Social Graphing Events
“Events are entering a new era and social media is becoming an increasingly important and visible element in the transformation of events. However, the full extent of social media’s use in events is still not very well known. Social media has greater power in events than many realize”. From Social Media in the New Event World”
As for today, event organizers are faced with numerous social networks that can be used to spread out and engage conversation about their events, thanks to their huge social graphs, like for example Facebook. Although all this social networks provide really limited tools in their event pages.
I strongly believe that events are no different then social networks, in fact many organizers easily associate events to social networks because of the many social interactions and networking that occur among attendees before, during and after an event. That’s what many good companies and projects try to address, like Pathable Crowdvine, The Social Collective, and many others. Treating events as social networks is indeed a logical path nowadays, but threatening them as little isolated walled gardens doesn’t always fit a bigger picture: not allowing the social graph they create to grow avoiding to embrace the changes that the social media is bringing in the events world. Events are not isolated islands anymore, they are all linked together, because events are made by people, and people are central interconnected nodes. Wanna see why?
(For anybody of you that don’t know what a social graph is, just think of nodes and edges that define their connections, If you put people among those nodes then you have a social graph, the more edges are created the bigger the graph it gets).
So here we are with huge social networks to be used to spread and share, social media to help and support conversation across different channels and finally online tools for the organizers to sell tickets and manage the event registration process (like for example Eventbrite, Amiando, Bookwhen and many others). The problem is that even if those event tools are starting integrating social media to their services they still based on the basic architecture of event = registration & ticketing, allowing for small social networking experience and engagement.
The result of this scenario can be seen in the explosion of event planners blogs and groups, twitter hash tag channel and forums where everybody give its receipt of mixing and matching to accomplish something. Is so exiting to be in such an experimental and innovative wave where great idea born almost every day, where nobody is inventing anything but just thinking out of the box on how to use in a different way all this new powerful social media tools for the benefits of their events. Social media is not about reinventing the wheel is about making it spinning.
Let’s think if Facebook events will allows you to manage ticketing, adding custom event registration, managing mailing and communication, giving planners event apps to manage the social media conversations, the budgeting, and whatever kind of event apps you can think of. Think if organizers could co-organize and collaborate on this, think if speakers will not be only in a single event page but also in other events where he attended or gave notes making those events related to each other in some way trough the edges of this graph. That’s the vision we have and the reason we are building ohanah, as in such emerging landscape a truly integrated social media event platform was needed to facilitate those changes. We are not the first, Socializr from friendster founder, or Zoji , are somehow early tries of this but we think they didn’t leverage the full potential of what a completely social graph architecture can bring to an event platform.
Its hard even for us to completely draft what the end result of this journey will be, what we can say is that we are not focusing on making your event pages being able to have funny extravagant colors, or advanced layouts, as we think your event logo should be strong enough to represent your brand as you do with your own brand on Twitter, Facebook and so on. The more clean and enjoyable the overall experience is, the better for your event, organizers and attendees. The rest is all about the people that make your event coming alive, the social media and the generated content.
Only by having such a centralized event centric social graph system, we believe that events could discover new possibilities bringing the next event experience completely harmonious with the changes that the social media is bringing to the events world. We see Facebook as the biggest social graph placeholder where you keep in touch with friends sharing stories and picture about it, LinkedIn, where you keep on touch with your colleagues, and where you keep your business profile, Twitter where you keep track of conversation about what matter most to you and where you spread out messages to your follower, and we think of Ohanah where everything related to your events both as organizers or attendees happen (without having to loose what you get on those other great networks and tools). Events tells a lot about you and your interests as we all are what we attend and we all attend what we are.
