For many of us our mobile phones have become our most valued possession, being the central hub through which we organise and record much of our lives.
As they have become more pervasive, businesses in every sector have had to evaluate how they can use mobile phones to engage with their customers many are realising that mobile allows them to form a direct, personal relationship that hasnt been possible in more traditional media.
Recently weve been working with TEDx Bristol to explore how it can leverage the attendees devices to get them engaging more with the event. Its been interesting to look at how technology can make these events more interesting before, during and after the day that it takes place.
Wearables
Wearables could well provide a key component of on-the-day user engagement for many events. At the moment smartwatches are the only common wearable that you’re likely to see. These work very well for small, micro-interactions that dont require more than one or two seconds of the users attention.
Its precisely this type of interaction that works best when the users focus should primarily be on the talks taking place in front of them. Its vital that new technology helps enhance already great events rather than detracting from them and frustrating their attendees.
Location
Theres been a lot of buzz in the last couple of years around indoor location and it makes a lot of sense for events to take full advantage of these technologies. Perhaps it’s being held at a particularly large venue and technology can help guide users around; or at a smaller venue the organisers might want to monitor the relative popularity and activity thats taking place in different rooms.
Users devices could even detect where the user was within the venue to offer contextual advice to the talk that they were attending, or if there were any special offers available in the caf .
Networking
We already do most of our networking through our mobile phones so why not make this super easy from within the event app too Our phones already have a huge range of technologies to allow us to share information with each other; for example users could bump their phones to instantly share their contact details through NFC.
Perhaps the application integrates with the event registration system where the user already has a public profile of information that theyre willing to share
Lots of conferences are already starting to provide lanyards with integrated NFC chips containing the holders contact details; it’s a small improvement that can really help grease networking. Were always on and our networking should be too.
Continue reading on the next page for purchasing power and platforms to consider.
Purchasing
If our mobile phone is the hub of our digital life, can’t it be my event ticket too If Im buying my ticket through the event app we can streamline the purchasing funnel and minimise the friction thats usually encountered when buying products on the web from different web sites.
Apple Pay and Google Pay offer great opportunities to use the users existing payment credentials and immediately associate a purchased ticket with their account.
Then by adding this directly to Apples PassBook/Wallet (or providing this within the native app) the user only needs to present their phone for entry.
Platforms
The main platform holders (Google, Apple, Microsoft) are all trying to build integrated services that were more and more reliant on. Each of them also has a strong lock-in effect the more that we use services from the same provider, the more utility they can bring to other areas of our lives.
We can help users a lot by using integration hooks provided by the platforms to bring our data into the system as natively as possible.
At the moment on iOS this might mean that we support Continuity and Handoff whilst indexing the event programme using the platforms event indexing features.
Google Now offers exciting possibilities that almost every service should be able to take advantage of going forward; and Microsofts Cortana is moving rapidly into a similar space.
Given how much change weve seen in the last ten years, it’s exciting to look ahead and see where the event space will move to in the next ten. As nascent technologies begin to establish themselves and new ones come to the fore, it’s important that we keep exploring this fast-paced frontier of innovation.
Susie McFarland is the UK MD at digital agency Rockpool Digital
