EventVue, maker of event social networks and our first competitor, just announced that they are shutting down their business. They’ve posted a raw and honest post mortem. This is bad for the event industry. They blame themselves, but I blame venture capital.

Respect for innovation
EventVue built a good product. Whenever I talked to one of their customers, the customer seemed happy. The attendees seemed happy. The software looked good. In the world of event social networks, we launched first, but EventVue was so close behind us that their launch was clearly the result of an original idea. They were our competitor with the most innovations and I constantly wondered if they were going to make a huge discovery that dwarfed what we were working on.

An event social network is not a walled garden like Facebook, it has a limited time with attendees and so it needs to play nicely with the existing online personas of its users (Twitter, address books, big social network sites). EventVue got this and executed on it as well as anyone.

They didn’t stop innovating. They launched Discover, a product that let people lookup which of their friends were attending an event. Then they launched a twitter chat stream that let events offer a real time Twitter conversation that any attendee could comment on.

There’s something about the way the event industry buys software that breeds copycats. That’s why you can have 190 online registration systems that nobody can tell apart. In the nascent world of event social networks our model was an attendee directory paired with a personal schedule builder. EventVue, more than any other competitor, was constantly testing and refining their own original model and vision.

The event social network niche is too new to be losing innovators and innovators are too rare in this event industry for this not to be a blow.

Venture Capital is a competitive disadvantage
I think it’s fair to say that I’m anti-venture-capital. I think it’s a corrupting influence on products and companies. EventVue is just a mild example. They took a small amount of investment (reportedly $265k, although from their story it sounds like there was a double-down round). That’s peanuts, but it was enough to put them on that weird (to-me) funded company path.

Here’s how I would summarize the history of their company. They had a product that worked well and they had some paying customers. However, they doubted the product could be a big seller because it was a “nice-to-have” with a low price point in an industry with long sales cycles. So they switched directions to Discover, a product that seemed to have bigger upside potential because it was designed to be more tightly tied to the customer’s bottom line, but which did nothing to aid EventVue’s immediate bottom line. Then they tried another product. Then they ran out of money.

To me, that’s a history of a company moving backward. Every day gave them less traction and less money.

We took a different approach. We charged for our product from the beginning and we never once spent more money than we were making. So now we find ourselves in a much better situation: we’re still in business. It’s actually a lot rosier than just that: we have a growing base of repeat customers, we have no debt, and we have growing revenue.

The key advantage is that we never had a period where we weren’t a sustainable company. That means we have longevity. Bootstrappers, like us, live with a lot of constraints, but they also have the advantage of time.

Compounding Interest
My biggest issue with venture backed companies is the way they throw away valuable products and leave happy customers in the cold.

Ignore market size for a moment. The customers who use event social networks are very happy. The attendees who use them are even happier.

Like EventVue, I don’t think the event social network market is perfect. It’s currently small. No one has shown a path for rapid growth. It has integration challenges since the rest of the event software market is so fragmented. Sales cycles are long and price points are low.

But I also know that we have very happy customers and a sustainable business. And those happy customers are asking us to write software for other pain points. That doesn’t look like a dead end to me, it looks like a great starting point.

Every business is a bet, and the bet I placed was on compounding interest. Every year we will have more customers, more revenue, know more about the industries we serve, and be better and more talented business-folk/programmers/product-developers. This past year our revenue grew by 50% and we added one hugely productive person to the team. Carry that forward for ten years and the small four-person business we’re running right now feels like a pretty big opportunity.

For what it’s worth, and I know I’m in the minority, but I like working and one of my major goals for CrowdVine was to build a company that I would want to work for every day. I’m 31 years old. I don’t just carry that idea of compounding interest forward for ten years, I carry it forward for thirty-nine years.

What does the EventVue announcement mean to you? Can a venture backed software company succeed in the event space? Does having innovative companies matter? Let me know in the comments.

There are many ways to manage and integrate your organization’s Twitter account and Facebook page. I’ve tried a lot tactics in my work with CrowdVine and for the Ecology of Leadership program. Here’s what really works.

First off, you want to post to Twitter and have those posts copied to Facebook (Twitter-to-Facebook, not Facebook-to-Twitter), for these three reasons:

• If you go the other direction and use the automatic Facebook-to-Twitter service, Facebook will append its own URL to every post it makes to your Twitter account. This means extra clicking—an annoyance for your followers. On the other hand, tweets with links work great when automatically re-posted to Facebook.
• When you go from Twitter to Facebook, your staff can post and not lose their own identity on your Facebook Page. If you add them as administrators of your page, everything they post comes thru as a generic post by your organization. This is a little quirk about Facebook Pages. For example: assume you’re ABC Nonprofit and that Jane and Frank are two of your volunteer Facebook people. Frank posts photos to the ABC Nonprofit page. Jane tries to comment on a photo, but her comment appears to come from “ABC Nonprofit” and not from “Jane”. Your Facebook Page admins lose their own identity on your Facebook page. That’s social media that’s not very social!
• By posting from Twitter to Facebook, you can get all of the benefits of using CoTweet. CoTweet is a powerful application for giving teams of people the ability to post to one Twitter account. You can schedule posts for the future, manage multiple Twitter accounts from your own personal CoTweet account, and track responses from followers. CoTweet is easy to set up: create an account, and then add one or more Twitter accounts to it. For each Twitter account you set up, you can invite others in to post via CoTweet, using their own CoTweet accounts…so you never need to share your organization’s Twitter password with the members of your team. If someone leaves the team, you simply revoke their permissions through CoTweet. Here’s a screen shot of CoTweet that gives you an idea of its power:

  

Those are the reasons for a system that copies from Twitter to Facebook; now you need to make that synchronization happen.

There’s an easy solution for this: use the Facebook Application Selective Tweets. Selective Tweets will post your Twitter status updates to Facebook if they have the hashtag #fb at the end of the tweet. (If you’re using CoTweet, use their “CoTag” feature to auto-append the hashtag for you.)

Selective Tweets lets you configure specific Twitter accounts to specific Facebook Pages; you can use it for your personal Twitter account to post to your Facebook Profile AND use it for your organization’s Twitter account to post to your Facebook Page. Other Facebook Apps I’ve seen don’t have the awareness that different Twitter accounts might correspond to Facebook Pages rather than personal profiles.

Just add Selective Tweets to youyr Facebook profile grant it access to your Twitter account(s). Then use the “Your Fan Pages” tab to set up which Twitter accounts should sync to which Facebook Pages:

When using Selective Tweet, Twitter posts might take some time to repost over to your Facebook page…that seems to be normal, so give it some time for your first test.

The combination of Selective Tweets and CoTweet is the best solution we’ve found for teams to post to Facebook and Twitter in one step.

It’s easy to create a social network website these days. We’re partial to our own software, of course, but you have more than two hundred other options. However, having social network software is not the same as having a social network. For that you need people.

We recommend the five step recipe below to everyone who uses CrowdVine. They’re simple, common sense steps that reliably lead to launches with high adoption and active members. We also see many networks try something different, and we can see that missing just one step reliably leads to a dead, lifeless, failed network no matter how much work the creator puts in. But have no fear, these are easy.

#1. Your network must be member-centric
Many social network ideas we hear are variations on “I can make a lot of money if I had a social network with millions of people talking about X.”

Yes. You would. But no members are going to join a network for your benefit. They’re going to join for their own benefit. You need to find a reason that’s compelling to your potential members.

For example, with event social networks, the first thing we tell potential members is “Meet other attendees on the event social network.” That’s a clear and direct appeal to one of the major reasons people go to a conference. Our adoption rate with this pitch is usually between thirty and seventy percent.

In comparison, there was an initial wave of event social network products that were transparent attempts to get attendees in front of exhibitor sales people. The pitch was, “Come get harassed by sales people.”

Not surprisingly, these networks saw very little adoption. Their pitch was a classic example of the “I can make a lot of money” approach. If the network was full, you would make money selling the opportunity to exhibitors.

The problem is that those networks were empty and so nobody got any value, not the creators, not the exhibitors, and not the attendees. Pretty much the only significant difference when we started working with events was that we’d flipped the value proposition around enough that we actually got adoption.

#2. Seed people in the network
There is no value in a social network that has no members. That means you have a tough sales pitch at first. Potential members will experience your pitch as, “Join my completely worthless social network about X.” One hundred percent of your potential members will ignore any marketing or communication requests to join that type of network.

