Events Unlimited.

Events & festivals are inherently social in nature, hence event organizers can't ignore the importance of creating the buzz on popular social networks. But this is not a trivial task, and requires good amount of effort from organizers. Here are some of my easy tips to generate an awesome social buzz for your event.


Engage your potential attendees early.
Don't wait for all the data to be available and then starting your social marketing efforts. Get your event website updated with a landing page & with whatever little information you have.

Post about agenda, planned talks, some speakers and venue information for a start.


Make use of various listing websites.
Just keeping your regular event website is not enough. Create a facebook event, and post about your event on other listing websites. That will help you in building an early visibility and traction.


Twitter activity.
Select a hashtag, ideally a small one, for your event. Use this hashtag extensively when posting content on twitter or facebook. Request your speakers to post about their talks using this hashtag.

Start early with twitter questionnaires like "What topics you want to hear at Developer Conference? let us know by tweeting with hashtag #IwantToHearAtDeveloperConf".

Run twitter contests during your conferences, shell out some prizes and let your attendees have engagement with fun.


Reward good content.
Reward your attendees who write blog posts, post pictures or tweets. For example - give out free a free ticket for your next event, to the attendee who posts best pictures.


Aren't these things easy? Hope you have a rocking social buzz at your upcoming event!

Attended my first Startup Saturday event in Pune yesterday. It had following speakers Arun Purohit (Co-founder Wicfy), Ruta Potnis (Faculty for UX, Symbiosis Institute of Design) and Kiran Sabnis (UI Practice Head, Fiserv). Overall the sessions were good and informative, though not many entrepreneurs were part of attendees, crowd was enthusiastic & curious.

I went there with 2 motives. First, to listen and learn from entrepreneurs & speakers, and secondly to understand how an event & conference software solution can be made useful in such settings. So here are the lessons I learned:

1) Everybody introduced themselves at start of the event, and this went around for 40 mins. Although it had some entertainment value, but usefulness can be questioned. One thing is that it takes up time. Another is that I can hardly recall names and info of 2-3 attendees out of 50 that were present. Any solution that lists out the attendees i.e. their name, designation, company, twitter url and bit of their bio would be pretty nice.

2) Speakers used PPTs while giving their speaking sessions. After Ruta Potnis's session, couple of attendees asked if her PPT can be made available after event is over. Agreeing to that said she will check how to do that and will inform accordingly. So an easy solution, where speakers can put their content before/after the event would be a real value add for the attendees.

3) Every talk was followed by Q & A session. Since time constraints allowed only to have maximum 4-5 questions that left many attendees with unattended queries. An utility that makes it possible for speakers to attend these questions post event, with other attendees able to see it, would be handy.


These were some nice lessons I learned yesterday. Hopefully technology, and our startup +Townscript in particular, will be able to do some justice to these needs, and make event attending a much more engaging & richer experience. Cheers!

Note: This is copy of original article that was posted here on 12th May 2013.

Being a socially active person, I have been attending number of national/international conferences for many years. Sharing my experience of conferences, whenever we attend them, very often during the conferences we face a number of difficulties:

1) As we know, one of the main aims of attending a conference is networking. Due to the high number of participants, it becomes difficult to interact with everyone.

2) The conference organizers provide us the schedule, list of venues and other important information on a printed paper form. It's always a tedious job to frequently check out the list of the speakers, etc. by taking out papers from our bag. Many a times we tend up losing those papers .

Townscript has solved the above problems in a very smart way both by making a mobile and web application. I am going to share the way our mobile app works, same features are provided on the web application

This is how it works:


1) The conference delegates will be able to see the basic information, venue, list of speakers, schedule, list of attendees and many more important stuff.
Pic. 1 Basic Information of the event


2) No need of distributing papers for schedule, speakers and conference venue. Delegates will be able to check that out on their mobile phones.

Pic. 2 Schedule and the details of the speaker who is going to talk at a particular session




Pic. 3 List of speakers and bios of each speaker


3)Conference delegates will be able to network and engage more efficiently even much before the conference starts. They will be able to check other delegate's profile which includes short bio, facebook/twitter profile link, Job description.


Pic 4 Details of all the attendees and a brief information about one of them


There are few important features that we are going to add soon in version 2. Those features are going to be revolutionary in terms of networking in conferences.

We have already tested the above product in conferences. The customer feedback has been very positive. We look forward to make it a standard product for all the conferences in Asia and other parts of the world.

Our mobile and web application for conferences is one of the offerings of Townscript. In the next blog, I will be sharing about our innovative product for events.

Thank you!

For more, check out our mobile application in action:

We now live in super connected world. We are connected to all our school & college mates, thanks to facebook. We are now connected to all past colleagues, thanks to linkedIn. We are connected to friends, thanks to Whatsapp.

And this connectivity is going to only increase with time. Soon it will also venture in settings where we meet new people i.e. meetups, seminars, conferences, hackathons, fundraisers, parties, concerts etc.

The visiting card method is obsolete. It gives out too little details, doesn't sparks conversations and people tend to lose them.

Why can't we have better systems where we this information sharing becomes seamless and effective? Is that difficult in today's times where most of folk's data, history & interest graph is already stored in cloud?

I guess solution lies in creation of a socialization platform around events.

Since it is a trade-off between utility & effort, considering that people already have too many social networks to manage, hence a good event social networking platform got to have following qualities:

Instant setup. For any new networking, users are NOT going to spend any much extra effort to put profile pics & their history data. Reason is simple, users have limited time, and they maintain this already on Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter. The platform should just make good use of their existing data & networks.

Ease of group creation. In Events, users don't know much of the folks personally. So onus shouldn't be on them to participate in group creation. It should happen independently of the users involved. Can be done on Organizers' level or tied to registration process.

Mobile first. Even though existing networks like Facebook & Linkedin's usage is heavily moving towards mobile, they were first developed for desktop level. It is easier to connect with your old college friends or company friends on a lazy sunday morning sipping coffee :) but Event networking is bit different. Much of it happens at the Event, where users are physically present, involved & rely on mobile


As someone who likes to learn new things and meet interesting people, I look forward to emergence of such social networks, which expand beyond the realm of existing bonds.