Unsolicited Marketing Advice

You've worked hard on designing and promoting your event. Now the challenge is making sure those hard-earned registrations actually show up. In some cases, reminder calls are appropriate, but in an age driven by electronic calendars what you really could use is an easy way to get your event onto your audience's computer or PDA.

Option 1: Integrate Yourself with Online Calendars

Users of eventful.com have the option of a button "Save to calendar" which gives options for posting to Outlook, Google, iCal format and other calendars. Eventful.com, which bills itself as having the world's largest collection of events, is a neat website which allows you to post details of your local events for free. It is easy for anyone to search for concerts, exhibits, lectures or other events of interest in their area, or a city they plan to visit. I found my region well represented with local events. In addition to the calendar feature, there are RSS feeds, e-mail notification, promotional tools available (Demand it!), imports from iTunes or last.fm (to track where your favorite bands are playing), and groups/friends social options. Posting your event to eventful.com can be the first step toward an integrated effort of pushing your audience to a popular online location where they can choose to add your event to their calendar.

In a similar manner, Markthisdate.com is a European-based calendar portal and event promoter that offers widgets to promote your schedule of events. Of course many other city web sites or daily newspaper sites provide a venue to post local event details (e.g., cincinnati.com), and you could always hold a virtual event in Second Life .

Option 2: Build a Convenient Calendar Link on Your Site

For a more customized approach, consider how WebEx online meetings have an "add to calendar" feature so you can add either a single meeting, or a series of their meetings, to your Outlook Calendar (although it was simpler in Office 2003 than in security-enhanced Office 2007). Minor league baseball teams the Toledo Mudhens and Corpus Christi Hooks, as well as the major league Detroit Tigers have an option to add their game schedules to your Outlook calendar. Unfortunately, these are a manual and somewhat complex process from a user's perspective. Such approaches use the vCalendar and iCalendar standards.

Until (or unless) someone has created a secure but simple approach to adding items to a customer's Outlook calendar, the most effective approach may actually be a combination of wired techniques such as existing or custom programmed "add to calendar features," or perhaps you-to-your-audience e-mail reminder services, with more traditional approaches like registration confirmation letters, reminder slips, and so forth. Let us what you use to get your events on your audience's calendar by using the comment link below.

Additional Calendar-Related Links

• Add or remove holidays to Outlook
• Easily Add Major League Baseball Team Schedule to Your Calendar (via markthisdate.com)
• Customize your employee's Outlook calendars with your company's important HR dates
  How to create & distribute a vCalendar file for Outlook
• Google Calendar with Outlook and Smartphones Automatically
• Sync your Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook
• Add Google Calendar to Outlook
• Outlook 2007 Calendar and Google Calendar integration (YouTube tutorial)
• Create an Add to Google Calendar button for your Web page
  CalendarHub.com: Access your online calendar from anywhere, privately, shared in a group or published on your blog
• Upcoming: Yahoo's less than impressive event and calendar service (but it does use the hCalendar microformat, which may impress some geeks)
• Memo to Me, Online Reminders, RS Outlook and Free Minder are email reminder services, although none seem to promote a bulk or "one to many" option
• Send invitations via Evite.com (such as for Cinco de Mayo)