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We built our company around the primary goals of the event planner (or, if you prefer, event organizer, event architect, or event director). You want people to register, attend, and get the most out of the experience. You want to create a buzz. At the moment of execution, you want your event to be valuable and enjoyable.

We’ve created the ZeristaPRO platform with these goals in mind.

Research suggests that 64% an event planner’s working time is consumed by mind-numbing busywork. In addition to the fact that time is the currency of your life and it is being used in a manner described as “numbing,” we believe that if you could eliminate this nonsense from your workday you could better allocate that time to far more useful ventures – setting yourself ahead of the other event planners who are spending over half of their day with busywork. So, how do we remove the busyness from your agenda?

ZeristaPRO makes event planning a breeze.

• By using the matchmaking and chatter features attendees are able to connect and start buzzing long before your event takes place. This user-propelled pre-event buzz will virally build a sense of excitement for your events – no monkey-business or busy-work required.

• The schedule builders and agenda features make sure that all times and locations are in sync for all attendees & speakers – no mass notifications and confusion for small changes and adjustments.

• Chatter feed and social media integration allow attendees, speakers, and sponsors to establish a community organically, exchange thoughts and ideas about which sessions to attend, and get the conversation flowing long before anyone boards a plane or checks into a hotel.

• Effectiveness: streamlined registration, great user experience, and mobile event planning dashboard make it so that your event thrives and you aren’t tied to a computer.

Social media has radically shifted the paradigm in which making connections occurs, a change with huge ramifications for the event industry.

According to comscore, the self-touted global source of digital market intelligence, as of February 2011 one out of every eight minutes online was spent on Facebook. Yes, the obsession with social networking partially stems from our curiosity to know whose gotten married/pregnant/incarcerated since high school, but in reality a only a small portion of our time spent on sites like Facebook is consumed by such creeping (“Facebook stalking,” if you will). What it really symbolizes is the fact that people are, at their core, social creatures. We want information, we want to sell our products and services, but, more than anything, we want to connect with one another.

Networking

Pre-social media, one would arrive at an event with a limited amount of time to meet, mingle, spark a conversation, and – hopefully – develop a couple of meaningful connections. Today those are balls that can be rolling in the days, weeks, and months preceding the event itself. With social media technology, attendees and exhibitors are enabled to participate in group discussions, share ideas, spark conversations, and request meetings long before anyone boards a plane or leaves their office. Rather than relying on the serendipitous nature of meet and mingle events, one can search through a database of every attendee, speaker, and event session in order to filter out the most promising networking opportunities available based on their specific interests and event goals.

In the end, not only does social media technology allow individuals to begin making connections way back in the planning stage of an event, but this foresight allows them to plan for the event itself so that, when it arrives, they are able to allocate their time and energy during those few days most effectively (and then continue the conversation in the days, weeks, and months to follow).

Simplicity

Let’s be honest: navigating through an event can be an absolute nightmare.

Schedule changes are inevitable. Keeping track of exhibitor brochures and business cards, along with a 3” thick stacks of session schedules, itineraries, brochures, and maps, can quickly become a discombobulated, confusing, and downright miserable ordeal. Exhibition halls are huge. People are everywhere, business needs to happen, and there is never enough time in the day.

With the help of mobile technology, events become manageable again. When things are manageable, you’re free to get the most out of them, and maybe even (gasp!) enjoy them a bit.

The Moral

A great event is energized, productive, progressive, and dynamic. Without the right tools, however, any event can quickly become an overwhelming, chaotic mess that fails to reach it’s maximum potential.

Companies and individuals that utilize event technology prevent the little administrative inconveniences that unnecessarily complicate an event while simultaneously giving themselves an edge before, during, and after the event itself.

Anjanet Mort, our June employee spotlight, is not only the phenomenal (multi-tasking, early-rising) Client Services Manager here at Zerista, she’s also a perfect representative for our June Life Sciences theme.

Anjanet was born in California but then grew up in Colorado. She went to school at Purdue, where she earned a BA in writing and a minor in computer technology. Her jobs have spanned from being a release manager for Integware, a software provider for the Life Science Industry (our June theme!) to being a technical writer at Vidiom, a division of Time Warner. Today Anjanet is happily married to her husband Chris (who happens to work for a medical device company – Life Sciences Industry strike 2!) with whom she has an adorable 4 1/2 year old daughter named Gwena Viere.

She’s currently recovering from a full, cringe-worthy, Achilles rupture. In her spare time, she loves to read (a lot) and is organizing her book club to host a charity garage sale whose profits will go towards the Learning Source for Adults and Families.