You need to get around the empty-network syndrome by getting some early members. Then your launch pitch can be “Come join these awesome people on the social network about X.” Here are some ways you can get early members:

• Invite people who can’t say no, like people that work for you. It’s their job to join!
• Invite people who will join as a favor, like friends or close colleagues. Tell them they are doing you a favor and that it will be worthwhile to them down the road.
• Load profiles from some other source. Associations have membership lists. Companies have employees. Events have attendees. Many of these sources have the implicit assumption that they are going to be part of a directory–that’s all the social network is.
• Use a combination of these–the more members at the start, the better.

If you don’t have an organization with members, don’t have friends, and don’t have employees, then you aren’t ready to launch a social network.

#3. Invite people via email
Just like there’s no value in an empty social network, there’s also no value in a social network that nobody knows about. Email is the most effective way to let people know that your social network has launched. It’s several orders of magnitude more effective than a blog post, twitter post, or website link. By all means, use websites and social media to promote your network. They help, but they’re not sufficient.

What we see when a network is promoted without an email list is that visitors dribble in but that there never develops a sense of activity. Members want to be able to find other members but they also want the sense that if they contact someone or start a discussion, they will get a response.

With an email blast, all potential early members visit on the same day. That gives a sense of activity and that activity increases your adoption rate.

#4. Set the tone
There’s a learning curve for people who join a social network, but it’s not about learning software, it’s about learning social etiquette.

In the real world, some people have learned etiquette from a book like “How to win friends and influence people” but the vast majority of people learned how to behave by copying other people. It’s the same with an online community. Some members will read your community guidelines, but the vast majority will wait to see what other people do.

When you launch your network you need to play the role of community manager, break the ice, and model every behavior that you want from other people. Add new members as contacts. Send private messages welcoming them. Start discussions. Comment on discussions that other people post. This role is crucial at the beginning and can tail off as your community members get more active.

#5. Send a reminder email
The goal of the first few steps is to create a network that’s good enough to draw people in and spark activity. Once you have active members your network changes from good-enough to great. Nobody gets 100% adoption out of the gate. Some people will miss whatever initial email you send. Some people will get the email but decide the network is not compelling enough (yet). Some people will join right away and miss the members and activity that comes a few hours later. Once your network is launched and more active, you should send at least one more email blast.

For our event networks we recommend that the reminder blast comes about a week before the event. This is the peak moment of interest (rational behavior for many attendees is to procrastinate until as many event details are settled as possible). For permanent social networks there usually isn’t a peak moment of interest but there are often high points. Send regular emails highlighting discussions or activities.

These tips are about the difference between success and complete failure. We like dreamers and we like to experiment with different techniques, but when I ran this post by other people at CrowdVine one response came back “Tell them they’re an idiot if they don’t follow this advice.”

I think that’s too strong for people who have already launched–we came to this recipe through trial and error. But, at this point, there’s enough experience out there to launch your network the right way. Let us know in the comments if you have your own recipe or other tips.

I found myself saying several times a day, that I was having a great time at PCMA because I was learning so much. I think this is the conference to go to for suppliers breaking into the industry. The educational sessions are great and the other attendees are incredibly open. I think the education here is actually the most valuable thing I’m taking away–which says a lot given how much exposure our product has gotten.

Targeted Marketing
My favorite session for Tuesday was a panel for Maximize Attendance With Targeted Marketing. In particular, people should pay attention to what the Chicago Convention and Visitors Bureau is up to with social media. Check out their Twitter feed. The cool thing that they do is work directly with their biggest shows on social media strategy. And the strategy work they do is good–it works, they measure it, and it’s innovative. I was definitely impressed.

Return on Time (ROT)
There was some talk about how to make short heavy-impact meetings that fit into people’s busy schedules. I think of Return on Time (ROT) as Return on Investment (ROI) mixed with opportunity cost. It’s more of a concept to get people thinking about shorter meetings than it is a rigorous measurement methodology. The concept jives with the underlying goals of CrowdVine, to give more impact to time spent in networking and education by providing tools for intelligent preparation.

Facilities Fees
There’s a lot of stress between hotels and event planners due to the down economy. I hadn’t really understood until now that a lot of the facility fee is paid for with attendee hotel rooms and the event planner makes guarantees about hotel occupancy when they sign their contract. This seems sort of convoluted to me, why not have the entire facility fee be part of registration, but this is an area I really don’t know much about.

Generation Gaps
The Twitter back channel had a lot of chatter about generation differences and @jessicalevin had some of my favorite takes on this matter:

Everyone likes to mock Gen Y. Aren’t they a result of parenting by Boomers?

She also contradicted a favorite Gen Y stereotype about them being distracted multi-taskers. Maybe what looks like distraction is just an result of another Gen Y stereotype. They are demanding, and when you’re being boring, they demand something more interesting, something that just happens to be located on their phones. All this generation talk made me want to look up the definitions on Wikipedia. I’m at the tail end of Gen X, which means I have no excuse for checking my email during a slow session.

Big kudos to everyone involved in putting together PCMA. It was a huge production. I haven’t even touched on the entertainment side of the event.

Inspirational speakers
Monday started with a show by the City of Dallas and then an great inspirational speech from Nancy Brinker on the power of one person in social causes. My favorite speakers are information-dense, but I’m observing that the best conferences make sure to bring plenty of inspiration. I was at a session later in the day on engaging educational experiences that touched on the need to hit people at multiple levels. Having a mix of speakers, some who can touch you emotionally, and some who touch you intellectually, definitely seems like something program committees should be consciously aware of.

Freeman Experiential Meeting Design
One of my rules of thumb for conferences is to avoid vocational sessions. If the topic is something I’m already doing, then the session is almost definitely going to feel to slow. Instead, I like to go to sessions that are completely outside of my expertise. On Monday, Freeman, the leading show production company, was giving tours of the setup they used for that morning’s general session. They had three 18′ tall HD screens, touch screens for the speakers, and individual staff for sound, lighting, set design, teleprompting, video cameras, video camera switching, video, graphics, and speaker prep. There are more details than you can imagine, and we got a nice explanation from the set designer of how little things like the color of the carpet on stage effect the overall experience.

Law of Two Feet
I found myself wondering what the etiquette was for leaving sessions. Unconferences and open space have a clear rule, The Law of Two Feet, which I love:

If at any time during our time together you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet. Go to some other place where you may learn and contribute.

Without a clear guideline, it feels like people would perceive you as rude for walking out in the middle of a session.

Meeting people
The CrowdVine find-people-via-your-address-book feature came in handy for me today. It turns out two of my favorite customers were at the meeting and I wouldn’t have noticed except that they popped up in my search. Monday was the first time we’d ever met face-to-face.

Tweetup
PCMA has come on strong with Twitter usage. They launched their Twitter account in June and now are big into it. We had a Tweetup with sixty or so people, including plenty of the PCMA staff. It’s nice to see the staff come out because they’re so busy and hidden during most of the conference.

Here are the official news highlights from PCMA TV: http://brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid60972845001

Great first day for me–met lots of people.

Social media kiosks.
I got to the event early to volunteer in the social media kiosk booth. There wasn’t a lot of foot traffic, but the people who did come were mainly interested in CrowdVine (self-serving but true!). We do well with social media newbies because we can say what our purpose is.

New Member Orientation.
PCMA does a great job of welcoming new members. My local NorCal chapter didn’t just ask that I come their last chapter meeting, they demanded. Then when I got there the president-elect immediately introduced me to ten people. I think that’s so important–I arrived at this event knowing people. Sunday we had a new member orientation with two parts. The first was specific to suppliers where we got an entertaining lecture in how not to scare meeting planners. That advice was promptly ignored in the second half of the session when we actually got to mix with actual planners.

NorCal reception.
I ate a lot at the reception not realizing there was even more food to come. NorCal has a ton going on! I talked about Twitter with a lot of people. There’s definitely demand for another Twitter webinar if Jessica Levin will oblige.

Opening Reception.
Dallas went all out to impress the meeting planners. Did you know hockey has cheerleaders? They do in Dallas. I met all my social media and #eventprofs friends finally.

Other notes:

I have a hot tip for amazing cheese burgers: Twisted Root. The PCMA staff picked this up as a tip from the visitors bureau, tested it, and loved it.

I asked a lot of my questions from yesterday’s post, “Things I don’t understand.” Turns out those were things that nobody understands, especially the fragmentation of suppliers. It’s amazing that the average planner can’t say who the leading online registration provider is.

I heard great things about this upcoming webinar for March 3, Using Social Media in Meetings.

I think it’s fun how much pull the meetings industry has when they come to town. Lots of people give us freebies. One of my favorite scenes from the day was a bus load of folks returning from a successful Neiman Marcus shopping trip with massive discounts.

