Stubbleblog

I recently started seven straight work days with phone calls to Europe. That was a little jarring at first but made some sense because we’d just run successful networks for conferences in London and Berlin. What took me a little longer to figure out was how little pushback I got on prices. The conversations we’re all about whether it was a good fit, not whether they had budget available. At first I thought it was just a different style of negotiation. But then I realized that with the weak dollar our prices are extremely cheap.

That’s a good thing when you’re trying to bootstrap a business. I’ve often wondered if it would be easier to start this business if I lived in Brazil (my aunt has an apartment there) where costs are low but continued to sell to the US where prices are comparitively much higher. Lucky me: I found the exact same dynamic living here and selling to Europe.

I’ve been wondering if other small businesses are on to this trend. Apparently, yes. Marci Alboher (who interviewed me for this NY Times piece on small business blogging) published an article in today’s small business section: Weak Dollar Has Small Businesses Thinking Globally.

The main reason CrowdVine has been so against taking investment or debt is because as programmers we think it’s more rewarding to run an independent company than to run a company that’s dependent on VCs or credit card companies. It wasn’t all personal preference, a lot of trends were pointing this way. Cost of development went way down. So did hosting, hardware, and bandwidth. And now there’s an entire continent of wealthy customers.

Not everything about the weak dollar makes me happy. I’d like to travel in Europe for example. But it is an opportunity for small business, and that’s fine by me.

We just launched our new product, CrowdVine for Conferences. Here’s the official announcement where I try to explain the product in layman terms.

We’ve done six conferences now through our professional services (that’s where we do everything from setup to community management): Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, MX East, Future of Web Apps / London, Foo Camp, Maker Faire Bay Area, SoCon.

And we’ve had people setup regular CrowdVine networks for BarCampBlock, IDEA 2007, Ignite Boston, and PodCamp Atlanta.

Our new CrowdVine for Conferences service is just making official something that we’ve known for awhile now: CrowdVine networks are a great replacement for the traditional printed attendee list. They let you put names to faces, find out real information about people, and then get in touch with the people you want to meet.

From a conference organizer perspective, more networking means a more valuable conference that attendees are more likely to return to. Plus we’re able to pull out information to help make the next conference even better, information like which topics were attendees most interested in, which speakers were most popular, and which attendees acted as connectors who made the conference better for everyone.

If you know conference organizers or you are conference organizer, please make an introduction.

I posted some tips for conference social networking to the Future of Web Apps network. I think they’re applicable to anyone using CrowdVine for Conferences.

A great conference happens when everyone is having fantastic hallway conversations. We setup CrowdVine networks to make it easier for you to find people in the hallway. If you’ve never used a social network at a conference (or even if you have) here are four tips for making the most of it.

1. Find people you want to meet

You can search, you can browse by tag, or you can browse other people’s contacts. For example, if you need help at work implementing OpenID, you should search the network for OpenID and introduce yourself to the OpenID experts. If you have a new Rails plugin that you want to publicize, then you should make a point of meeting all the other people who tagged themselves “ruby on rails”. If you want to do business deals, then you might want to browse the “CEO” tag.

2. Make yourself visible

Use a recognizable profile photo. You’ll be surprised how many people recognize you and introduce themselves.

Then take a few minutes to fill out your profile and answer the profile questions. You just need to give enough information for other people to understand your expertise and interests.

3. Contact people

If you mark someone as a fan, they’ll show up in your network. It’s the digital equivalent of waving hello. You can also track the their blog posts and popular sessions from your My Network tab.

If you mark someone as want-to-meet, you’re expressing some interest in actually talking face-to-face. They’ll receive an email and at least know that you’d like to introduce yourself. That’s miles better than interrupting someone’s conversation and then explaining who you are.

For anybody that you want to connect with, try leaving a comment. That can be a great endorsement for the person. It’s also a terrific way to ask a question or explain why you want to meet.

4. Recognize that there are no obligations

People come to conferences for different reasons. Not everyone you contact is going to contact you back. Likewise, you shouldn’t feel obligated to connect with everyone who contacts you.

Bonus tip #5. Enjoy yourself! This is social software.

Shelly from Pathable wrote a great summary of the social software package we put together for Foo. I especially like her description of the collaboration:

we were, individuals from five separate organizations, collaborating to create a fully featured, unique social networking experience for Foo Camp attendees – with only six weeks to piece it all together. This, as much as anything, emphasized for me what a great job O’Reilly has done in creating an environment that generates the level of trust and shared passion that enables this sort of effort to succeed.

The folks from Pathable, CrowdVine (me) and iCalico got together at Foo Camp to prototype a social software package for conferences. We had a lot of fun and got enough traction for the concept that we’re putting together an official package for other conferences/events.

Here’s how it works. CrowdVine provides a social network which let’s people do some pre-event networking by putting names to faces and arranging for in-event meetings and then do some post-event networking where people follow up with the people they met during the event. Pathable provides badges or badge stickers that use their social matching algorithms to recommend maches and opposites (a fun group to meet) and groupings into colors and tags. The badges make for great conversation starters. iCalico provides social conference scheduling. You can mark which sessions you’re going to and also see what sessions your friends are interested in.

Here’s what Scott Berkun had to say after using the package at Foo:

Not sure how much these folks charge, but smart conference organizers should be hiring these folks. Conferences talk the talk about connecting people and building networks, but rarely do anything to facilitate it. Crowdvine and pathable are real tools to help make that stuff happen.

If you know anyone who runs conferences or events I’d love to talk to them.

Pathable had a very successful first deploy, helping people make professional connections at BizJam. See their writeup, Pathable Social Matching at BizJam: It works!

“I met two people on my most similar list, and one opposite. One of the similar people I already knew from Mind Camp, and we just chatted for a bit. The other guy is also a local Python programmer working in Django (what I wrote the Noonhat site in) and he’s on the mailing list for my user group meeting. ;) Certainly similar. When I met the lady who was my opposite, it was like oil & water. Wasn’t even able to have a minimal conversation to figure out what she does.”

I’ve had very similar experiences using CrowdVine for conferences. People want to connect but there are a lot of barriers, both informational and social, to making meaningful connections. We’ve teamed up for Foo Camp to see how our software plays together. CrowdVine will provide the pre- and post-event networking and Pathable will extend that into face-to-face interactions.

Congrats to Peter and Shelly for a successful launch.

Interesting that Joel is taking his entire team to ETech this year. I’ve been to every O’Reilly conference in the last three years save EuroOSCON and the defunct Bioinformatics. ETech is consistently the most interesting and fun. Apparently Joel gave his team a choice of conferences and they all chose ETech. Good for them.

I did overhear someone at Web 2.0 claim that they hadn’t told anyone that they were at the conference because they considered the trip a competitive advantage. My guess is that Joel feels the opposite, publicly acknowledging his team’s intentions gives him an advantage when it comes to recruiting and retention.

I guess openness is one of the Web 2.0 virtues that not everyone at Web 2.0 understands.