Hope to see you there!
The next Espresso Bar hangout will be March 19
Due to scheduling conflicts and some health issues, we’ve postponed our hangout a week to March 19. Don’t worry, everyone will be fine, we just wanted to make sure our hosts would be 100% and available for another awesome show. We’ll have Darren from the development team on to talk about the new Messages system he’s been working on for 3.2. We’ll also be selecting a customer web site to feature for our Espresso Shots segment (thanks for sending in the suggestions for titles!) as well as talking about the new API and iPad app, our Postmark/Mandrill plugin and our new Event Espresso Pros page and developer resources. We’ll also answer any questions or topic ideas you may have that we think would be good for the show, so fill out the form below if there’s something you’d like us to talk about or if you’d be interested in being a guest host.
You can follow Darren, Chris, Seth and Event Espresso on Twitter, join us on IRC and tune in a week from next Tuesday for our live hangout.
11 Reasons the Event Espresso Community Can Help You – And Your Events – Be More Successful
By Garth Koyle
Networking with other like-minded people and organizations can make a significant impact on your success as an event manager, website programmer, or designer. If you haven’t already discovered that, then you will soon! We know it’s important, so we’ve created several ways to help you engage with other members of the Event Espresso community:
- Community Chat Room
- Support Forums
- Google+
- Are we missing anything that would help you connect with the Event Espresso community?
Here are some of the key benefits and reasons to network with other Event Espresso users:
1. Building New and Strengthening Existing Relationships
Building a relationship is about more than just connecting to someone else’s online profile. You might have 500+ friends on Facebook or the same number of connections on Linkedin, but do you connect with those people on a daily basis about how to grow your business? Quit “liking” or “poking” old friends; connect with the people and organizations who are working on the same projects and have the same goals as you do. That’s a real business relationship.
2. Discovering New Ideas
Do you want to know how Event Espresso users can process 80,000 registrations in a single month or $35,000 in 48 hours? You’re not going to find that by watching your news feed on Facebook. You’ll learn more important ways on how make your events more successful by engaging with the Event Espresso community than any other source. Do you want your friends to “like” you, or do you want your customers to like you (for example, by attending your events)?
3. Building Your Reputation
You might have a thousand points of expertise on your Linkedin profile and your resume might be three pages long, but those aren’t any good to the wrong audience. You’re using Event Espresso and your business is similar to hundreds of other businesses. The Event Espresso community will value your experience and skills the most. Join the discussion and build your own brand today.
4. Finding New Opportunities
Event Espresso probably has more features than your local coffee shop has flavors. But imagine how many combinations you can create with all the coffee flavors or Event Espresso features? Building Event Espresso as a plugin for WordPress also allows you to use a variety of other plugins and themes, but which ones do other people use? There is a wealth of information available among the thousands of Event Espresso users, we just need to ask the right questions and encourage each other to share the right answers. What questions do you have and what insight can you give? What would you like to learn more about?
5. Access to New Information and Learning
Organizing, managing and promoting events is an ever-changing job and there might be a thousand different ways to do something. But if you had the chance to ask someone else who has been there, would you take the opportunity? You might be surprised at what other people know and how it can expand your knowledge. We also can’t read your mind about what you want to know, so the only way for anyone to help you is to ask.
6. Gaining Advice From Other Experts, Find a Mentor
At Event Espresso we ask a lot of questions each day. We ask each person of the team questions about technical issues or how we can better serve our customers; we ask customers each day about how they use Event Espresso and how we can improve our events plugin; and we ask third-party developers and mentors how to deal with the challenges of growing a small business. But no matter who we ask for help, we always get the best answers from people who have walked down that path before. Our mission is to help you grow your business, and as you grow you’ll be faced with many different challenges. You should have a team in your corner who can look at the problem from outside the fight and give you advice on what your next steps could be.
7. Sharing Your Expert Advice, Mentoring Others
One of the most challenging and rewarding things you can do is help someone else be more successful. It takes a lot of courage to give your opinion that might not be accepted, but if you have real-life experience then no one else can refute your knowledge. Your simple opinion is also helpful for others who are uncertain about what path they should take. In nearly every case your participation and encouragement can help other people be more successful.