I often feel like an outsider to the conference industry because all of my expectations were set by being in the worlds of consumer web startups and open source software. There’s good and bad in that.

I didn’t get sponsors and that was a good thing
The upside is that it’s easier to have a fresh perspective and to see opportunities for improvement.

For example, there have been two waves of event social network providers. In 2006 I covered Dreamforce as a reporter and joined their social network. There were ten-thousand attendees at the conference and three people on the network. All three immediately tried to sell me their products. The first wave was based on the premise that social networks were a good way for sponsors to contact attendees. For sponsors, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Unfortunately, the fish didn’t want to be in the barrel.

The second wave, which we kicked off in 2007, and now has (I believe) seven competing products, is characterized by being attendee-centric. We figure out what the attendees want (better networking, discussions, interaction with speakers, control over their schedule) and then make sure they’re happy. We see adoption rates in the 30-70% range. In other words, we would have expected at least 3000 people on that Dreamforce social network. We didn’t come up with this approach because we were smarter, we came up with this approach precisely because we were less-smart. We’d mainly experienced conferences as attendees of high-energy, high-passion, tech-centric conferences. We built the tool we would have wanted as an attendee. Sponsors weren’t part of the initial tool is because, well, we’d only had the attendee experience of trying to avoid them.

Things I don’t get
I know a lot more now than I did in 2007, but there’s still plenty of things that leave me confused. I’ve just arrived at the PCMA annual meeting for four days of conference-industry educational sessions and lots of networking with meeting planners (PCMA used CrowdVine). And I’m on a mission to get smarter. Here’s what has me confused:

Why are suppliers so fragmented? The most glaring example is online registration providers. I’ve heard there are more than 190. In our customer data, the biggest registration provider is EventBrite with maybe 5% of our customers. Really? This isn’t software that could be standardized and commoditized? I think this is bad for everything except keeping salespeople employed. It’s bad for decision makers. It’s bad for software quality. It just seems like a backward dynamic. Why don’t meeting planners pick and promote winners?

Why is customization so important? One of the reasons I’ve heard for the the industry having so many reg providers (and every other type of provider) is because every event has such different needs. Really? Wouldn’t many events benefit from working with software that has smart sensible defaults? One example I’m thinking of is event websites which often are extremely cluttered and hide the most pressing information (I often can’t find dates, location, or even the conference topic). Ask yourself how many navigation links on your event website and then compare that to the event Information Architecture annual summit (basically an association of experts on such things). They have seven navigation links. Your website probably has 20.

Where are the opportunities to make real impact? When the economy crashed, meeting industry leaders made a big PR push to make sure that everyone knew the value of conferences and events. Their biggest talking point was how many people the industry employs. I know the people who have jobs in this industry appreciated it–but I thought that talking point was incredibly demoralizing. Is this industry a giant high-carbon-footprint make work project? We love conferences because of the energy they generate and the way they spread new ideas. Those types of conferences have impacts on the world that we get excited about. I want to find more people that think that way and ask them how can we have more, better, more world-changing meetings? Can software help?

Why is everything so expensive? I once paid $200 to plug in a monitor for two hours. I know a company that charges $5k to turn on their API (consumer web app companies turn this on for free). Lunch is $80 per person. On the software side, I think this goes back to the point above, supplier fragmentation. All the suppliers have to rely on sales teams because each customer is won through one-on-one efforts. Those sales team salaries are paid for by meeting planners and attendees. I think this is a major road block for new meetings and independent organizers. Wouldn’t it be better if we measured IQ points added?

Expect plenty of blog posts and tweeting over the next week as I take my open source, tech-startup ideals to the experts. If you’re going to PCMA 10, here’s my CrowdVine profile. Make sure to say hello.

Our old contact form had some characteristics that most people would consider good. It was linked to from our footer, which is a common place for people to look. And we listed our phone number and our email address, so we were easy to get a hold of. People often used both. They would email and then they would call just to make sure we get email.

The problem
Unfortunately, we overlooked an important point. Most people who found the contact form were not looking to contact us–they were looking to contact the site owner (for example a conference organizer). Apparently many of the organizations that we work with have contact info that’s so hidden, ours, buried in the footer of an interior page several clicks into their site, is the first that a visitor can find. We would get a lot of questions from people who hadn’t even heard of the social network yet. Did my registration go through? Do you have student discounts to attend the event? How do I buy an exhibition booth?

Here is how we redesigned our contact form to make it possible for people to get through to the site owner, while also making sure users can still get great technical support.

Features
For small features (like this one) I start by listing out our goals. Usually I’ll break the list into two parts, the first part is for things that have to be done (must dos) for the feature to launch. We launch improvements whenever we have free time and the only test we hold ourselves to before launching is, “Is this better than what’s there right now?” The second part is for embellishments, things that are going to make the feature amazing (there are many definitions of amazing).

Must dos:

• Site owner is contactable
• CrowdVine is contactable for software support
• Clear delineation between the site owner and Crowdvine
• Site owner is not subject to spam

Embellisments:

• Contacter feels heard or at the very least, we set clear expectations
• Form adheres to current form design best practices (I have to look those up)
• Code adheres to Rails best practices

On the embellishments, remember, our old contact form was completely broken. The difference between broken and good is much bigger than the difference between good and best. Although, you should be able to guess, since I’m writing this blog post, that I got all of the embellishments in.

Gotchas
Then I ask, is this going to cause anyone any trouble? Well, yes, a little bit. If the site owner has a preferred way of being contacted then this feature is going to co-opt it. I think as a default, that we’re doing the site owner a service. Many of the people we hear from want to give the site owner money (either registration or sponsorship). But what if the site owner really wants people to go through a different contact form? In that case, we’ve got to give them a way to change the default.

Mockup
I use a web-based tool, Balsamiq, for mockups. This lets me work out design issues and get feedback quickly. Here is what the initial mockup looked like:

The hardest design decision was how to communicate who you are contacting. It’s a bit much to expect a visitor to your website to be able to parse the difference between your organization and your service providers. But on the other hand, there’s no hiding that CrowdVine and our customer are two different organizations that respond to different kinds of contact requests. In the end, we settled on radio buttons for the site owner, us, or both. The “both” option is so the visitor doesn’t need to make a decision. We thought hard about having all emails go to both parties but then decided it would create a logistical hassle for the site owner.

The easiest design decision (because I knew the answer going in) was how to prevent spam. We’re using the ReCAPTCHA service, which is a CAPTCHA (prevents automated spam by making people read and type a random text) that pulls random text from digitally scanned books. The work that people do to complete the captcha goes toward digitizing the text.

Contacter Love
The reason I wanted to put some thought into making the contacter feel good is because so many of the people we talk to seem lost, angry or annoyed. They need help now, they’ve been clicking all over, and they found contact info but they don’t trust that they are going to get a response. Our contact form isn’t magical. It just moves the person one step closer to a solution–it can’t actually solve the problem. But I do think that with clear communication, the contact form can be a calming and reassuring step.

There are two places were we tried to be exceptionally clear (or at least transparent). First, we’re exposing the difference between us and the site owner. For most people this is the first time they’re hearing about us, so we tried to give a clear explanation.

Second, we also want to set expectations for when a person will hear back from us. CrowdVine is on California Pacific Time and we aim to respond within one business day (we’re often faster or responding during off hours, but we want to give ourselves a chance to exceed expectations). Setting default expectations for our customers is a little trickier–we don’t know their response times. Here’s the default language we’re using:

Your message was delivered to a real person at SITE NAME, but there may be other official contact channels on other portions of their site. If you do not receive a prompt response from SITE NAME you may want to keep looking for other contact options. To set your expectation on the definition of prompt, many organizations of lesser quality than SITE NAME take several business days to respond.

I want that text to communicate: “You have successfully contacted this organization. Somebody has heard you. However, let’s be real, this isn’t a customer support hotline. Give the organization a chance to get it’s act together. If you really need instant help, you should keep looking for another contact option.”

Contact Form Best Practices
I did some research on form best practices and the best information I cam across came from LukeW Interface Designs. You can buy his book but most of my questions were answered by his Web Form Design Best Practices presentation.

This may sound pedantic, but I was really curious to find out what the current thinking was on placement of form labels. It turns out there’s good research comparing top-aligned, to the side and left-aligned, and to the side and right-aligned. Each has pros and cons. For us, we clearly fit the characteristics of a form that should have top-aligned labels (as demonstrated in the mockup above). This style of labeling works well with forms people are familiar with (ours looks like many other contact forms and also a lot like an email composition form). The only problem with looking up best practices for one feature is that you start to feel bad about other parts of your site.

