Conference Bay revamps its website!

In order to be ready for the new conference season, which traditionally starts in September, Conference Bay will be revamping its website to make sure that customers can find conferences even more easily. We have also looked at the bidding process in which customers can name the price they are willing to pay for a seat at a conference, making it easier and more intuitive for the customer to make a bid. All of these changes are based on feedback we have received from many of you and we would like to ask you to keep sending us your honest views and thoughts.

Below we will give you a sneak peak of the pages as we are developing them and we would love to hear back from you, so drop us a comment here or write to feedback@conferencebay.com

The new homepage (click on the thumbnail below, some of you will have to click twice to zoom in on the image in your browser) will have a more prominent space for a number of selected conferences and as you will notice there is a more prominent message saying Make an Offer, with a box where the customer can fill in an amount to get started with the bidding process right away.

The new Conference Bay homepage

The number of conferences on Conference Bay has grown tremendously and we have heard from quite a number of people that the process of finding the right conference was sometimes a bit complicated. We have therefore made this process very intuitive as can be seen on the screenshot below. You simply click on the categories that you are interested in and a complete list of conferences will be shown immediately. These can always be filtered by location and/or sub-topic.

An easier way to find conferences you are interested in

The page with more detailed information for each conference has also seen an overhaul: we have placed much more prominence on the bidding opportunity that we offer for each of the pricing packages the organiser offers. This does not mean the conference details are less prominently available, on the contrary, we feel the whole page has become much more user friendly, especially with the “Amazon” style ’similar events’ we will suggest to the customer.

A conference detail page

We have also made the bidding process much simpler for customers by taking out the credit card stage where the customer used to ’secure’ his/her bid. This means that a bit for a seat can be made in less than a minute.

We hope to launch the new look Conference Bay soon, stay tuned and write us with your views!

Liveblogs! They Multiply Your Conference’s Value

It’s an emerging media all its own. It pays to use it for those unable to visit a conference and many swear by it as even better than video recordings: it’s the conference liveblogs ! The process is known as liveblogging. A blogger present at a conference, streams a synopsis of each presentation, talk-by-talk. That’s on real time, well almost. It’s a serious job, more than a snarky twit about how bad a conference speaker is.

We are a big fan of the conference livebloggers. The best we have around are Ethan Zuckerman who teams up with Bruno Giussani, star livebloggers both, who came up with a free short 3-page PDF booklet on how to blog a conference with effectiveness.

It works very well for the conference blogger to begin with. When you blog a conference it forces you to pay attention. The requisite focus of summarizing each talk clarifies many ideas for the one writing it. With that, the blogger-conference-goer is then able to share. The really nice thing about perfecting this craft is a “free pass to many high-priced conferences”. It’s a cool thing as conference organizers are increasingly looking for first-rate livebloggers to generate press and future attendees.

The recently concluded BlogHer ‘O8 July 18-20, 2008 in San Francisco, CA have put up liveblogs here.

On the other hand, conference organizers are also urged to keep pace with new technologies to innovate on thw way conferences are conducted. Livebloggers of note are able to report on talks at conferences like Pop!Tech, TED, OSCON, All Things D, because they are well organized, interesting and stimulating. Good speakers makes for easy liveblogging — you get to follow a narrative thread that can be easily digested and streamed through blogs and other platforms.

Are you already liveblogging at conferences? Give us a buzz! Feel free to share them in the comments. If you are conference goer keen to give it a try, then this piece from Ethan and Bruno will be your best bet for kickstarting it!

Tips for Conference Bloggers
By Bruno Giussani and Ethan Zuckerman
2007, 3 pages
Free
Available as a PDF from here

Some cool excerpts:

• It’s relatively easy to blog good and great speakers: They follow a narrative path through their talks and speak at a pace the audience can understand. It’s harder to blog inexperienced speakers(because they may be too technical, confusing, fast, etc.) and multispeaker panels (because the discussion can take many different unstructured turns). But you don’t need to transcribe the whole talk, you need to capture the gist of it. A 20-minutes talk can often be summarized in a 20-lines post.

• Always remember that what you’re writing will be read by people who weren’t in the room, so they haven’t seen the slides, the video, or the gesture. Hence, you have to compensate for the lack of context. Don’t be afraid to create a narrative by saying “He shows a slide with data on …” or “She walks on stage carrying a big suitcase” or “He shows a YouTube video” etc. And if the speaker shows a YouTube video, or a picture, remember that you’re online: Open another browser window, go to YouTube, find that video, and link to it; or go to the speaker’s website, find that picture or another similar or related item, and link to it (or republish the picture within your post). Yes, this requires effective multitasking. It’s at the root of conference blogging.

