SOCIAL DISCOVERY SOLUTIONS FOR TOURISM
Author: Ratko Mutavdžić, Projektura
One of the major trends in the meetings industry is a need to better understand the people coming to your events so that you can personalise and tailor the content and experience specifically for them. Also, events today are moving from a few days’ long conference experience to a 365 days’ long experience for attendees, where past, current or future attendees are engaging in a series of experiences that are shaping the agenda and helping organisers to better prepare the conference, but also helping the attendee to be better prepared and to have the best possible return on investment from it.
Different business discovery platforms today generate significant interest that gives additional value to attendees, partners and sponsors of your conference where one can use the value of the professional network through the automatic people discovery.
New solutions in this field enable people to build their new networks and automatically suggest the people and groups that should meet each other. But that is not all – you actually get to engage with those future attendees’ months in advance, through the use of social networks, message posting, pictures, exchanging ideas and topics – all things that are very valuable to you when you are building your agenda or schedule of the event. People also suggest their interests and expectations, so you have a clear view on what is expected and what needs to be delivered.
Connecting people on-site is not easy. Research studies showed that the bigger the conference, the more people tend to stay connected to people they already know, thus limiting possibilities of new business connections or business opportunities. This, of course, is wasted opportunity, since more than 72% of people are actually coming to an event to meet new, interesting people and create new business networks. Also, current business to business match solutions are not doing their job properly, being limited to only specific details that need to be entered by an attendee and a very poor experience that comes later with the management and execution of those meetings. Advanced software solutions are using artificial intelligence, machine learning and decision-making algorithms to automatically find best matches for you, grouping them into interest groups and working with you to establish those connections.
One of the regional examples of software that is following these principles is CONNECT360, a Croatian startup that can be found at www.connect360.me, but is really a part of a bigger solution package that is driving personalisation, connectivity and insight with event or conference guests, but also people that want to be connected in different scenarios.
CONNECT360 is a joint project between two agile and growing companies: AXILIS, experienced team of software developers who were working individually and co-operating for many years before they decided to form a joint venture and PROJEKTURA, consulting company that is leading the discovery and innovation management projects for a global companies, helping them understand the potential but also the applicability of new technologies that are crossing the chasm.
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