8. Finding New Products and Services
How did you learn about Event Espresso? You might have had to search for an online event registration plugin for WordPress, or you might have been one of the lucky ones and had a friend recommend it to you and saved you from all the searching costs. Either way, by connecting with other Event Espresso users you will have access to other event organizers who know how to solve your same problem. For example, what website hosting company should you use with Event Espresso or trust?; what merchant account do people like best and is most affordable?; what is a good WordPress theme, etc? Event Espresso will be your best resource for answers to these and many other questions.
9. Generate New Business Opportunities
When was the last time your old high school friend on Facebook was able to help you earn business from a new client? Is your Linkedin profile among the top 10% most-viewed profiles? We know that neither of those relationships or statistics are as productive in generating new business than networking with like-minded businesses and potential customers.
10. Recruit New Members of Your Team
It really is hard to find good help these days. We’re creating new ways for you to find help from other Event Espresso users, programmers, designers, marketers, etc. who can help you make your events more successful. Need to hire someone? We have a Job Board where you can post free (and paid) job listings, and we try to tweet out all the job postings to our extended network for you. We also know that the best place to find good help to manage your online event registration is by building relationships with other people who are doing the same.
11. Have Fun
Event Espresso was started after Garth and Seth worked together for three years. They’ve enjoyed working together, and their work has become their hobby. Some of their best friends are now people they work with. They enjoy networking with customers, programmers, business managers, etc. Hopefully you get to do what you enjoy – we enjoy having you part of the Event Espresso community.
Conclusion
Again, at Event Espresso we know that if you meaningfully engage with on other like-minded people and businesses to achieve your goals, you can learn who to trust and how to do things better. Participate with us in the community today via:
What can you bring to the Event Espresso community and what can we all help you with?
Come hang out with us on Tuesday
Our second public Google+ hangout will be next Tuesday, February 12 at 9am MST. You can watch the first episode in the Event Espresso Hangout Archive or download the audio on iTunes. If you have questions or topics you’d like us to discuss on the air, you can fill out our form.
Some topics we might discuss are:
- Customer Seating Chart showcase
- Event Espresso developer whose client sold $35k in 48 hours
- Event Espresso 3.2 progress report
- 3.1.30 released
- What’s coming in 3.1.31?
- Front End Manager beta & attendee mover tool
Our hosts this month will be:
Seth Shoultes @sethshoultes
Chris Reynolds @jazzs3quence
Chris is a general handyman around Event Espresso, working the forums, email, custom development and occasional contributions to Event Espresso core and add-on development. Chris is responsible for rewriting much of the Event Espresso Requirements Check plugin and has been with the team for the past 2 years.
Brent Christensen @BrentEspresso
During the hangout you’ll be able to send us questions or comments live via twitter with the #EventEspresso hashtag or via IRC (our hangout page will have a IRC embed below the video so you can log in and watch live on Tuesday).
Event Espresso live hangout on Google+
Want to get the scoop on the latest developments in the Event Espresso plugin? Have a question about how to set up Event Espresso on your site? Curious about Event Espresso and want to know more about it before you take the plunge? We’ll be starting a new, monthly hangout on the second Tuesday of every month. Our first episode will be next week!
Here’s your chance to hear directly from us. In this regular one hour chat, we’ll cover all sorts of topics in Event Espresso and WordPress in general. We’ll also be featuring customer sites and case studies, and answer questions submitted via Twitter or our IRC channel. If you aren’t already following us on Twitter, do it now, so you can be sure to catch us live when we go on at 9am MST. Can’t make it? Submit your questions via Twitter with the hashtag #EventEspresso or post your questions in the comments below and we will pick select issues or questions that you have. Already a nerd? You can join us on Tuesday on freenode in #eventespresso-support channel.
Topics and format are subject to change — this is our first attempt at doing something like this, but we’re excited and think it will bring a new way to connect with you, our users, and address some topics that you are specifically interested in. So let us know what you want us to talk about! Need a prompt? How about, what should we call the hangout? We thought of Coffee Talk, but your feedback is welcome!
Use the links below to add this to your calendar:
