Every organization that holds events has a need to promote the event, to make sure more people show up, and to get the right people there. The current practice of events being promoted via emails is not working because of information glut, people’s reluctance to sign up for more email newsletters, and organizations only promoting their own events. Using technologies such as Microformats and Upcoming.org can make sure that the message about your events gets widely distributed, get the info to key influencers and connectors, and can help build momentum for increased attendance. The efficiencies gained may also reduce your organizations need to spend money on physical resources such as direct mail, flyers, and posters, and reduce waste.
Microformats are a special way of tagging HTML that is easy to learn. According to Andy Mitchell they are, “additions to your web page that makes your data readable by machines and humans alike. Microformats are simple to create, simple to [use], and only require you to build on existing data (i.e. not replace it). They are useful right now and supported by the likes of Yahoo and Technorati. Key industry figures, such as Tim O’Reilly and Bill Gates, have publicly discussed their importance. Right now, microformats can be used to let users easily extract people/event information from your website for their organizer software (like Outlook).” If you have an online calendar, which means it’s in HTML, there’s no good reason that it couldn’t be in the hCalendar microformat. There is even an online wizard, the hCalendar creator, that require only knowing just enough HTML to know where to paste the code in the page.
For the prospective attendee of your event, if your site uses hCalendar, using it can make it as easy as pointing at the event, and importing the event into Outlook or Mac Calendar. Add the common practice of syncing your personal computer’s calendar to your mobile device (phone, blackberry, etc.) and you’ll have people automatically reminded of the event.
Upcoming.org makes it even easier to use Microformats, and adds the bonus of creating a virtual crowd of co-promoters that influence their networks of friends and contacts. You can add your event details via the form on their site. You can use it to send out emails to your prospective attendees. You can tag your event with key words like “sustainability” and “green”. People can then use their pc, mac, or online calendar to automatically show tagged events. (Presumably from sustainability, or green tags, although you could just as easily add fruititarian knitters if you wanted)
Also, with upcoming.org’s blog widget (such as the one in the sidebar of this blog) you can ensure that attendees of your event help promote the event to their networks. Targeting early adopters of technology can yield a big return because they also tend to be influencers.
Both of these services allow you to get on people’s personal calendars easier. And that’s great for access, because they are a lot more likely to look at their own calendar, than your email from last month, that’s somewhere in their mailbox with 1000 other unread messages. It’s also a completely free standard format, based on open source principles, which is a good match with the ethos of sustainability.
P.S. if you’re interested in more technical details, there are some great resources. Technorati’s Kitchen has a microformats search engine. Check out the source of the BarCamp Sandbox page, it includes a javascript widget that reads hCalendar events from another page (which could be any other page on the web). You could use rel-tag to tag your hCalendar events with “sustainability” and we’d be well on our way as a community to having a comprehensive event calendar. Just think if we added geo microformatting for location - we would be able to create a mashup with local sustainability events. And there is a new book: “Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0″ (John Allsopp)
A challenge: if several large organizations, or the biggest (and my favorite) bay area eco calendars that I know of (ecology center and organic architect’s events start publishing microformats or using upcoming.org, I will resume work on the sustainabilitycalendar.org/com project project to aggregate events related to sustainability. Let me know what you think here in the comments!
Technorati Tags: green marketing, microformats, opensourcemarketing, organicmarketing, upcoming.org, sustainability, sustainablemarketing
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