There’s no need to indicate required fields. They’re all required. Also, we don’t have a cancel button. The best practice advice was to either minimize secondary actions (like Cancel) or eliminate them. For ten years I’ve wondered why so many forms have cancel buttons and I couldn’t figure out why we would have one on this form. Maybe somebody will use this contact form to ask us to add the cancel button back.

The next form design best practice is to provide sensible defaults. I got this far in the design before I remembered that some of these users are already logged into CrowdVine so we already have their name and email. So we can pre-fill those.

Rails Contact Form Best Practices
In Rails, the way that you validate forms that aren’t tied to a database model is with ActiveForm. Many of the blog posts about using ActiveForm use a contact form as an example use case. Clearly, this is the right model for us. However, I couldn’t figure out which is the proper plugin to install. There’s a competing, but different Gem, and there are several forked branches of the plugin on GitHub. I’m pretty sure this is the one to pull from:
http://github.com/cs/active_form

The ReCaptcha plugin worked great, except that I couldn’t find a way to write a functional test to submit the form with correct Captcha text. I worked around it by getting as close as possible to submission in my functional tests and then making sure the unit test coverage was good.

I did some searching for a ruby library for email validation. Even though everyone and their brother writes their own regular expression for this, I know the best practice is to go with something that’s well tested. Unfortunately, in Rails, it’s nearly an officially sanctioned practice to go with this liberal, but incomplete regex: /\A([^@\s]+)@((?:[-a-z0-9]+\.)+[a-z]{2,})\Z/. That regex is even in the official Rails documentation. So, that’s what I did. For regex geeks, the characteristics of that regex are that it accepts some malformed emails, but never (I think) rejects valid emails.

Liquid Templates
Remember the gotcha about wanting to give sites an option to opt-out of this feature? We open up a lot of CrowdVine for customization through Liquid templates. Liquid is a user-safe templating engine, which means it’s safe for one site to edit and change a template without having access to data from other sites. In this case users have three places to override our default contact form. They can edit the template with our footer links and link somewhere else. They can edit the contact page template and put their own contact information. Or, finally, they can edit the contact-received page that people see once they’ve submitted the contact form (for example if the site wants to be more explicit about when they will respond).

We basically love Liquid templates although there seems to be a lot of magic going on, so I’m never sure when we start in on one whether it’s going to be straight forward to complete. In this case, my big concern was whether ActiveForm would play well with Liquid. The good news is that they did–you can open up your ActiveForm model attributes with the liquid_methods shortcut (this makes sense once you start working with Liquid templates).

How would you make this even more ultimate?

I updated out top 100 events list and moved it to a permanent page.

View the list in entirety: Top 100 Event Twitter Accounts
Follow the list on twitter: @crowdvine/top-100-events

The top-100 list is based on a sorting of roughly 2000 event twitter accounts. Jumping into the top 100 are LeWeb, nar2009, and gilbaneboston, Official_PAX, twi_tour, Bumbershoot, NY_Comic_Con hollywoodfest, GameOnLondon, fantasticfest.

I want to say a little bit about LeWeb. I forgot to mention them last week in my post about Airbnb for conferences. LeWeb was featured on the Airbnb site and were promoting Airbnb as a cost-savings measure for attendees. A lot of innovative stuff comes out of that conference. Second, I’ve been surprised that they weren’t in this list all along given that they are a major conference run by the founder of a major Twitter app. They had their event in between my first posting and this one. During that time they pulled in almost 15k followers and jumped from outside the top 100 to #6.

So there’s hope for all the event accounts that are just getting started. The trick is just to put on a great event and then you’ll attract tons of followers. Easy?

There are good reasons to ask for a non-disclosure agreement and we do feel very strongly about protecting the data you give us and the things you tell us. We’ve already made that commitment publicly through our Privacy Policy.

However, there are some NDA requests which we will not accept. I always decline these respectfully and with explanation, but I have never once been greeted with equal respect from the other side. My goal is not to get the world to stop asking for NDAs, it’s merely to get NDA-askers to accept that there are reasons to turn down an NDA other than a plot to steal the idea (FYI, the reason you’re talking to us is because we are already in possession of a good business idea).

Food for thought
First, read Why Most VCs Don’t Sign NDAs for a run down of the common reasons people turn down NDAs (these are written by a VC but are broadly applicable). Then read Five Reasons to Drop NDAs for an argument for why your boilerplate NDA request has come too early and is doing you more harm than good.

Finally, read this Ladies Who Launch discussion on How To: Use an Non-Disclosure Agreement for when is a good time to ask for an NDA. They are actually pro-NDA, but at least have a handle on the etiquette of when you would ask for one.

Once you’ve read those, consider just asking us to be respectful or sending us a FriendDA.

The ones we turn down
We will not sign an NDA unless you have told us explicitly that you are interested in doing business with us. If you are asking for a phone call and you have not done any research on our company–that’s not a good time to ask us to sign an NDA. These are almost exclusively the NDAs we get asked for. Here’s why we’re saying no:

1. All we do is build and launch social networks and talk to people who want to build and launch social networks. We have already heard and will in the future hear a similar idea. Your NDA creates a legal hurdle for working with any of these other similar ideas and we think it’s unreasonable to limit our ability to work with other customers merely to have a phone call with you.

2. The NDA is an unwelcome hassle (for all the reasons listed in the articles above) that’s coming too early in our relationship. Most are too broad, don’t define what they’re protecting, require review and vetting, require tracking, etc. I have a track record on Google that’s ten year’s old. My business is based on word-of-mouth. I could never stay in this business if word got out that we were stealing our customer’s ideas. In fact, I’d have a hard time getting another job in this industry.

3. It’s ok for you not to tell us your idea. If you’re not serious about doing business with us, then it’s actually in your best interest not to tell us your idea (especially if you’re not interested in an hour of feedback from someone who builds and launches a lot of social networks). You’re vetting us, but we’re also vetting you.

So, what happens with what you tell us?

We want to postpone the legal paperwork until after we’ve had a chance to say hello. Keep the company secrets to yourself until we’ve had a phone call. If we’re a good fit to work with you, there are plenty of protections we’ll sign. Here’s how our policy works:

1. We never share any document that you send us. I’ve heard of VCs that will share presentations with their portfolio company. This makes my skin crawl. That is not how we do business.

2. If we have a similar project in mind, in the works, or in the wild, we will say so. Although we will not disclose the names of unlaunched or private projects.

3. If we have seen a similar idea we will say so, but won’t reveal any information that was told to us. We will however repeat any advice that we gave to the last person that we were particularly proud of.

4. If, after the initial conversation, you have specific or corporate reasons for discussing non-disclosure we would be happy to sign an NDA.

5. If we sign a contract to work together we will often include protective clauses. These include mutual non-disclosure of information.

6. If we are building a custom social network for you we will do you one-better than an NDA, we will include a non-compete clause. We don’t want to build the same one-of-a-kind network twice.

A few weeks back, I heard a famous tech investor raving about a disruptive new investment. Airbnb, is a vacation rental website that takes all of the spare rooms, couches, and in-law units in a city and makes them part of the liquid hotel and vacation inventory. Innovative? Yes. Practical for conference attendees? Let me tell you.

I’m headed to Dallas next month for a conference, I’m staying at an Airbnb, I saved $400, and I got great tips for local BBQ.

Location
If you’re considering Airbnb, you need to figure out if there is an option within walking distance of the conference and if there isn’t, are you going to rent a car or are you going to take public transportation. Thankfully, almost any city of more than 200k people will have at least a few options.

When I researched Dallas I found only one choice within walking distance, but it involved sleeping on someone’s couch in a studio apartment. It was $25/night, but there were other, much better, places a little further away.

I also found that parking and car rentals were cheap–so I decided to go that route. I’m staying a few miles away and renting a car. That way I don’t have to worry about transit schedules and I’ll have a trunk to stash any conference materials that I don’t want to lug around.

Quality
Airbnb is short for air-bed and breakfast, and yes, they have options for sleeping on an airbed in someone’s living room. But they also have lots of nicer options. For $55/night I ended up in an in-law unit over my host’s garage. I have my own bed, kitchen, and bath. Plus the owner is a fountain of information on local eateries.

Is this safe?
I ran this idea by another conference goer and he said, “I would definitely have tried this before I was married.”

