Couple times lately I've seen comments in blogs, on YouTube, and elsewhere, and I've heard occasional feedback from random people at conferences expressing skepticism that the news reports on Eventful that aired on Wolf Blitzer's CNN program
Situation Room (see
here and
here) surely must have been prepared by or even paid for by Eventful. Likewise, I've gotten feedback that Eventful's Eventful Politics initiative seems biased towards the Democratic Party candidates (for example, the
John Edwards competition).
This blog post is intended to set the record straight, with the stories behind these stories. It's important that people understand that as a company we are taking a very firm stand at neutrality and impartiality, building and supporting a technology platform that all can benefit from. Likewise, when it comes to news reports, believe me, the news organizations call the shots with their stories.
Let's take the CNN case first.
How'd it come about?
First, a digression. I can't help but be reminded by Woody Allen's famous quote, that "eighty percent of success is showing up." It may have been a simple offhand joke for Woody, but since the very founding day of Eventful back in 2004, I have found that quote to be amazingly true. Showing up, time after time after time, was what got the company funded. Showing up was how we got great people to join the team. Showing up got deals closed. Showing up at conferences, particularly to exhibit and/or participate in a keynote or panel session, has always led to good things happening.
Such was the case when a contingent of Eventful folks converged at the Personal Democracy Forum conference back in May. I was sick as a dog that week, and was in no condition to be walking the streets of New York City let alone speaking at the conference. We had a booth in the PDF exhibit hall, where Tim Breidigan and Jed Sundwall did an awesome job of answering questions and doing demos all day long. Booth duty is exhausting work and I was amazed at their energy and enthusiasm.
At one point while I was hanging around the booth during a break from the conference sessions, a woman approached and inquired about Eventful and what we were doing with politics. She introduced herself as Abbi Tatton, a reporter from CNN's Situation Room show with Wolf Blitzer. She asked a lot of great questions, and said she was thinking of doing a segment on Eventful. Cool!
Now, when a startup company sticks in the game long enough to create some buzz, the media starts waking up and checking you out. By May 2007, we were getting a good share of buzz and the corresponding mainstream media inquiries, including major print and television outlets who'd tell our PR firm they were considering a story and wanting to do interviews. You quickly learn not to get too excited about the media attention for, as Yogi Berra might have said, "it didn't air on TV until you can play the clip on YouTube." So many times the reporter you've done this great interview with will be suddenly pulled off the story, or the producer will have to table the project because another unrelated story just turned urgent, or something else will get in the way and suddenly that major print or broadcast feature about Eventful you were looking forward to seeing isn't happening after all. And then a day goes by, and suddenly another fantastic opportunity opens up and you move on to pursue the new opportunity. So it goes.
So when a CNN reporter stopped by our exhibit booth at PDF on May 18th, we were excited, for sure. But reporters from lots of other news organizations had stopped by that day. Like we'd done with everyone, we did our best to help answer her questions, walk her through a demo of the site, suggest some story angle ideas for her and Wolf Blitzer to consider, and then we said our thank yous and goodbyes and that was that. Maybe there'd be something to air on TV, maybe there wouldn't. You just never know.
Not two weeks later, on May 29th, our PR firm excitedly contacted us to let us know that they'd heard from CNN that we were indeed going to be on Wolf Blitzer's show, that same day! We found out when the segment was due to air, and a bunch of folks at the office dashed off to the gymnasium downstairs in our building, as it happens to have a TV connected to cable, and they were able to watch the segment live.
We couldn't believe how good the ninety-two second segment was. Blitzer and Tatton did a great job accurately describing Eventful in brief sound bites, along with how the 2008 presidential candidates were using the service to invite their supporters to "demand" them to come to their towns for rallies and speeches. In 92 seconds they succinctly got the message out better than we probably could have. And it was all their own reporting. Personally, I was amazed at how good it was. It was a great day for Eventful.
Woody Allen was right.
But more good was to come out of our participation at the PDF conference. On July 17th, Blitzer and Tatton were back with a yet another segment about Eventful Politics, this time specifically covering the news about John Edwards' "Demand and Be Heard" competition which was due to wrap up within 24 hours, with the winning city likely to be tiny Columbus, Kentucky. Now, our PR firm had stayed in touch with Tatton who has been genuinely interested in tracking what Eventful's been doing in the politics arena. This was another great segment that succinctly put together, in ninety-five seconds, the whole John Edwards competition story, including how Columbus, Kentucky got into the lead thanks to the hard work of one Shawn Dixon.
Which leads to the next issue: that Eventful's politics initiative does too much with Democrats and not enough with Republicans (not to mention other parties). I heard this the other night at a dinner party: how come you're working so much with the Democrats and not the Republicans?
