Sure you can promote your event though the newspaper and local TV add channel, but have you considered a Web 2.0 solution? Enter:
All of these online web sites allow you to promote your concert or event free of charge to the pubic and can create custom RSS feeds of your events (RSS FEEDS MADE EASY!) to incorporate into your websites or syndicate as you like. Google even will add your event to the Google Maps when anyone is searching the area for things to do!
The place to find out about local events! Zvents helps you quickly find events you care about, and gives you the tools to share event information with others. You can search for things to do (just like your favorite search engine), or browse categories if you’re not sure what you want to do.
Founded in 2004, Eventful is the leading events website which enables its community of users to discover, promote, share and create events. Eventful’s community of users select from nearly 4 million events taking place in local markets throughout the world, from concerts and sports to singles events and political rallies.
People use Eventful to track and share events with their friends and community in many ways:
- import iTunes and last.fm performer lists and keep track of which favorites are coming to town
- easily export events via feeds, calendar widgets, third-party calendar services, email alerts and much more
- keep track of what’s happening at favorite venues and see where favorite performers are appearing
- weekly email event guides are completely customized based on a user’s interests, with recommended events in their city
- add events to your personal watch list and see what events your friends and groups are watching (and going to)
- add events to Eventful for free and promote events to the entire community
Upcoming is a community for discovering and sharing events. It can help you find stuff to do, discover what your friends are doing, or let you keep private events online for your own reference. If you’d like, read more about Upcoming.
Use Google Calendar to post public listings of your event and have them integrated into Google’s mapping software.
Each one has it’s pluses and minuses… I’ve used them all in the past, but I have mainly been focusing on Eventful and the Google Calendar in the past year. Once you put your items into Eventful it is easy to Share them via Google, Yahoo, and other Social Bookmarking Services.
Here is a link to one my postings on Eventful. Good luck with your event postings!
I am a member of Eventful and have found it extremely helpful–it not only tells you music and theater, but any kind of entertainment: special club nights, sporting events, etc. It’s a quick run down of events sent right to your email.
I also enjoy how artists can now have their fans “demand” them to come to their cities through Eventful–it’s helping the artists easily see where in the country they’re listened to and desired.
The concept of using RSS feeds to promote music events is quite interesting. In contrast to the sort of publicity that I recall from my days of high school, I feel this method brings in a different and larger demographic. Posters in the public library, will raise awareness primarily amongst senior citizens and young mothers. By contrast, rss feeds will bring in probably a younger and more diverse crowd, making a greater part of the community aware of local events. I feel this is a great way to promote the arts locally.
Nice summary. Agree that they each have their pros and cons but have you just copied the description of each from their website? They sound overly positive of each and aren’t really accurate.
Zvents – the one you want to use to find things to do. They are a search engine so they have way more stuff and power most 3rd parties – listing with them will get you just about everywhere else (heck with manually “sharing”). Problems? stale. Hardly the buzz that eventful has but then you want function and effectiveness, not flashy.
Eventful – The social platform. Demand is a great badge for your profile to say I want X to come to town while getting others to support you. I’ve heard that that alone has convinced some bands to do successful shows.
Problems? hardly “discover” They aren’t a search engine so they really only have what people demand. That said, as I defended Zvents’ problem, I’ll do the same with this criticism: Sure, users are “discovering” the events that they have.
“Create events” What does that even mean?
Upcoming – no comment. Yahoo’s thing right? still very techie last I checked. Private events is an interesting angle.
Google Calendar – yeah post public listings and share on maps. I’m really anxious to see what Windows Live supports in this regard though since Windows is the only thing that can trump Google by getting everyone (except Mac users) using it.
What I really like is that you’ve almost summarized them well as such:
Zvents – find and share/promote events
Eventful – request and share events
Upcoming – private events (though why you wouldn’t use Evite for that…)
Google – promote events
Alex,
Thanks for your review. You are correct the quotations are copies of their summaries. I am a big fan of the Google Calendar options as the map funciton is really useful when you are already going places and can see them.
All of these are the first generation of this type of thing and it will only get better. I’m not really familiar with Evite, thanks for the cue… I’ll check into it.
The intent of this article wasn’t to review the services as much as it was to make readers “aware”. Again thanks for very insightful comment and opinions. Please join our conversation anytime!
J. Pisano
It sounds like you are gathering lots of different ideas in your blog. This is great stuff.