I couldn’t tell if he meant that his wife wouldn’t let him or that pre-marriage, his life wasn’t worth protecting. Either way, lots of people will have safety concerns. Airbnb encourages you to use common sense and then makes it easy to bail if things don’t feel right. For the worst case scenarios, Airbnb holds off on charging your card for 24-hours after check-in and provides 24-7 phone support to help you quickly find a new lodging.

Who is this for?
Brave cheapskates. Seriously though, this is a down economy, so this is a great option for helping attendees save money. Including the car rental, I’m saving $400.

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that a lot of interesting attendees are careful about conserving travel expenses. It doesn’t mean they are homeless lobby crashers. For years, OSCON (the first conference I ever attended) has been helping attendees save money by sharing rooms or camping in local attendee’s back yards. Here’s an example of one penny-pinching attendee from their room-share program:

I am a male developer planning to attend for the week and willing to share a room – I am also flying a small plane down from Seattle on Sunday returning Friday and can take one person willing to share gas.

It’s definitely a sign of tough times when you’re looking to split the gas bill on your private plane.

See also:
Washington Post Tips on Booking an Airbnb Bed
Top 40 Airbnb Accomodations

Updated 11/6: New accounts, #friends, list memberships. See comments for details.

These are the top 100 event twitter accounts sorted by number of followers. We’ve been crawling Google and every event list we could find in order to get these. If you think we’re missing someone, leave us a note in the comments.

If you like this list, follow it on Twitter, @crowdvine/top-100-events. If you want to talk to someone about getting more Twitter integration into your event, send us an email, conferences@crowdvine.com. I’ve got three copies of The Twitter Book which I’ll give to the first three events that email us.