This one is easy to address. We've reached out to everyone equally, in keeping with our mission to strictly stay impartial and encourage everyone to get involved and use these tools. In general, I believe it's safe to say the Democratic side has to date been more active on the Net. I could be wrong, but that is my simple take. Not just with Eventful, but with all of the various web services out there including blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Perhaps it's due to the head start the Democrats gained thanks to the efforts taken back in 2003-2004 by the Howard Dean campaign, who made history with his aggressive use of the Net and support of the "netroots". It seems like ancient history now, but it was only a few short years ago.
But the Net is far enough along now that political campaigns from all parties realize that using the Net is key to winning office. And I fully expect to see much more activity from the Republican campaigns in the coming months. I hope to see more activity from Democrats too. Indeed, it'd be awesome to see independents and third-party candidates get involved.
When Eventfullers Alex Hunsucker and Jed Sundwall originally pitched the Eventful Politics project back in late 2006, we all thought it was a great idea. We would go aggregate every politics-related event we could find, happening at the local, state, and national level across the entire U.S. We'd index all of the members of Congress, making each of them "performers" in our Performers database. We'd even index the daily hearings and other events on Capitol Hill. And, of course, we'd enable people everywhere to "demand" that a political figure come to their town to give a lecture, or participate in a debate or rally. One rule we all agreed on right up front: Eventful would remain neutral, and our mission would be to offer our technology platform to all citizens of the U.S. to discover, share, track, and demand political events regardless of political affiliation. Alex and Jed made up a list of conferences we should participate in, and they set out to contact all of the 2008 presidential campaigns and see if they were interested in sharing their event data and participating in Eventful Demand. The first conference Eventful attended was CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, held in Washington DC earlier this year. We had a booth and spent a lot of time meeting with conservative political operatives, pundits, supporters, and a few candidates and elected officials. Next up, PDF. Most recently, YearlyKos. We've done a bunch of conferences now, and established relationships with all of the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns.
As you might expect, each campaign has their own strategy, priorities, and timing, particularly when it comes to Internet initiatives. So far, with the exception of Republican candidate Ron Paul, the Democratic candidates have been quicker at adopting Eventful's tools to connect to supporters. Again, I suspect this traces back to the Dean activity in 2003-2004.
It's been remarkable is how fast Eventful has become one of the key Internet tools for many of the campaigns. So far, we've seen more of the Democratic candidates use Eventful for specific campaign initiatives, most notably John Edwards' "Demand and Be Heard" competition (we look forward to seeing him actually go out to meet the people of Columbus, Kentucky -- hopefully that will be soon!). Most amazing with Edwards, at least for me personally, was the video he and his staff prepared for the competition. The video began with a black page with white titles showing "Senator John Edwards", with "Eventful.com" appearing below that. And then there he was, wearing a light blue T-shirt, sitting in the corner of some room, surrounded by walls of maps, talking clearly and succinctly about the "Demand and Be Heard" competition. I think it's safe to say everyone at Eventful was blown away by the video. We'd suggested to the Edwards campaign that it'd be great if they could do a video, but we weren't sure they'd have the time to put it together. The result was all their own work, presumably produced at campaign headquarters in faraway North Carolina, and when they sent it to us to put on the site, that was the first time we'd seen it.
So, going back to the question submitted to me at a recent dinner party, where's the Republican activity? Well, for one, the Ron Paul campaign staff has been quite active, not to mention his supporters, who have been amazingly busy at a grass-roots level, catapulting Ron Paul to the top of the Demand charts for Republican candidates.
But what about a Romney competition? To which we of course say, fantastic, let's do it! And Giuliani? Same thing. And same for McCain, Thompson, Huckabee, Brownback, Tancredo, and any other candidate anyone's in favor of. There are demands underway for all of those candidates, and we'd be delighted to see any and all of them use Eventful's tools in any way they and their campaigns see fit to reach out and connect to their supporters. Any candidate is welcome to do their own "Demand and Be Heard" initiative or something else. Indeed, if you're a supporter for one of these candidates, or any of the Democratic candidates, or candidates of any party, the first thing to do is always join or start a demand for the candidate to come to your city, and then get in touch with the candidate's campaign and let them know you're demanding them and that you'd like them to help alert their supporters at the national level, so everyone's demanding their favorite candidate. And while you're at it, if you know of any political events in your area that are not listed on Eventful, well, add 'em!
The Eventful Politics initiative has so far wildly exceeded our expectations, and we still have many months to go before the 2008 presidential election. What's more, we're starting to see 2008 senatorial campaigns begin to embrace Eventful. It's my hope that by this time next year, all candidates have used Eventful in a significant way, and have found that it has helped them connect to their supporters around the country. It's also my hope that lots of people around the country will have discovered, through Eventful, intriguing local political events that they might have otherwise never known about. We love the idea of a tremendously well-informed populace, and if we help even a tiny bit with the tools we've built at Eventful to get closer to that goal, then we'll keep going. We invite you to participate!
