Building Alliances Blog

About Building Alliances LLC

We support Thought Leaders (and their companies) in generating revenues via sponsorships and alliances. Our 25 year track record includes developing and implementing programs in the areas of live events, social media, business management, and sustainability, for both start-ups and leading corporations.

Building Alliances, LLC succeeds by serving the needs of two distinct groups:

• On the one hand, we develop programs that enable brilliant visionaries (and their organizations) to connect with corporate funding and support.

• On the other, we help leading corporations achieve their thought leadership and business development goals through effective sponsorship and content marketing programs.

Services we provide include:

For Properties (Including events, media entities, non-profits, and others):

• We help transform Properties to be more attractive to funders, and especially Corporate Sponsors.
  
  
• We specialize in enhancing the Thought Leadership opportunities you have to offer, with a goal of dramatically increasing your attractiveness and value to Sponsors and others.
  
  
• We recognize that the above services are only valuable if they are translated into concrete sales. We work closely with your internal resources to maximize revenues from all your business development and sponsorship efforts.
  
  

For Leading Corporations and Start-Ups:

• Assistance in getting the most out of your investments in Sponsorship.
• Development and implementation of effective Thought Leadership and Content Marketing Strategies, including integration of both live event and online components.
• Creation of cooperative marketing campaigns that reduce costs and maximize impact.

Approach:

We focus on building the precise strategic alliances and sales and marketing campaigns that our clients need in order to thrive.

To be truly worthwhile, alliances and campaigns both need to be sustained over the long term, which in our experience requires three things:

1. The quality of the content and Thought Leadership message conveyed is paramount.

2. They have to be anchored on a foundation of sustainability, through both the products and values embodied.

3. They need to be approached with that perspective from the beginning, and structured accordingly.

Working as part of your team, we seek to cost-effectively extend your ability to achieve your goals, on a flexible and evolving basis.

Current and past clients include:

• Federated Media
• Harvard Business School Publishing
• Fast Company Magazine
• Esty Environmental Partners
• Business Climate 2011
• Balanced Scorecard Collaborative

The State of the Union (of events and new technologies)

As I sit here on the verge of SXSW, it seems a good moment to reflect on the state of the events space. 

There is a sense of resurgence as we hit the full swing of the Spring events season.  But this is against a backdrop of declining attention spans, and general overwhelm all around.

What events to attend, and which to skip remains a critical question attendees and sponsors are asking, and they increasingly are delaying their answers until the very last minute.

Even more challenging is how to deal with the new options that exist—most notably the audience attending from afar by watching the livestream or twitter feed, or attending physically, but spending a majority of their time working on smartphone, tablet or laptop, re-joining the event only occasionally.

This is the big (and largely unaddressed) digital trend transforming our industry, just as it has so many others. Very few event producers are really addressing this though  Event Camp has shown some interesting models and new tools like lanyrd.com , are jumping into this breach in exciting ways. (More on all these in an upcoming post.) 

Meanwhile the plethora of new in person connection tools debuting this week at SXSW looks like Domo and Yoblongo among others looks to improve the live experience itself.  This is likewise going to be critical to the future health of events of all kinds.

What in your experience are the best new tools you are experimenting with to get more value out of the events you attend, produce, or sponsor?

 

Fragmentation and Attention

As I cover various events for my Conference Bites website, I rely heavily on Twitter, Live Streams and various blogs. The maxim I used when I started the site, "We can’t be everywhere we want to be", is especially true in the event biz these days.

Today, I sent part of my attention span to at least three and a half events:

1. The Virtual Edge Summit in Santa Clara. I laughed at first that there was an in-person expo and conference about virtual events, but they live streamed several sessions (very effectively) and I sat in on a couple of panels.

2. The IAB Leadership Conference in Carlsbad. Here I relied on a very active twitter stream, which I dipped into via my platform of choice, TweetDeck.

3. The Online Marketing Summit in San Diego, which really kicks off tomorrow was also on my radar screen.

4. And there was a panel on Social Media down at Stanford that had a few tweets (mostly from @loic) that made it sound interesting as well.

Looking back on the day, I got value out of most all of it. I really would have liked to be down at IAB, and I still am missing out on the panel Seth Goldstein is chairing as I write.  The twitter stream gets across many of the key highlights, but along with missing out on the relationship value of in person networking, I find myself wanting more—a live streamed video, or somebody doing a full on live blog on the sessions.

The Virtual Edge event offered video and slides in a nice player (via Stream57, among several other sponsoring companies), and while the content was good, it wasn’t great, and my guess is IAB delivered more. So I am left with less than full satisfaction.