1.		sxsw SXSW | Austin, TX Official user of the SXSW Music, Film and Interactive Conferences and Festivals 44734 friends | 604 updates | 837 memberships	46674 followers
2.		twestival Twestival | The Twittersphere Global events organised *by* twitterers *for* twitterers. Connecting amazing people offline for a great cause. Join us in 2010 for Twestival Global. 6629 friends | 1820 updates | 217 memberships	42301 followers
3.		w2e Web 2.0 Expo | SF, NY, online… Web 2.0 Expo event / community updates. http://blog.web2expo.com 21288 friends | 1613 updates | 208 memberships	19362 followers
4.		sundancefest SundanceFilmFestival | Park City, Utah Welcome to the Official Twitter Feed of the Sundance Film Festival, presented by Sundance Institute. 275 friends | 232 updates | 330 memberships	18057 followers
5.		BarCampParis BarCamp Paris | Paris, France Information sur les Barcamps et autres événements gratuits (ou presque) dans la région parisienne. (par @innomgmt et @jkloren) 17925 friends | 136 updates | 60 memberships	16377 followers
6.		SFMusicTech SF Music+Tech Conf | San Francisco, CA We’re going to have some music/technology related parties and events in the fall… 10118 friends | 238 updates | 77 memberships	12228 followers
7.		lollapalooza Lollapalooza | Grant Park, Chicago August 6-8, 2010 35 friends | 125 updates | 209 memberships	10816 followers
8.		Comic_Con Comic_Con | San Diego, CA The OFFICIAL Twitter for Comic-Con! 0 friends | 533 updates | 365 memberships	10790 followers
9.		BlogHer BlogHer | Everywhere… The community for women who blog 4407 friends | 1676 updates | 182 memberships	10681 followers
10.		FranchiseExpo1 Franchise Expo Scott | Florida – New Jersey FranchiseExpo.com – Franchise and Entrepreneur Portal – Over 200 Franchises to choose from on FranchiseExpo.com 10325 friends | 528 updates | 7 memberships	10268 followers
11.		blogworld Blog World Expo | ÜT: 33.674508,-117.255275 Tweets from Blogworld & New Media Expo, and its founder Rick Calvert 8589 friends | 3725 updates | 199 memberships	9987 followers
12.		socialmediaweek Social Media Week | New York Social Media Week is a annual conference that is designed to identify and advance social media practices and policy in corporate, public and non-profit sectors. 10571 friends | 224 updates | 140 memberships	9959 followers
13.		googleio Google I/O | San Francisco, CA Google’s largest developer event on May 19-20th, 2010 at Moscone West, San Francisco 96 friends | 288 updates | 465 memberships	9454 followers
14.		affiliatesummit Affiliate Summit | NJ The premier affiliate marketing conference since 2003. 9598 friends | 906 updates | 72 memberships	9331 followers
15.		e3expo E3 Expo | Los Angeles, CA The Official 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo Twitter 4887 friends | 468 updates | 221 memberships	9148 followers
16.		oppgreen Opportunity Green | Los Angeles Opportunity Green inspires a collaborative culture of new & unconventional ideas. Opportunity Green at UCLA, Nov 7-8 – The Premier Green Event Driving Change 7470 friends | 2914 updates | 116 memberships	8447 followers
17.		adtech ad:tech | iPhone: 41.888531,-87.613692 ad:tech is a digital marketing conference and exhibition where brands, agencies and publishers gather to learn, explore and meet up with friends and colleagues. 964 friends | 443 updates | 127 memberships	7448 followers
18.		womenoffaith Women of Faith | Women of Faith encourages women of all ages and stages in life by offering events, materials, and online resources. 7601 friends | 675 updates | 96 memberships	7393 followers
19.		SmallBizExpo Small Business Expo | Mission VIejo, CA Small business resources. The ultimate online resource directory for small business owners and entrepreneurs. www.SmallBusinessExpo.com 3635 friends | 1445 updates | 44 memberships	7376 followers
20.		cop15 UN Climate Change 09 | Copenhagen, Denmark United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 in Copenhagen (COP15), brought to you by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark 3 friends | 1161 updates | 303 memberships	7265 followers
21.		ted2009 ted2009 | Long Beach, Palm Springs News and talks from TED2009. For all TEDTalks news, follow @TEDTalks. 475 friends | 300 updates | 129 memberships	6941 followers
22.		TheNewMediaExpo The New Media Expo | Las Vegas, NV, October 15-17, Tweets from Blogworld & New Media Expo, and its founder Rick Calvert follow @blogworld too. we update more often there 728 friends | 105 updates | 65 memberships	6850 followers
23.		burningman Burning Man | San Francisco, CA All things Burning Man, from the Black Rock Desert and around the world. 9 friends | 71 updates | 149 memberships	6643 followers
24.		web2summit web2summit | san francisco, ca The Twitter account of Web 2.0 Summit – the annual gathering of key insiders who leverage technology and the web to change the way we live and work. 6477 friends | 604 updates | 113 memberships	6269 followers
25.		TWTRCON TWTRCON | ÜT: 40.756356,-73.990316 Twitter Conference for Business | Grand Hyatt Washington DC | Oct 22 2009 6727 friends | 1507 updates | 64 memberships	6261 followers
26.		soundwavefest Soundwave Festival | Australia Soundwave Festival Australia 17 friends | 68 updates | 79 memberships	6147 followers
27.		_defcon_ DEFCON | Las Vegas, NV Hacking Conference 2571 friends | 275 updates | 164 memberships	5641 followers
28.		WOMMA WOMMA | Chicago, IL WOMMA is the leading voice for ethical and effective Word of Mouth and Social Media Marketing 2849 friends | 1845 updates | 128 memberships	5510 followers
29.		SocialNetworkWF Social NetworkingWF | World Wide Event & Conference’s dedicated to social media : Social Networking, Social PR, Social TV, Enterprise 2.0, Social Politics www.sixdegs.com 5349 friends | 475 updates | 52 memberships	5419 followers
30.		SonarFestival Advanced Music | Barcelona, Spain Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art – June 18.19.20, 2009 1974 friends | 162 updates | 108 memberships	5266 followers
31.		atpfestival ATP Festival | London Jamie @ All Tomorrow’s Parties: Festivals/Gigs/ATP Recordings 68 friends | 482 updates | 125 memberships	5265 followers
32.		BlackHatEvents Black Hat Briefings | Seattle, USA The World’s Premier Technical Security Conference 2696 friends | 704 updates | 140 memberships	4965 followers
33.		thewomensconf thewomensconf | Los Angeles The Women’s Conference – The Nation’s Premier Forum for Women. We empower women to be Architects of Change. 1741 friends | 340 updates | 116 memberships	4949 followers
34.		stARTconference stARTconference | DUISBURG KULTUR | WEB | MEDIEN 4781 friends | 1612 updates | 45 memberships	4347 followers
35.		intlCES intlCES | Arlington, VA Jan. 7-10, 2010, CESweb.org, produced by @ceafeed 2860 friends | 559 updates | 59 memberships	4313 followers
36.		sydney_festival Sydney Festival | Sydney Sydney. January 9 – 30. Music, theatre, dance, visual arts, ideas, free and family events including Festival First Night. It’s big. This is our city in summer. 1009 friends | 657 updates | 70 memberships	4297 followers
37.		cloudforum Cloud Interop Forum | World Wide Web The Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (created by @ruv) 4217 friends | 351 updates | 62 memberships	4222 followers
38.		NHLtweetup NHLtweetup | Anywhere hockey fans are! This Twitter account sends out updates regarding official NHLTweetup events. (updates by: @dani3boyz) *not NHL affiliated 4589 friends | 1488 updates | 180 memberships	4217 followers
39.		austintweetups AustinTweetup.com | Austin, Texas Hosting and Promoting Austin Tweetups. 4336 friends | 202 updates | 81 memberships	4186 followers
40.		ixda ixda | Everywhere you are Interaction Design Association Global Twitter Feed 1615 friends | 1265 updates | 216 memberships	4170 followers
41.		PDC09 Microsoft PDC | Redmond, WA The definitive developer event focused on the strategy of the Microsoft developer platform: Nov 17-19, 2009 at L.A. Convention Center; pre-conference Nov 16 1372 friends | 274 updates | 120 memberships	4102 followers
42.		women2 Women 2.0 | San Francisco, CA Networking women entrepreneurs in technology! Our events are held monthly in the San Francisco Bay Area. 1178 friends | 422 updates | 63 memberships	4100 followers
43.		140tc 140tc Conference | Los Angeles, CA The Twitter Conference is the place where developers and business people converge to tap into the Real-Time Web. In LA September 22-23, 2009. 3325 friends | 1604 updates | 85 memberships	3964 followers
44.		BostonTweetUp BostonTweetUp | Boston, Ma Central place for Boston area Tweetups – send us an @reply and we’ll tweet it! Created by @JoselinMane. Facebook http://facebook.com/BostonTweetUp 3837 friends | 2545 updates | 77 memberships	3643 followers
45.		NewMediaExpo New Media Expo | October 15-17, 2009, Las Vegas The New Media Expo is an annual convention that educates individuals and companies about how to produce high-quality audio and video digital content. 0 friends | 30 updates | 24 memberships	3601 followers
46.		140Conf 140 Characters Conf | NYC, Los Angeles and London Upcoming #140conf Events: Oct 27/28 LA; Nov 17 London. Dec 6th Tel Aviv. Produced by @jeffpulver 3501 friends | 240 updates | 97 memberships	3480 followers
47.		sofresh Social Fresh | Charlotte, NC Social Media Conference – Serious Business contact @jakrose for details 3722 friends | 404 updates | 54 memberships	3415 followers
48.		etech ETech Conference | San Jose, CA O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference 3538 friends | 468 updates | 23 memberships	3402 followers
49.		newmomexpo New Mom Expo | Anaheim, CA A one day event for expectant, new and young families – Resources for everyday 2142 friends | 241 updates | 17 memberships	3344 followers
50.		BookExpoAmerica BookExpo America | 820 friends | 255 updates | 75 memberships	3299 followers
51.		rothbury ROTHBURY Festival | ÜT: 39.720533,-105.003839 I am a American Festival established in 2008. Come visit me July 4th weekend in Rothbury, Michigan. 63 friends | 279 updates | 42 memberships	3241 followers
52.		sydfilmfest Sydney Film Festival | Sydney, Australia Sydney Film Festival 3 to 14 June 2009 1734 friends | 196 updates | 45 memberships	3223 followers
53.		AnimeExpo AnimeExpo | Southern California USA’s largest Anime and Manga Convention! Please direct any question to our forum at http://forums.anime-expo.org/. 1 friends | 77 updates | 48 memberships	3220 followers
54.		makerfaire Maker Faire | San Mateo, CA Maker Faire Bay Area May 30-31 5 friends | 718 updates | 78 memberships	3187 followers
55.		sapteched SAP TechEd | U.S., EMEA, India, China Get great hands-on training and build real connections with SAP experts and community members! (Use hashtag #sapteched09) 2898 friends | 758 updates | 79 memberships	3180 followers
56.		iPhoneDevCamp iPhoneDevCamp | San Francisco, CA A worldwide community of developers for iPhone and iPod touch. 2660 friends | 313 updates | 62 memberships	3146 followers
57.		affsum Affiliate Summit | Berkeley Heights, NJ The premier affiliate marketing conference. 3401 friends | 2869 updates | 17 memberships	3093 followers
58.		railsconf RailsConf | Las Vegas, NV 2930 friends | 316 updates | 115 memberships	3085 followers
59.		JavaOneConf JavaOne Conference | San Francisco The official handle of the JavaOne conference. Tweets by @BetsyHa, @Sumaya and @MMaryMary. 3185 friends | 715 updates | 57 memberships	3065 followers
60.		womenhealthexpo Women’s Health Expo | New York The Women’s Health and Fitness Expo is a one-day event that provides health, fitness, and nutrition tips to thousands of women across the tri-state area. 515 friends | 16 updates | 23 memberships	2983 followers
61.		toc Tools of Change | Cambridge, MA O’Reilly Media Tools of Change for Publishing 381 friends | 696 updates | 95 memberships	2834 followers
62.		nytvf NEW YORK TV FESTIVAL | New York The Festival for Independent Television 454 friends | 930 updates | 30 memberships	2805 followers
63.		v_festival V Festival Australia | Australia Australia’s own V Festival lands as usual in Sydney, the Gold Coast, Melbourne and Perth in March/April 2009. 979 friends | 130 updates | 23 memberships	2785 followers
64.		e2conf e2conf | Annual events in Boston & SF The largest gathering of E2 evangelists and others focused on connecting teams with Web 2.0 tools 2723 friends | 1056 updates | 52 memberships	2742 followers
65.		NewYorkFestival New York Festivals | New York, NY Marketing, Advertising, Awards, Social Networking, 311 friends | 226 updates | 38 memberships	2736 followers
66.		MPIevents MPI Events | Dallas, TX Meeting Professionals International’s main conference page, for WEC, MeetDifferent, EMEC, GMEC, etc. 612 friends | 666 updates | 36 memberships	2731 followers
67.		SocialBreakfast Social Breakfast | Germany Official TwitterAccount of the Social Web Breakfast Team 2938 friends | 1276 updates | 31 memberships	2703 followers
68.		where20 Where 2.0 | San Jose, CA O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference 2520 friends | 339 updates | 50 memberships	2698 followers
69.		gov2events Gov 2.0 Events | San Francisco, CA Twitter account for Gov 2.0 Summit and Gov 2.0 Expo, co-produced by O’Reilly and TechWeb 1519 friends | 526 updates | 86 memberships	2575 followers
70.		barcamp BarCamp | Earth A BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. 122 friends | 32 updates | 43 memberships	2560 followers
71.		Luxurytravelexp Luxury Travel Expo | New York, Las Vegas the original.the standard.the signature event for the luxury travel industry. 158 friends | 51 updates | 38 memberships	2547 followers
72.		FashionExpos Phoenix Fashion Expo | Phoenix, AZ PHX Fashion & Beauty Expo 3/28/09! www.PhoenixFashionExpo.com 427 friends | 21 updates | 11 memberships	2534 followers
73.		NABShow NABShow | Las Vegas, NV The World’s Largest Electronic Media Event for Professionals Passionate about Content 2456 friends | 960 updates | 37 memberships	2529 followers
74.		BarCampCLT BarCamp Charlotte | Charlotte, NC Charlotte’s 2nd BarCamp, a technology & media unconference, this Oct 17th @ Area 15 in NoDa 2557 friends | 366 updates | 32 memberships	2524 followers
75.		oracleopenworld oracleopenworld | Redwood City Get the inside scoop, important announcements, and valuable tips and tricks for making the most of your experience at Oracle OpenWorld. 2120 friends | 652 updates | 65 memberships	2502 followers
76.		vmworld VMworld | Palo Alto, CA VMworld Twitter Account 2226 friends | 3329 updates | 45 memberships	2466 followers
77.		OGIConference OGI Conference | Washington, DC The Open Government and Innovations Conference will explore how social media tools can make government more transparent, participatory and collaborative. #OGI 2697 friends | 367 updates | 15 memberships	2452 followers
78.		enterprise20 Enterprise 2.0 | Germany TwitterBot of Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT / Nov 11 & 12, Frankfurt GER / operated by @traukainehm & @bn_at_twitter 2341 friends | 562 updates | 61 memberships	2446 followers
79.		ChristianBkExpo Christian Book Expo | Dallas, TX More than 150 transforming workshops led by popular Christian authors. Tens of thousands of Christian books. More than 60 publishers exhibiting. 1901 friends | 477 updates | 31 memberships	2403 followers
80.		FloridaTweetup Florida Tweetup | Florida Florida’s Social Media Groove Promoting Florida Professionals, Organizations and Events. Welcoming Florida Tweeps and All Things Florida ☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼ 1969 friends | 454 updates | 39 memberships	2356 followers
81.		Boise_Tweetup Boise_Tweetup | Boise, ID Facilitating local socal networking events. Announce Boise Area Tweet-Ups Here. DM us & we will retweet them. 2487 friends | 484 updates | 35 memberships	2331 followers
82.		allthingsd All Things D | 10 friends | 89 updates | 89 memberships	2310 followers
83.		sfnewtech SF New Tech | San Francisco, CA The heart and soul of the SF Tech scene. We’re 5000 strong and we don’t bite. 1564 friends | 362 updates | 48 memberships	2294 followers
84.		techcocktail techcocktail | Chicago, DC, Champaign, Boulde Community building, aiding entrepreneurship & amplifying the technology signal and having fun doing it. Co-founded by @frankgruber & @ericolson 1713 friends | 527 updates | 42 memberships	2289 followers
85.		smx SearchMarketingExpo | Search Marketing Expo (SMX) is the must attend search marketing conference and expo backed by Search Engine Land. 7 friends | 656 updates | 100 memberships	2287 followers
86.		reblogworld REBlogWorld | Las Vegas, NV A Real Estate Blogging & Social Networking Conference in Las Vegas, October 15th-October 17th, 2009 1903 friends | 555 updates | 40 memberships	2266 followers
87.		GreenBabyExpo Green Baby Expo | Chico, Ca 1458 friends | 11 updates | 13 memberships	2263 followers
88.		AWEA AWEA | Washington, D.C. AWEA is the voice of wind energy in the U.S., promoting renewable energy to power a cleaner, stronger America. Find us on Facebook: www.tinyurl.com/AWEAFacebook 1577 friends | 1138 updates | 59 memberships	2256 followers
89.		blkweblogawards Black Weblog Awards | Atlanta, GA Get the latest information on the Black Weblog Awards! Vote for the finalists until 9/1! http://bit.ly/2rEPmS 2020 friends | 264 updates | 10 memberships	2251 followers
90.		sicamp SICamp | Bethnal Green Bit of an experiment in using social tech for social change 2254 friends | 823 updates | 35 memberships	2247 followers
91.		bdo_official Big Day Out | Australia and New Zealand Big Day Out Festival 619 friends | 77 updates | 48 memberships	2230 followers
92.		fashioncamp Fashion@Barcamp | NYC 2-day conference in NYC (Sept 12th&13th) bringing together the mainstream fashion community,indie fashion community,& the next wave of wearable technologists. 1687 friends | 86 updates | 16 memberships	2215 followers
93.		TweetupNYC Tweetup NYC | NYC Use Twitter? Live in NYC? A casual meetup to converse with fellow Twitterers! 253 friends | 12 updates | 17 memberships	2201 followers
94.		actorexpo Actors Expo | London Actor Expo is the UKs only tradeshow for actors and performers. London and Edinburgh! Actor, TV, Theatre, Film. 1827 friends | 300 updates | 8 memberships	2150 followers
95.		ibmevents ibmevents | NY, London, Paris, Tokyo @thereyesreport, @ragtag & others telling you when and where it is happening 390 friends | 701 updates | 45 memberships	2125 followers
96.		CMSExpo John Coonen | Chicago Web designer turned CMS evangelist. 2313 friends | 4960 updates | 33 memberships	2115 followers
97.		oscon O’Reilly OSCON | San Jose, CA O’Reilly Open Source Convention. Follow ‘oscon’ and ‘oscon’ will follow you, aggregating the twitters of all the attendees. 1972 friends | 465 updates | 50 memberships	2105 followers
98.		TechEd_North_Am Tech•Ed North Am. | New Orleans, LA 6 friends | 82 updates | 33 memberships	2100 followers
99.		siggraph SIGGRAPH | s10=LA, s11=Vancouver Things about SIGGRAPH conferences. Planning 2010, 2011, 2012 33 friends | 213 updates | 77 memberships	2094 followers
100.		NCVS NCVS | New York, NY The National Conference on Volunteering and Service: The world’s largest gathering of volunteer and service leaders from nonprofit, gov, and corporate sectors. 2201 friends | 434 updates | 30 memberships	2068 followers

