Eventful Blog

A Word About "Event Planning"

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:45:04 -0800

This one goes out especially to writers and reporters doing stories on Eventful. :-)

Dear reporters: far too often I see Eventful described as follows: "Eventful, an event-planning site, etc."

I would like to take this opportunity to explain what event-planning is, and why Eventful is not, and never has been, an "event-planning" site.

What better source to turn to than Wikipedia, which, I am delighted to discover, has a clear definition of what event-planning is. So without further ado, here are the first four paragraph's of Wikipedia's entry on "event planning":

Event planning is the process of planning a festival, ceremony, competition, party, or convention.

Event planning includes budgeting, establishing dates and alternate dates, selecting and reserving the event site, acquiring permits, and coordinating transportation and parking.

Event planning also includes some or all of the following, depending on the event: developing a theme or motif for the event, arranging for speakers and alternate speakers, coordinating location support (such as electricity and other utilities), arranging decor, tables, chairs, tents, event support and security, police, fire, portable toilets, parking, signage, emergency plans, health care professionals, and cleanup.

Event Planning is a relatively new career field. There is now training that helps one trying to break into the career field. There must be training for an event planner to handle all the pressure and work efficiently. This career deals with a lot of communication and organization aspects. There are many different names for an event planner such as a conference coordinator, a convention planner, a special event coordinator, and a meeting manager.

In a nutshell, that's not Eventful. Indeed, that description inolves way too many atoms, and far too few bits. In other words, we are about information, not the physical "heavy lifting" of putting on actual events and dealing with all the logistical headaches. Nah. No worries about decor, tables, chairs, tents, let alone police, fire, portable toilets, and whatnot. We're geeks. We work with computers. :-)

So if Eventful is not, so I dare to claim, an "event planning site", what is it?

It's the best way on the Internet to discover, share, track, create, and demand events. Since day one, Eventful's mission has been, in three words, to "maximize event discovery", something that I felt the Internet had done a poor job doing in the years prior to a service like Eventful being available. "Event discovery" is the act of discovering events that are interesting and meaningful to you such that you want to go to them and hopefully do wind up going to them.

How does this act of discovery take place? By finding out what your friends are doing. By sharing what you're doing with your friends. By having the system recommend events to you based on your interests. By browsing through the site and discovering events you might never have heard of before. By joining groups whose members share an interest, and, together, all of you can find events related to that interest. This is what discovery is all about. It is very powerful.

So what about "share"? Sharing means taking those discoveries you've made, and telling others about them, that simple! Getting the word out. Making your discovery someone else's discovery, and so on, and so on.

What do I mean by "track"? I mean tracking things down -- having the system work on your behalf to automatically and regularly search for people and subjects you are interested in, and when it finds events that match those people and subjects, it lets you know in as much advance time as possible. Did you know that whenever you search Eventful, you can save the search results as an RSS or iCal feed, and then re-run those feeds any time you wish, to get fresh results? That's tracking. Did you know that you can save a search, give it a name, and have it listed in your My Eventful page, and tell the system how often you wish to receive email notifications whenever the system finds items that match your search terms? That is tracking. Did you know that you can use My Eventful's iTunes / Last.fm importing feature to instantly import all of your favorite musical artists, and then Eventful will email you whenever any of them announces they're coming to your town for a performance? That's very powerful tracking.

By "create" I mean two things -- first, simply posting new event listings on the site, either via our Add Event page or the Eventful API for the developers out there. Second, by using Eventful Demand to create a groundswell of interest and support for an event in your town that you and your fellow demanders really, really, really want to have happen. When events come about because of Eventful Demand, you can truly say that you've helped "create" them.

And finally, "demand" -- using our world-famous Eventful Demand service, unique on the Internet, you can connect to performers and get them to come to your town for an event, be it a concert, comedy show, political rally, interview, public appearance, speech, book signing, film screening, or whatever other type of event you wish. Ask, ask loudly enough, and you shall be surprised at how often you can receive . . .

So. Not "event-planning." When you see that in a published news story about Eventful, you know somebody has not done their homework. :-)

Meanwhile, invite your friends to come on in and together use Eventful, especially the My Eventful feature inside Eventful, to its fullest -- indeed, the very best way to get the most out of Eventful is when your friends use it too. That way, each of you doesn't have to do much to get all the recommendations and event discoveries from the others.

Vote for Eventful for a WebWare 2008 Award

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 07:19:10 -0800

Last year we won a WebWare 2007 award thanks to all of the votes we received from supportive fans. Time to vote again this year!

They've re-arranged the categories this year, and we're in a very crowded group, "Commerce and Events", which they describe as including "Retail, auctions, travel, real estate, concerts, conferences" (yikes!). So, more than ever, we need your votes and your friends and family's votes so we beat out the likes of Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Google, and others!

Click on the logo here to go vote, or, click this link!

Voting Ends March 31st! Be sure to get your friends and family to vote for us too. Thanks!

Eventful: Now with 5 Million Users!

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:00:15 -0800

We reached the 5-million-user mark today. Thanks to our users all over the world for their continued support. Keep sending us feedback on how we can make Eventful better!

Eventful's Online Demand Data Reveals Obama and Huckabee Strong Ahead of Iowa Caucus

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 11:28:03 -0800

Obama and Huckabee Demanded in More Cities in State of Iowa Than Any Other Candidates

SAN DIEGO, Calif. - Eventful, the leading global events web site, announced today that Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee are the most 'Demanded' candidates by their users in the state of Iowa, and have surged to the top of Eventful's Hottest Demands rankings, just hours before the first votes are cast in the Iowa caucus. Both Obama and Huckabee have requests to speak in over 60 cities throughout Iowa, more than any other candidate.