The other challenge with TweetDeck up all day is that I’m also pulled in to my columns for  Facebook and LinkedIn as well as Twitter. Much of it erroneous, some of it wonderful, but the result is I've got lots of open tabs on FireFox for links I opened that I am still hoping to get back to.

The net result of all of this rapid shifting from live stream to downloading the boxee app that wowed at IAB to the tweet stream to Facebook, is that I feel somewhat frazzled.

But, I’m (relatively) up to date on my email in-box, and didn’t have to endure any airport screening or long car rides, so I guess there are always trade offs.

One learning from the Virtual Edge panel on "Learn How Oracle, Intel and SAP Extend Reach, Build Community with "Hybrid" Events" is that as they put more components of their b to b events online (think Sapphire and Oracle Open World) it is not cannibalizing live event attendance. The dream is that it will increase it, as people who get a taste online will want more.

I think that is true, and IAB is now more likely to be on my list for next year, based on today’s Twitter feed.

How about you? Any tricks you’ve learned for following events from afar, and keeping your sanity intact?

Does being able to get at some of the goodness online make you more or less likley to attend in person?

Google Wave powering more 21st Century Event 'Attendance' Options

Continuing on my last thread about the different ways that technology is changing the way we relate to events, I want to point out a  couple of great posts last week:

First was from Fresh Networks blog  about the potential for Google Wave to build on (or even surpass) twitter as an event tool. 

Even if you don’t have your copy of GW yet, this one is important because as Charlie Osmond says “I suspect it’s going to take a couple of years before this goes mainstream. But it will. And the impact on conference organizers and speakers is significant.”

One of the comments in that thread was even more eye opening, from Dan York of Voxeo.  He walks us through an actual how to from how conference producers and delegates can actually make this work.

What seems most exciting about this to me is that it continues to spreads the value of the actual event further across time, Tivo style.  Specifically, it offers the opportunity for collaborative notetaking  as well as post session commenting, linking , questions and dialog.  Very impressive!

21st Century Event Attendance Options

It used to be the choice was to either attend an event, or not to attend.

Now there are a whole range of options, including:

A. Attend

B. Attend, but keep half your attention on your smartphone or laptop

C. Stay home (or at your desk), but “attend” virtually via twitter, twubs, livestream, blogposts, etc…

Saturday, I couldn’t make it down to LA for OpportunityGreen, so I  followed  the tweets and such from here.  Check out hashtag #og09 if you want to do the same.

Last week, I went with option B, spending the day in San Francisco at Green Tech Media’s The Networked Grid Event.  Along with getting some work done, I used my laptop to record 4 posts worth of quotes that I’ll be putting up at www.conferencebites.com over the next few days.

It was really an impressive collection of highlights, at least for anyone interest in the Smart Grid.  Please check them out and let me know what you think.

--Brian Duggan, Building Alliances Blog

The search for Event Video best practices…..

For many months now I have been struck by the increasing confluence of video and events. Here are some examples:

> Sitting at my desk watching Chris Sacca live on UStream from Amsterdam discussing Twitter and other web ventures.

> Attending Always On Going Green, where they have an outdoor mini-studio/spin room set up to schmooze with the key presenters after each talk, all of which, talks included they send out live.

> At GridWeek in DC, they hired a crew to do man on the street type interviews with the delegates that were then edited and played back to the audience in the main session (like when waiting for Congressman Markey (of Waxman-Markey fame) to show up). The difference here was they had real talent—the interviewer was part of an Improv troupe that also provided entertainment onsite, and he really brought each piece to life in a great way. see here 

> Off on vacation in the mountains, way off the net, one of my friends pulls out a dvd and asks if we want to watch a TED Talk.

None of these is remarkable or groundbreaking, but taken together they point to a growing trend: Video is increasingly key to events succeeding. There are huge challenges to this, especially in terms of a business model to make it cost effective, and also in terms of technology, as we all know how spotty the transmission remains on most of these online broadcasts.

One experience I had the good fortune to be part of, which I think points the way towards an exciting new model, is Next Agenda. Predicated on the need for a new approach to solve the major problems facing our world, this event felt as much like being on the set of a reality TV show as being at a conference. The hope is that this will allow the discussions (and the solutions) to scale across the net. They are on the verge of posting the footage from the day, but even without that they have a lot of great content on their site, which I highly recommend checking out at www.nextagenda.com. Also, you can see some of my quotes from the day at www.conferencebites.com.

