that the Enhanced Listings beta period is officially open.

What are Enhanced Listings?
A new way to make your event or venue listings stand out from basic listings, and benefit from enhanced features and design options.

By upgrading your Basic Listing to an Enhanced Listing, you can:

• Tailor your marketing messages with special offers, news and announcements and promo codes
• Appear prominently in search results with a colorful, highlighted listing
• Increase brand awareness by adding your company logo
• Upload a video ad, commercial, or virtual tour
• Stylize your listing with colorful custom graphics
• Enhance your brand experience by removing advertisements or user reviews

We offer two packages - and Enhanced Detail Page package and a Search Results package. You can also add additional upgrades, such as removing ads and user reviews, or adding custom graphics to the border on your listing.

Here’s an example of an Enhanced Detail Page Package for Sibby’s Cupcakery in San Mateo:

The Search Results Package highlights your listing in search results:

For a limited time (a few weeks, most likely), you can create Enhanced Listings for your business, venue or events - for free! Join the beta now.

And remember…every listing created on Zvents is shared with our growing 250+ Zvents Media Network partners too.

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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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How one guy is using Zvents to promote his music and support a good cause

Are you a performer, artist or public speaker who wants free publicity for your events? Create a free Performer listing on Zvents. Your listing is the place to tell others about yourself and your upcoming appearances. Here’s how one performer is using Zvents to get the word out about his music and events:

Silverdave, a songwriter/storyteller aka Dave Silverberg, has been performing in Bay Area clubs and cafes for years. Recently, Dave learned about Zvents and created his own Performer listing to reach a wider audience and to help promote an upcoming show. Along with four other local acoustic artists, he is hosting the Second Thought Festival, a benefit concert for suicide prevention.

“A good friend recently lost a friend to suicide, and was understandably feeling depressed. Maybe it could have been prevented, if he could have reached out to someone”, said Dave. “That sparked the idea for the show – we figured, hey, we can help by raising money for a local suicide prevention group. Someone else’s life can be saved.”

Silverdave will perform this Sunday night at Hotel Utah, along with artists Mia & Jonah, Nurse Reagan, and Billy Schafer. All artist proceeds from the event go to the San Francisco Suicide Prevention organization. Thanks Dave, for using Zvents to promote your concert!

Here’s how to get the most out of creating your own Performer listing:

• Sign up for a free Zvents account (if you don’t already have one)
• Add a Performer listing, and make your profile interesting. Add images, related links, and tags.
  • About tags – To help people find you, add tags of common misspellings of your name. If you are known under different names, add those too.
• Add upcoming events – from your Performer page, go to the Tools menu (located in the top left section of the page), and select “New Event for Performer” under the “Performer” section. Enter your event details here.
• Tell your friends, family, and fans about your profile. Ask them to sign up for an RSS feed of your page, so they will get automatic updates when you add new events or update your information. It’s a great way to stay in touch!
• Share your listing through popular social media tools, like Facebook, del.icio.us, Digg and StumbleUpon. Click the “Share” tool on your page to get started.

For ideas on how to create your own Performer listing, check out these for inspiration:

• Seth Godin, Marketing Guru
• Anjelah Johnson, Comedian
• Mebanesville, Acoustic Rock
• Nitidus, Award-winning Hard Rock Band
• The Pocket, Reggae/Alternative Rock Band
• Stephen Sanfilippo, Painter
• Stoney Creek Warriors, Junior Hockey Team
• Slingshot Country Band, yep…a Country Band!

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Did you know that you can use Zvents to advertise your garage sales, yard sales, and rummage sales? Whether you’re selling stuff you no longer need, or for a good cause, getting the word out about your sale is a key component to making it a success.

Here’s where Zvents can help. Listing your sale on Zvents is an effective way to promote your garage sale, because:

• It’s free to list your sale. Sign up for a free account to get started.
• Your listing is automatically syndicated to our newspaper partners (we have over 80). Say your sale is in Costa Mesa, CA. Your online listing would also appear on LA.com, Orange County Register, and SqueezeOC, plus a few smaller papers – and you only entered it once!
• Zvents is frequently crawled by major search engines, like Google and Yahoo, so there’s a good chance your sale will appear in natural search engine results too.

Below are six tips for successful online promotion of your garage sale on Zvents:

1. When to advertise? We recommend listing your sale 2-3 weeks prior to the date. This gives people time to find your listing and also gives major search engines, like Google and Yahoo, time to index your Zvents listing. This makes it more likely to be found by people searching online.
2. Where is it? Make sure you list the correct address. Zvents automatically generates a map for your listing, which includes driving directions.
3. What’s for sale? Include ‘hot’ items you are selling, popular items might include:

• Baby clothing & items
• Furniture
• Toys
• Bicycles
• Tools
• Sporting equipment
• Books
• CDs/DVDs/Tapes
• Small Kitchen Appliances
• Unusual items, like this Hello Kitty Beach Cruiser

4. When is the sale taking place? List the start and end times of the sale, and be sure to specify if early birds are not allowed…or you might have some folks knocking on your door at 6:00 am!
5. A picture is worth a thousand words. If you have pictures of some of your items, upload them to enhance your sale listing.
6. You say puh-tay-toe, I say poe-ta-toe. Make sure you tag your listing, because one person’s garage sale is another person’s yard sale, and yet another’s rummage or tag sale! Including different terms will ensure that your listing shows up when users search with various words.

Got other ideas on how to promote your sale online? Let us know with a comment.

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