Every conversation in the event marketing industry eventually comes around to technology. You want to know what tools are out there to make your jobs easier, make your programs more successful and most crucially, make your target consumers love you the most. This month, we give you a quick tour of some of the standout technology products and tools on display at the Event Marketing Summit, our annual executive education conference, held May 7-9 in Salt Lake City.
BoothTraffic.com
BoothTraffic is a master of the multi-touch content delivery screen. It calls them eDoc stations, and these docs are loaded up with 14 different types of interactive games and fully customizable content streams. The stations can support up to 16 individual simultaneous users so you can get a ton of buzz about your quizzes, puzzles, match games or other interactives. And with rental prices starting at just $995 per unit, you’re looking at a pretty sweet deal, too.
Certain Inc.
Certain brings the thunder with its feature-loaded event management platform, handling and streamlining everything in an event’s lifecycle, from planning and budgeting, through on-site data collection and reporting to post-event analysis and data management. It’s a backend dashboard at heart, but with mobile-ready integration, you’ll never be tied to a computer and as a result will be able to run more fluid and nimble activations across your portfolio.
Cvent
The company’s CrowdCompass is a mobile app implementation suite, specifically tailored for b-to-b events. It’s cross-platform and way too feature rich to describe in this space, but take a look and you’ll see what the hubbub is about. Crowdtorch is an app designed to take advantage of the unique brand activation opportunities at festivals and concerts by bringing consumers in and giving them content-driven exclusive advantages that will drive all the love straight to your brand.
DoubleDutch
Event apps are sometimes all about the user experience, which is great, but are you getting anything tangible out of them? If not, look into DoubleDutch’s new event app, which is set up to put data collection and reporting first in order to ensure that you can get the juicy meat off that tasty experience bone. In addition to all of the usual features, this shiny new toy includes embedded surveys and polls for real-time attendee reporting, monetization services including promoted messages, a sponsor directory, a branded splash page, push notifications and custom badges. As a final treat, every app can be integrated with existing reg systems from Cvent, eTouches, Active, and more, in addition to social tie-ins with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and onsite in-app barcode scanning for lead gen.
Eshots
Taking the lead in the race to integrated gaming, and it’s doing it with a product called QuickPrize. At the core, it’s a lead generation device, with games, prizes and contests designed to collect and vet potential contacts through incentives and game objectives that will determine likely behaviors and even purchase readiness. Game on.
Eventbase
With gigantic events like SXSW and the Olympics under its belt and more than five million downloads across its platform, it’s hard to top that kind of proven power. The secret is in unfailing reliability and scalability. Want to go big and never hear a complaint about how your app isn’t loading? Go see Eventbase. It does it by keeping top-notch servers tied to redundant hardware and multiple levels of data protection that gets backed up daily over huge multi-gigabit fiber optic hard lines. Plus live, human teams of techs who watch the whole system run 24/7.
Fish Technologies
Ties deep, granular measurement tools to super-fun interactive technology that keeps key consumers engaged and happy to volunteer their data to you. FISH uses tactics like expert social media management and RFID activity monitoring to inform its main mission, bringing brands actionable data that helps bring customers to point of sale. Also exciting, the work it’s doing for massive sports platforms like the NFL where one data system runs throughout the entire fan experience. Fun for fans, data-rich for brands. Touchdown.
Gather Digital
Makes apps for folks who like to keep it professional, specializing in technology companies, large corporations and financial firms. Because of its chosen niche, Gather has mastered the art of tailoring apps for corporate events and giving motivated attendees the tools to tailor their experiences through integrated networking and scheduling tools, while making sure everything still speaks to them with a clear brand voice.
LED3
A provider of LED displays and services that will figuratively blow your eyes out. Having handled everything from sports arenas to concert venues, LED3 can turn up to 11 whatever you’ve got planned. Some of the options include indoor ultra high definition LED video walls, full-color fixed outdoor LED digital displays and transparent LED video walls. Any of these can be as small as a simple television or as huge as you can imagine.
Mad Systems
Every type of A/V install you can imagine is right in the Mad wheelhouse, but the big game happens inside its interactives unit. This skunk works specialty division concentrates on electro-mechanical displays, touchscreen interactives, sensor-based motion-controlled activations and fully custom interfaces. So, if you want a real wow-factor with a custom, never-seen-before feel, go ahead and get Mad.