I think we all (event producers, participants and sponsors alike) need to recognize that this is yet another way the game is changing. As I’ve written about before, given the world of "short attention span theater" we all live in, we are more challenged than ever in terms of getting people to attend events, or to pay attention once they get there, especially if you are still in a talking heads model. Video offers a powerful and increasingly essential tool to turn that to your advantage, by creating content that scales beyond the event, where you can get hopefully engage people back at their computers and mobile devices.

My question for you is, what are the best success stories you have seen for bringing this power to life?

Finding time for reflection admist a swirl of events......

The last couple weeks have been a blur of events. I hope to write something more reflective here in the near future, especially about Next Agenda, which promises to be a new frontier in the integration of live events and online experiences.

In the meantime, I am posting quotes from each stop on my recent journeys at my website, www.conferencebites.com  and I invite you to look in over there at the latest.

"The people formerly known as the audience" raise the bar for the Events Business

Growing evidence points to both the mounting challenges facing the conference business right now, and the fact that somewhere within those challenges lurk great opportunities.

Consider:

1. The recent 4A’s conference (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Conference, as reported by Michael Bush in Ad Age, came up short both in numbers of delegates (off some 30 or 40%+),and in the delivery of practical solutions the delegates were looking for.

2. There are several amazing blog posts and a vibrant tweetstream about the "New Models for Old Publishers" Panel at SXSW Interactive this week. I highly recommend searching through this stream from Sunday the 15th during the panel, either at #sxswbp or through a site like icerocket.com (which I prefer). Either way, you’ll find what Michael Tobis, one of the many bloggers to report on the panel described as… "Most of the panel presentation was irrelevant (and rather pointless) exposition on the part of the panelists… Why? Because almost everybody in the audience was on a pre-announced twitter channel #sxswbp. And by the time anybody in the crowd got to ask anything, most of the crowd was in a very collective and connected foul mood… the event was ironic because it was ultimately not about long form writing at all but about the very short form, i.e., the 140 or fewer characters in a Twitter message. For all I know it was a watershed event in the history of instant messaging. It certainly was a revelation for me, and that's why I'm glad I was there. Twitter is nowhere near as silly an idea as it appears at first glance."

A similar reaction from Yen was... "On the one hand, the conversation on Twitter was related (and a reaction) to the offline panel discussion; on the other, it took place without the involvement of the panelists—the Web 2.0 equivalent of passing notes behind the teacher’s back.  Welcome to the New Think."

Seth Godin’s challenge to the community of event producers gets more relevant with each passing week. The current economy  paired with the richness of what is available online continues to raise the bar.

The NY Times report the day after SXSW Interactive sums up what event producers have to compete with: "It was obvious after a few days here that the people formerly known as the audience were too busy making content to consume much of it, unless it came from their friends. The medium is not the message; the messages are the media.”

How does that sentiment jive with your experience? What live conference or session have you been to lately that was really worth it?

6 ways (and counting) that Twitter is transforming events, Part 2

When it comes to what Twitter means for events, there are far more unknowns than knowns at this point, but here are some of the early indicators:

1.    Twitter is the new back channel for communication:

In any event that appeals to early adopters, and increasingly a greater and greater segment of the population, people will be using Twitter for the digital equivalent of passing notes back and forth in class.

All events will want to establish a designated hashtag (#ted, #davos, etc…) to allow these users to connect with each other easily onsite, just by including it in their tweets.  Or just stand back, they will create one for themselves.

The emergence of this phenomenon is a two edged sword for events. Even sophisticated events trying to build community around their Facebook pages are finding the grassroots nature of Twitter impossible to control. The conversation is out in public and flowing freely, and once underway can’t be easily corralled into a more structured environment.  At least that was my experience at the OMMA Social Conference a few weeks ago, where a rich twitter stream included at least a couple of invites from the promoters to bring the conversation back to the established Facebook community pages, with little or no response.

This may also affect more established Event community and collaboration suppliers, such as Jive Software and others, but more about that category in a future post.

2.    The back channel becomes as public as your conference website, maybe more so:

This designated hashtag will immediately enable anyone anywhere searching for what is going on at your event to follow along on the comments in real time, to join in, and allow them to follow posted links, photos, etc…

This is a powerful outbound communication stream that you will want to nurture,

6 ways (and counting) that Twitter is transforming events, Part 1

Maybe it’s the Buzz of TED (see favorite quotes here, gathered from afar and mostly through Twitter), but as I turn my attention to the specific new technologies that are transforming events before our eyes, Twitter seems to me to be first and foremost.