We love the new twitter lists feature! They make it easier to follow conversations, to share accounts that you’ve curated, and to help people discover new accounts. So we were wondering how events are going to use them. We’re literally on day one of this feature, but there are five obvious lists that every event should make:

1. List of staff
Almost all events have multiple staff members on Twitter, or separate, but related, corporate accounts. Make a list!

2. List of attendees
To make this list you’ll need to ask for Twitter name during registration. In the new world of social media, self-promotion starts by promoting other people. Who better than your attendees? This will help other attendees discover each other and strengthen your event community. If you forgot to ask for Twitter name during registration you can export them out of CrowdVine (Admin -> Reports -> All Users).

3. List of sponsors
Wait, not all of your sponsors have Twitter accounts? Are you sure you want to be associated with these dinosaurs? For the ones that do, this is a quick way to help promote your sponsors.

4. List of speakers
You paid your keynote speaker top dollar to show up, but every other speaker is coming for visibility. This is one way for you to promote them and make their trip worthwhile. Plus, once you have this list, you can refer back to it in order to find posts to retweet.

5. List things to do around town
I have this friend, a totally devoted family man, who treats events like a jailbreak. There are no kids or responsibilities, so he’s free to go out to see live music. I know he’s not alone–many attendees want to explore the town. Work with your convention center or hotel to find local twitter accounts for event listings, roving taco/ice-cream trucks, and restaurants.

If you want to see some examples of lists, check out the ones we’re curating: Conference Tools, Great Events, Event Industry Leaders.

We’ve recently added third-party registration support so that attendees can be added to your CrowdVine event social network as soon as they register. This feature is in beta while we work out what instructions and support people need. If you want this feature turned on, send us an email: support@crowdvine.com. There’s no charge and we’ll walk you through setup.

If you use EventBrite or RegOnline, we’ll need your account details. RegOnline lets you create a read-only account; we’d prefer that.

If you use Laser Registration, you’ll need to to talk to your Laser account representative. They’re a consumer of our API for the PCMA conference.

If you have your own home-built registration system ask us for API access. Our API is simple, it just requires a single REST call (your developers will equate this with easy).

If you run a different third-party registration system, our policy is to enthusiastically support any third-party registration API that has publicly viewable API documentation (send a request into our support).

However, some major registration providers require us to sign an NDA in order to view their API and will charge you several thousand dollars in order to turn on their API feature. We’re less enthusiastic about these providers and think that if you’re forward thinking enough to be using an event social network, you’ll be looking for a similarly modern registration provider.

We’re providing our event social network software to the Professional Convention Management Association’s annual meeting in January. We’re hooked into everything. We’re the attendee directory, personal agenda builder, message board and social media hub. Even though the event’s more than two months away we’ve still had over fifty percent of attendees participate and thousands of messages.

There are two main reasons we’re excited about this at CrowdVine. First, it’s a major sign of progress for event social network adoption. When CrowdVine launched there was no event social network category–now there are hundreds of events using event social networks. Plus several thousand more meeting planners are going to get to use us first hand at PCMA. Second, it’s a chance to work with an organization, PCMA, that’s filled with people who have both event expertise and an amazing ability to educate. I’m as excited to attend PCMA’s annual meeting as I am to be serving them.

Here’s what we said about it in the press release:

Attendees at the highly anticipated Dallas Annual Meeting will be able to take advantage of innovative online tools to improve their entire meeting experience. The CrowdVine platform provides an interactive online community which allows attendees to set up meetings as well as access the Annual Meeting final program onsite via personal mobile devices. “Together with PCMA, we’re showing that event social networks are a major upgrade for both connecting on site and as a way to receive the traditionally printed information and should be considered as a standard feature for all conferences,” said Tony Stubblebine, CEO of CrowdVine.

Key features of CrowdVine allow participants to easily add sessions and events to their personal schedule, add friends or people they want to meet, and access speakers to tell them exactly what they hope to learn at the sessions. The site also allows attendees to aggregate their blogs and Twitters through their PDAs onsite, for instant updates. “Attendees can follow social media conversations from a single social media hub,” says Tony.