Natural Insight
If you are looking for a solution that will allow you to schedule your staffers for a global event, in gigantic numbers, all over the world, Natural Insight could very well be your salvation. It’s a cloud-based workforce management solution that’s already in use by 40,000 people in 70,000 locations globally. It helps you coordinate everything from dynamic scheduling to task management and time keeping. Sweet bonus: it also delivers analytics about work quality so you can understand what’s going on and make adjustments quickly and efficiently, if desired.
Magency Digital
Deploys digital sleight-of-hand interactives that will give your guests a taste of the amazing while you give them a taste of your brand. Magency has designed and built tablet applications for everything from small training seminars to large conferences, which you can deploy yourself or, better, tap into its network of digital performers that will wow your attendees with technology-based branded illusions and performances. Shazam.
MoZeus Worldwide
Check out Smart Activator, a comprehensive marketing activation platform that is designed to leverage smartphones, Facebook, email and photo/video sharing in tandem in order to help brands connect with consumers quickly and cost efficiently. It runs on either Android or iOS, and, thanks to MoZeus’ experience and Smart Activator’s interdisciplinary nature, is sure to reap you some tasty rewards.
Poken
It’s all about streamlining lead generation for Poken. They want you to get all the qualified leads you can, in as efficient a way as possible. And they can do it, thanks to the Poken device. It’s a tiny “digital business card” that allows your sales force to collect contact details with a simple tap, and then stores the data on digital stickers for later follow up. It’s fun, so people will be happy to tap you, and fast, so no one gets annoyed.
Postano
You need perspective. You need eyes on the ground. And that ground is the social web. And those eyes come from Postano. This product helps you see the conversation around your brand instantly, through its platform for monitoring, organizing and delivering a total view of what’s being said online. It’s also set up for reaching out to key influencers and evangelists and helping you begin a dialogue in a natural and authentic way. For Postano, it’s all about giving attendees a chance to add to the conversation, and create their own content. And once that’s rolling, you’ve got it made, folks.
QuickMobile
Mobile event app creation doesn’t get too much simpler or turnkey than with QuickMobile. If you’ve got a computer and a basic sense of language, you can build and manage your next app in just a few minutes. Builders can choose from more than 30 different modules, into which they can load tons of types of content like video and .pdfs, interactive materials like floor maps and schedules, and actionable items like speaker presentations. All within the app. And we think that’s pretty darn cool. So cool that we tapped QuickMobile for our EMS app.
Social PIX
You’ve heard about Social PIX before, we hope, and if not, it’s time. The formula is simple: photo activation + social = brand love. Each activation Social PIX handles generates more than 300,000 impressions on average on Facebook, where the PIX likes to hang out. Oh, and it returns a 90 percent attendee-to-fan conversion rate, along with a 50 to 60 percent average opt-in rate for surveys. All from a cleverly run photo activation footprint and a brilliant instant sharing mechanism that will make Facebook your lackey instead of your boss.
SpotMe
Time to roll out a mobile app for your meetings and briefings, folks. Your meetings need to stop being dreaded time sucks and start tracking to measurable results, and SpotMe is here to help. The proprietary platform underlying SpotMe drives greater productivity through packaged formats and fun user experience while eliminating stress and mind numbing boredom by turning attendees into active and engaged participants that are seen, heard, inspired and connected with each other during events. And it’s about time.
Super Booths
The kiosk is alive and well and living at Super Booths. It makes photo activation a novelty again with booths like the selfie mirror that helps attendees finally get a good selfie thanks to the world’s first image capture mirror. Or the London Photo Booth, which is an overhead photo booth, so all of the pictures are weird and fun, and because you’re looking up at the camera, you never look fat. We like that. A lot.
Thuzi
A top developer partner with Facebook, Thuzi is dedicated to making strategic social media investments lead to direct feedback and trackable results for brands through publishing content, Facebook page management, social insights and utilizing the Facebook Ads API. And while the activation skyrockets toward viral territory (one hopes), Thuzi is watching and measuring with its Social Scorecard, just waiting to tell you how awesome you look. And you do look good.
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