• Conferences usually give out a program ahead of time. Use it to prepare for blogging: Do a quick Google search for each speaker, and save (in the same text file) links to their sites, blogs, and the institutions they’re affiliated with; write a one-or-two-sentences “biography” for each; and for the speakers you’ve never heard of, try to get a general sense of who they are and what they do. To write the mini-biography, use also the speaker information distributed by the conference organizers (booklet, website, etc.). For the key speakers, save a picture on your laptop (from their websites) and pre-format it for Web use, in case you will need it. If you prepare sufficiently, you’ve got the first paragraph of each post almost written ahead of time.

Conference-in-Focus: AQ Services International Customer Service Excellence Conference

We first came across this buzzword at the turn of the 21^st century – the term Experience Economy was described in a book written in 1999 by B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore titled “The Experience Economy”. It is supposed to be that NEXT big stage to follow the agrarian economy, the industrial economy and the most recent so called service economy.

This is exactly the value we drive at Conference Bay – to design and orchestrate memorable events for our customers. We always say delightful conference experience, means conference without the hassle. Then that experience becomes our product! We offer conference going without the hassle commonly associated with it. For instance, we aggregate relevant conferences by topic and location and offer online tools to book conferences or alternatively to save on your conference seat by bidding for it. This, we submit is the natural course in the value added by our business over and above other things.

The experience economy is also considered as main underpinning for customer experience management. We have a classic example to show you here from AQ Services International with their Half Day Conference on Service Excellence.

Goods and services are no longer enough. To be successful in today’s increasingly competitive environment companies must learn to “stage experiences” for each one of their individual customers. Recollecting a delightful experience is remembering the product positively.

They have taken every innovative step to make this event a Conference apart from all their past offerings. First, they have put all bids up for sale. In an interview with Herman van Breemen, he says of this innovation “ At AQ-Services we think that customer service should be on everybody’s agenda. Yes we have put all seats up for bid ! I believe this innovative approach lets every company decide how much they think customer loyalty is worth instead of setting a fixed rate for a conference. With this approach we want to trigger companies to think about this. Yes, why not? It began as a curiosity and indeed, curiosity is fundamental to every achievement!”

Setting the price free is a smart way to persuade people to visit conferences even during an economic downturn. We see this as shaping the way conferences are organized and attended now and in the years to come. “All companies involved with rendering services have to realize that sharing experiences can provide knowledge to all. Knowledge to gain market share, to understand customer behavior, to recognize new marketing methods, to explore the market! Our approach, by setting the price ‘ free ‘ can only attract the real entrepreneurs. It’s not about the money…..it’s about the ideas …….it’s about backgrounds……it’s about sharing…….it’s about winning!”

In this conference, it will be discussed how front line performance can make or break a business in this experience economy. Services, for instance values such as hospitality, are intangibles, Herman van Breemen maintains they can they drive value for customers and grow profit for businesses in solid ways. “In today’s experience economy service excellence plays a major role for the customer. Poor service is the number one reason why customers turn to the competitor. Exceeding their expectation will lead to loyal customers and therewith, growth for your business.”

Herman maintains that the experience is everything and “Nowadays the experience is growing! Various researches show that the experience is considered more important than the product on itself. This is visible in restaurants, luxury stores, hotels etc. There is an incredible downfall when talking about customer loyalty. The customer expects a certain level of service and only exceeding the customer’s expectations can lead to more loyal customers. To benefit from this trend companies must offer the perfect customer experience to prevent them from going to the competition.

A lof other conferences are based on figures, percentages, martketshares, etc. This one is based on something else, something different! Namely people. No business without people! Customer loyalty is underestimated but still one of the major components to continue business relations. So let’s focus on this customer! How can we influence and understand their behaviour in order to learn and benefit from their loyalty. It used to be that “What you see is what you get… but experience goes beyond everything…!”

Serve Better, Sell More! Bid for this new conference experience! You get to meet like-minded, interesting people in this cool venue in Carcosa Seri Negara, Malaysia. How cool is this, no fixed rate, YOU decide how much loyal customers are worth! Make your bid now for the Service Excellence Conference Day.

Head on to Conference Bay simply register and placeyour bid by clicking ‘the service Excellence Button!’ Any reasonable offer will be accepted !

My ‘Champagne’ Conference on a ‘Beer’ Budget

Take it from seasoned conference goers who have tried them all — that’s us at Conference Bay! You can attend a conference in style and it need not cost you the world. A few quick tips here:

“A Conference minus the hassles can be a delightful experience and need not cost you the world.”