We're Four Years Old!

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 07:37:38 -0800

Hard to believe, four years have passed since Eventful, Inc. was founded in my kitchen on January 1st, 2004. The company was originally called EVDB, Inc. simply because I was able to get the EVDB.com domain but wasn't yet willing to spend $888 to get eventful.com (that would come 18 months later and by then cost a lot more than $888).

Today we have roughly 35 employees, and four and a half million users, soon to pass five million. We've indexed over ten million event listings since 2004. There are 1.2 million Demands for events via the Eventful Demand feature. We have over 90,000 performer records in the Performers database.

2008 will be the most exciting year for Eventful yet!

Open Web Awards: Vote for Eventful!

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 12:59:40 -0800

Voting for the Open Web Awards is open, and Eventful is one of the nominees in the "Places and Events" category.

We'd love for you to vote for Eventful!

Just click here to go vote for Eventful, or click the button below.

Thanks for your support!

John Edwards at the Columbus, KY event

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 10:15:31 -0800

Shawn Dixon introduces Sen. Edwards:

John Edwards speaks:

CNN Coverage of John Edwards' Eventful Competition

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 08:41:49 -0800

CNN's Wolf Blitzer covers Eventful once more, this time with a brief interview with John Edwards in Columbus, Kentucky, the winning town in the "Demand and Be Heard" competition that Edwards ran on Eventful during this past summer:

How to Use Saved Searches

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 10:20:42 -0800

Since the earliest days of Eventful, we've had a feature that let you save a search that the system would run on an ongoing basis, emailing you the results hourly, daily, or weekly.

We recently improved that feature and made it a lot easier to create and manage saved searches.

I'd like to take a moment to show you how the feature works and how you can start tracking events you're interested in.

It Starts With a Search
The way to create a saved search is by first going and searching for something. For example, you're on the home page and you want to create a saved search for "technology" events in "San Francisco". Type "technology" in the what box and "San Francisco" in the where box and click the Search button. That takes you to the search results which might look something like this:

I've highlighted the green "Save this search" button. You'll only see it if you're signed in to Eventful first. If you're not, then you first need to sign in or register, then do a search, and view the results. To save the search, just click the green button.

A dialog box appears with a small form providing you with a way to name this search and specify how often you want to be emailed with updates. The default notification setting is "daily" but you can also specify hourly, weekly, or never (the latter disables any email notifications from going out).

There's a link called "Show more options" that you can click to expand the form to display additional options. When you click "Show more options" you'll see the form expand, and the link text will change to say "Show fewer options". If you click the link again, the form will shrink back to the smaller size:

The expanded form lets you customize the "what", "where", and "when" search keywords, as well as what category, if any, you want to limit the search to, how you want the results sorted, and whether you want to limit the search to a particular geographical radius.

The possible "sort by" settings are revealed in the pull-down menu. The default setting is "date", meaning the search results will be sorted by date.

The possible "Within" settings are revealed in the pull-down menu. The default setting is "25 miles", which means the search engine will limit the results to events that are happening within 25 miles of whatever you have specified in the "where" field. This can be particularly useful if you want to find nearby events, for instance, within 5 miles of your zip code, for example. Likewise, for more distant events you might be willing to drive to, you can set a distance up to 100 miles.

The category pull-down menu lets you specify a particular category to limit the search results to, if you want. But by default, the system will search all of Eventful without limit to any one category.

Before you can save the search, you'll want to name it. We suggest you give it a name that is reflective of what the search is about. So in our example, let's use "my-tech-search" as the name, and click "Save".

You're all done! The search is now saved in your My Eventful records, and if you specified any type of email notification, the system will send you an email if there are any results that match.

Finally, you can see the list of your saved searches by clicking on the "my eventful" tab in the navigation bar (again, you'll need to be signed in first).

In the "Saved searches" section you'll see your saved search named "my-tech-search". If you click it, the system will go run the search, and you can modify the settings if you wish (look just above the search results for a blue header that says "This search is saved as my-tech-search" with a "modify" link just to the right of it).

Be sure to try out Saved Search. It's incredibly handy for tracking all kinds of events you want to know about but don't want to have to keep coming back to Eventful and manually searching for. Let Eventful do the work on your behalf with Saved Searches!

The Stories Behind the Stories

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 14:36:16 -0800

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!

500,000 demands and counting

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 14:27:47 -0800

On Thursday, the number of demands in Eventful Demand passed the 500,000 mark. A mere two days later, as of this posting we're at 509,461 and counting. Amazing!

My guess is the next big milestone will be the first performer to have 100,000 people demanding them. Currently the rock band Hinder is in the lead with 80,160 people demanding.

More Eventful coverage on CNN

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 15:30:37 -0800

Wolf Blitzer and Abbi Tatton of CNN's Situation Room program do another segment on Eventful:

Here's the video itself:

And here's a related story published on the CNN site as well.

I Demanded

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 12:38:58 -0800

Have you demanded?

Eventful wins CNET WebWare 100 Award

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 15:00:01 -0800

Hot off the press:

Eventful wins a CNET WebWare 100 Award in the Entertainment Category!

Read all about it here.

Thanks to the many Eventful fans who voted!