When she isn’t reading, hurting herself, or saving the world one garage sale at a time, Anjanet loves to garden. She has gads of heirloom flowers from her grandmother back in Pennsylvania, along with rhubarb that is older than…well..dirt. “My garden obsession is keeping my husband’s hops out of my garden; my garage obsession is keeping his brewing equipment contained.” Towards the end of the season, the garden gets totally ignored as Anjanet turns her attention to college football; watching the boilermakers.

Besides gardening, she loves biking to the farmers market with her family, complete with Gwena on her training wheels, and petting her pup Lily.

comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, recently released it’s regular report on key trends in the U.S. mobile phone industry. According to the report, “for the three month average period ending in March, 234 million Americans ages 13 and older used mobile devices.” Of these devices, 72.5 million were smartphones.

“Browsers were used by 38.6 percent of subscribers (up 2.2 percentage points), while downloaded applications were used by 37.3 percent (up 2.9 percentage points),” indicating that people are still using a browser more than downloadable apps.

What does this mean for your event?

First of all, it means that making your event mobile is an increasingly powerful way to improve your event. It also means that, from an accessibility standpoint, if you only use native apps you’re neglecting huge components of the mobile marketplace. comScore reports that Android & iPhone users constitute 60% of the downloadable app market. Assuming that roughly 1/3 of the market are using downloadable apps, these statistics indicate that utilizing purely Android and iPhone apps at your next event will cover only about 20% of the market – and potentially only 20% of your attendees, exhibitors, speakers, and sponsors.

It’s for this reason that Zerista’s mobile platform utilizes both native apps and a mobile browser – so that you, and your attendees, are sure to be covered.

Sources:

comScore press release: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/5/comScore_Reports_March_2011_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share

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Lady Gaga Sharp IS03 two commercials, cell phone, KDDI in Japan will operate, with a bright 960 x 640 3.5-inch screen. http://www.sunrainet.com/lady-gaga-sharp-is03.html

This year, NTC (NTEN’s nonprofit technology conference) used Zerista’s web & mobile event planning platform to enhance the annual 3 day experience for over 2,000 users  - an impressive adoption rate that includes 362 exhibitors, 280 speakers, 11 moderators, and 1,915 attendees. This complete mobile platform put the entire event completely in the palms of all 2000+ hands, not only simplifying networking and planning, but making it easier to connect and form an effective event community.

It was nice to be able to choose several sessions and have a schedule on my phone, so that if one session was full, or didn’t fit my needs, I could easily look up my alternative session without having to reference my program book…

I also relied on the live [Chatter] feeds to see what everyone else was saying about the conference topics, key takeaways, and to also see where people were heading to dinner or when the cookie cart arrived!

- Lisa, myNTC user and writer for the Balcom Group blog

To learn more about NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference, visit their website at http://www.nten.org/ntc

Here at Zerista we’re hard at work making sure your event is the best it can be, the best way we know how: by constantly upgrading and improving our software. We know planning an event is a stressful process, and we’re committed to not only relieving many of the hassles, but to make you – the event organizer – look good in the process… because you deserve it.

Now, thanks to the hard work of the Zerista development team, you – the event planner – have better control than ever over your event site.

Changes to the database? You can now add and export attendees and sessions on your own, edit attendee and speaker profiles, or lock and unlock accounts when necessary.

Broadcast announcements & messages: When things get unpredictable (session change? Location change? Cancelations due to weather?) you can send a message in bulk to everyone attending your event.

Sophisticated dashboard: We’ve added a “track” column to the session listings in the admin panel, enabled you to add an RSS feed to your event site, and added support for multiple concurrent sessions per track.

With enhanced communication & more opportunities than ever to personalize your event with the administrative dashboard, you’ll be able to weather the literal and figurative storms that even the most challenging and unpredictable of events can throw at you.

Comscore has some great market info for us.  Google’s Android platform made the big jump in market share last year coming at the expense of Blackberry.  It looks to be more of a two horse race and our guess is that both will end up winning the lion’s share of the market.  The good news for ZeristaPRO customers is that not only do we support iPhone and Android native platforms with downloadable apps, but also support every other browser capable phone on the planet.  So, whether you love downloadable apps (32.3% of you did last year) or love to use your phone’s browser (34.5% of you do), ZeristaPRO has you covered.

Smartphone Platform Market Share

Mobile Content Usage

First mover advantage is way overrated.  Trail blazing companies capture headlines, @Techcrunch articles and @Scoblizer tweets – no doubt.