• Worried about hotel bills? Track down relatives or buddies in the conference city. Be creative and get yourself invited into their homes. Consider it as a way to bond with relatives and friends who happen to be in the same locale. And how about visiting mom?

• Consider staying in a Youth Hostel, they also have private rooms with bath and are often equipped with facilities like gyms and swimming pools. Be on the alert for bed-and-breakfast programs offered by several organizations.

• Don’t just fall for the inexpensive place. It maybe cheap but consider transport arrangements Plan your stay around walking and public transportation.

• Share a room. You can use your blog or social network to look for a potential roomie. Having a roommate can be fun and gives you a chance to discuss what you’re learning. It is also a chance to reconnect with a colleague who has moved to a new city

• If you must stay in a hotel, consider their freebie offerings. Choose one that provides free breakfast.

• Go slow on restaurant meals, if any. Find the closest grocery store and get your supplies, a picnic in your hotel room is a cool idea. Since you are on travel, bring food that you can easily grab on the go — granola bars, dried fruit, coffee fixin’s, and a travel mug.

• You can take advantage of the conference travel for that long due summer trip with your spouse or significant other. They get to explore the place while you’re in meetings, but you can have fun moments in between.

• Cash in frequent flyer miles to pay for the airline ticket. Check out special air fare offerings on the net.

• Take advantage of vendor receptions and meals.

How about saving on the conference seat itself?

Yes you can now attend a conference that fits your budget by using Conference Bay’s online bidding system.

You have the option to register as a regular paying delegate by finding conferences by topic and location on our site.

What’s cool is that you can also bid for you next conference seat, by telling us the price you are willing to pay. You surely want to find out how that works !

Simplify, and Get the Most of Your Life Online

We are well into the information age. If you are not yet the interactive type, then you are missing quite a lot. If you are the tech savvy one, then you know that life can be chaotic on and offline.

We all can get obsessive compulsive about collecting and keeping information. It would be well to manage them so they take less of our time and are easier to keep track of. Besides, organizing activities online can be very helpful for business people and professionals on the go. You not only save time that you can devote back to work or other personal commitments, you are likewise kept tuned in to information relevant to you from throughout the globe, as they unfold.

These social media networks channelled correctly can be a valuable tool for marketing or personal branding in the case of today’s professional. But used indiscriminately may cost you valuable time from your work day. As a busy professional consider how much time you’re putting into Social Media and what you’re getting out of it.

Here are some hot tips to simplify your digital life:

• Make your own homepage. A personalized homepage as alternative to traditional web portals can be a great help. There is Netvibes which lets you assemble your favorite websites, blogs, e mail accounts, social networks, search engines, IMs, photos, videos, podcast, you name it. All in one place.
• If you are more often on Yahoo, you can use My Yahoo, or if you love Google, then you can set up an iGoogle. So easy to do, just type in to your searchbar, follow instructions and sign up.
• Subscribe to RSS feeds. Your RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader program gives you a one-stop place to visit all of the sites that you think are important on the Internet. You follow a site by subscribing to its RSS feed. Instead of using your bookmarks to visit the site you use your RSS reader to keep track of new content.
• For organizing photos, you may use Flckr or Picasa, you can choose only the photos you really want to keep.
• Delete softwares you don’t actually use, it is just taking up space on your hard drive. Software often installs services that run in the background even though you aren’t using it — uninstalling software can make your computer run faster as it frees up memory.
• Unsubscribe from automated emails you don’t read. You can try Gmail which has super-fast search. Delete e mails you are not likely to read again or have need of, or not going to want to re-experience. They’ll be in the trash for 30 days if you change your mind. Use filters and labels to track emails that aren’t urgent.
• Do you twitter? The strength of Twitter is that it is a mesh network of people who find each other interesting. Unfollow people who you don’t have two-way communication with, especially if they’re too prolific.Subscribe to your @replies feed using another service so you don’t miss people communicating with you. Block people who are spamming your @replies.
• Have you signed u p for Facebook yet? It is an essential site not to be missed if you want to be the professional in the stream of things.

Time has come up with a list of 10 essential Sites dubbed Sites We can’t live without and they are as follows:

1. Wikipedia.org
2. Yahoo! Finance
3. Craigslist
4. ESPN
5. Yelp
6. Facebook
7. Digg
8. Google
9. TMZ
10. Flickr

For finding and booking conferences, head on to Conference Bay. This the only portal where you not only find relevant conferences by topic or location but have the option to register hassle free, or use our online bidding system where you can nane the price you are willing to pay for a conference of your choice. Hop in here to find our how smart and cool this system works!