Also, I want to acknowledge that we worked with two excellent organizations in order to get a seamless integration for the attendees, a wonderful Chicago web design and development shop, Grail Interactive, and event registration provider (and more), Laser Registration.

If you are a meeting planner interested in event social networks you should register for PCMA (Dallas, Jan 10-13), and then add me to your to-meet list. (Or you could just email, conferences@crowdvine.com.)

In August, we launched support for Twitter Auth and Facebook Connect, which means that attendees can use their Twitter of Facebook account to login, rather than creating yet another password. We also already had the option of logging in with OpenID. Now that we have three options, I wanted to look at which was the most popular. Twitter wins, barely, with Facebook close behind.

Five percent of attendees are logging in with Twitter, four percent with Facebook Connect, and one percent with OpenID. I’ve written before that I thought OpenID adoption was disappointing, and afterward I wondered if people were just more comfortable with usernames and passwords. These numbers are much more encouraging (although we shouldn’t ignore that the majority, 90%, are logging in the old-fashioned way).

One big benefit that Twitter and Facebook have is that they give us access to the attendee’s profile photo, and, more importantly, to their list of friends so that we can show who they know at the conference.

If you want to know more about how CrowdVine connects to social networks (this is just the tip of the iceberg), sign up for a demo.

Technically, the first line of CrowdVine code was written in late 2006, but I mark August 6, 2007 as the day CrowdVine became a company. It’s the day we were incorporated, the day I went full time, and the day when there was enough business to hire a second person (Jay). So that means today we’ve turned two years old!

There were some milestones:

I like our track record for innovation. But I’m much more proud that we’re building a company that can last. We’ve gotten this far without ever taking investment or going into debt. The people that work here are fantastic. And our customers are great people too. So much thanks to the folks here at CrowdVine who’ve made all this happen and even more thanks to the customers who had the vision and guts to give us a try before there was proof.

We recently worked with a conference in Russia to get key parts of CrowdVine translated. Here’s what it looked like:

Over the last several months we’ve been changing our back-end systems to allow for more flexible customizations and one of the side effects is that you can change the text in many places. Our Russian conference was the first to realize that meant they could do a partial translation. It’s not the ideal translation, that we’ll offer some day, where you just select the language from a drop down. But it worked well for them without too much work.

If you’re interested, you should talk to us, because this is an area where we’re willing to offer special support. But the general idea is to go to the Manage Pages, Tabs, and Components section of your Admin tab and edit the tab names and then go through the list of components and edit those.

One of the major things we’ve done this year is to go on a hiring spree, more than doubling the number of people who work for CrowdVine. That hiring was driven by demand for our conference social network support packages. Jay and I found we couldn’t give the kind of hands-on instant support that busy conference organizers need while also continuing to build a cutting edge product.

Our support goals include an amazing white-labeling service (well beyond just slapping your logo at the top of the page), making sure we’re synced with your registration and conference agenda (even if that means writing custom code), nailing community management (the people and discussions are what create an amazing network), and anything else you may need. The support we offer now is done almost entirely through the work of two new ‘Viners, Terrie Miller and Michelle Koumarianos.

Terrie, Jay and I worked together at O’Reilly Media. Terrie managed the online publishing program (including the conference websites) and Jay and I managed the software that held that publishing program together. She went on to run online properties for Make Magazine. Her super powers include preparation and documentation. You’ll experience this as great service, but the hidden secret is that she’s compiling an encyclopedia of best practices for managing conference communities.

Terrie runs blogs for her many cool hobbies: TerrieMiller.com, her personal blog, permie.net, about permaculture and resources for sustainable self-sufficiency, crittergeek.com, a web site about animals, citizensci.com, about citizen science, harnessing non-scientist volunteers for the collection of scientific data. She’s @terrie on Twitter.

Michelle was a college freshman at UConn who had just launched a web consultancy when we swooped in and booked up almost all of her free time. She’s responsible for the white labeling we do (check out these examples). You could do it yourself, but she’s really good and really fast.

Michelle is also a former professional video game player. Her and her clan were flown all over the country to play Counter Strike. I think that’s got an impressive start to her resume. She’s @mkoumarianos on Twitter.

How do you evaluate social software? I’ve been part of four social software companies, Odeo, Twitter (just the very beginning), Wesabe, and now CrowdVine. For each of those companies, we spent a lot of time working through misconceptions that seem rooted in how other people are used to evaluating non-social software (say Excel or Oracle). I think this problem bites almost everyone who’s trying to use social software or social media (including at least: blogs, twitter, youtube, podcasting, social networks, niche social networks, message boards, and wikis).

Here’s an example of even professionals getting it wrong, a 2007 review comparing two social software services, Twitter and Dodgeball. The review, from the leading news site for web startups, insisted on declaring a winner based on features and potential uses for those features. Within months, the winner of the review, Dodgeball, was out of business due to lack of usage, and the loser, Twitter, had doubled in size. If leading tech journalists can’t get an easy evaluation right, then the general public (i.e. our customers) are really in trouble.

Luckily, evaluating social software is not magic, in fact it’s mostly common sense.

1. If people use it, it’s valuable

Show some respect for other people. If they’re spending time with something then let’s at least start with the assumption that they’re getting some value in return. I see too many people dismiss something like Twitter or Facebook as trivial or worthless, only to find themselves doing a complete reversal a few weeks later.

With social software, the people are everything. If people you care about are active, then the software is going to stick with you. If not, that’s when you can dismiss it (but often only temporarily).

Does your company need a Twitter strategy? The way to find out is to search Twitter for mentions of your company. If nobody is talking about you now, then you don’t have a lot to do. But things change fast. When I started CrowdVine several people told me I shouldn’t call what we provided “social networks” because nobody knew what those were. Within two years, the people who didn’t know what a social network was are now active Facebook users.

2. Solve a problem

“[Twitter is] the messaging service we didn’t know we needed until we had it.” – Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on the Colbert Show.

I think Biz was joking. Social software isn’t a “build it and they will come” world. It solves problems. The real Twitter story comes from Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and originator of the idea. He had been thinking of use cases for a service like Twitter for years.

Take Jack’s approach and make sure you’re solving real problems. The trick is to frame the problem in social terms that include the people who are going to be using the software or media you put out. A good example of a problem social software can solve would be “my members want a way to network with each other.” Saying “I want to be rich,” on the other hand, is not a well-framed problem.

As an example, CrowdVine regularly gets high adoption rates, regardless of demographics, because we’re clear about what problems we can solve. Social networks as a class of software can be dismissed as trendy, but even the most conservative attendee wants something better than a printed attendee directory to help them meet people. We got our start with tech conferences, but the meat of our business is with mainstream companies like General Mills, or main stream professionals like lawyers and nurses.

3. Budget the right amount of time

When I work with someone to budget time for a social media project, I try to place the project into one of two camps. Either they’re going to tap into some existing behaviors or desires of their members, in which case the members do most of the work. This is an opportunistic project. Or they’re going to create a brand new social experience, in which case they’re going to have to do most of the work, often over a long period of time.

If you want to create a blog, you have to be willing to write blog posts for the life of the blog. That takes work. It’s the same with a podcast. However, if your community is already on Twitter, sometimes all it takes is for you to provide a hashtag that they can all use to find and talk to each other. That takes five minutes.

So why would you ever choose to take the hard work approach? Sometimes you don’t have a choice. Your community isn’t likely to start a blog about your company. That’s your job. You can use hard work to create something new or you can be opportunistic. If your community is on Twitter then you can use Twitter, otherwise, you can’t.

With conferences, we see both sides. If the organizer is intending to just help attendees network then their work load is to configure a social network, invite members, and get out of the way. They can do more, but they don’t have to. However, we also get customers who want to use CrowdVine to help attendees learn more. These conference organizers create additional session materials and sometimes even pre-event homework (they tend to be corporations who have some ability to make the attendees actually follow through). Nobody is going to do that work for them.

So when you start to roll out social media, you need to ask how much time is this going to take? Hopefully, if you’ve got a good grasp of what problems you’re solving, you’ll also know how much time it’s worth spending. In the case of the corporate meeting above, they’re paying all the typical event costs plus salary and travel for the attendees. Taking an extra thirty hours to develop additional content for their social network is easy to justify. Conferences put on by three person superhero teams, however, should be looking for opportunistic uses of social media.

I want to know what problems you’ve solved with social media and how much time you had to put into it. Tell me in the comments.