BEING A NEW CO HOST = AWESOME
This is how we feel about our experience with New Co Oakland. We continue to be humbled for being selected as a 2015 Oakland host on 10/8. In our classic style, we wanted to share our real experience in working with New Co festivals and their staff!
As a first timer event attendee back in 2013, I was truly inspired as a young entrepreneur with a shiny new MBA to show for my last 2 years of hard work. The festival boldly takes the concept of the business conference outside.. and literally onto the streets, into company headquarters... where the real work happens! As an attendee, you gain incredible access to some of the best and brightest innovative companies (and connections) in the world, especially here in the SF Bay area!
When we heard New Co was doing the first ever Oakland event ... we jumped at the chance to participate. Here are some of the top 6 reasons why we love New Co, as a host company and why you might too:
EXPOSURE
As a young company in the multimedia marketing industry based in Oakland, we needed a way to put us on the proverbial map. Our participation in New Co Oakland instantly added us to their map offering us a platform to introduce our company to the larger local business community. We are now recognized in Oakland as a strong leader in the marketing and media world, based on this one event!
COMMUNITY
New Co host companies range from top tech innovators think: Pandora, Pinterest, Yahoo, Google, Linkedin, all the way to small bootstrapped startups such as Hack the Hood and Mamacitas Cafe. By unifying all these companies into one group, us little ones benefit by association... meaning we are immediately raised to the level of awareness like some very well-known companies. Now we have a connection, we have a shared experience and this creates community. Remember it is WHO you know... not just WHAT you know!
SUPPORT
The New Co staff team of about 6 communicated well with tangible actionable info, from sample tweets to how to create an inspiring presentation. We digested all their information and their best practices to create our sold-out full house event on Transforming from Expert to Leaders via Multimedia. Our topic was mainly on developing Thought Leadership as a process and we leaned on the New Co team for "sharing support." When we Tweeted they Retweeted us... when we shared new content about our event, they too shared it! Due to our outbound marketing efforts, we officially became a "poster child" company for New Co. You could not ask for a better event team than New Co!
CONNECTIONS
As the community developed and we started seeing lots of attendees signing up for our session... the new connections happened organically. Since we are in the media space, we reached out to New Co attendees, other host companies and the larger community to connect with. Over the about 8 weeks of pre-event preparations, we added almost 100 new Linkedin contacts... from local to global connections! Plus, even though only 70% of the RSVP list of attendees actually came to our event (which as good, as our room was small) we connected with almost 100% of our RSVP list before they even walked in! Now that feels great.
INNOVATION
Knowing that we were in the big kids pool now... it inspired us to step up our internal game. We ordered new swag for attendees (although it never arrived in time), got custom business cards made, and ordered healthy snacks/drinks for the event. Personally, we spent hours developing the content for our live session, only because we knew we could create some new evergreen (long-lasting) content for our company/brand. Thus we created a great new 25 minute presentation (which we streamed to Periscope live), made a short 4 minute funny movie sample, ran two press releases, and even created a live video demo of our session. The attendees loved it and the feedback has been wonderful! Overall it forced us to internally innovate by asking... "What is an engaging event" and "How can we educate to inspire!"
LEAD$
At the end of the day, any activity that takes time away from our day-to-day operations has to prove itself with clear ROI. As mentioned, we added almost 100 new connections on Linkedin, we added over 100 new Twitter followers, and we have so far about 6 potential new clients in the works (we're vetting them now). Of course, not all of them will become customers for our business model, but they know us, can refer us, and we provided them value already (we love good 'pay if forward' karma). Yes... we have new leads and potential revenue coming our way!
So, if you are considering attending New Co in your city or even better, becoming a host company... DO IT NOW! Follow New Co on social media @newco and see when their heading your way, remember they are international already.
Thank YOU to New Co ... we hope to host again in Oakland, 2016 we will surely be involved!
How Can You transform?
During our research and client work, we have realized some insights about this dynamic and evolving topic. Below are the presentation slides from this event. Feel free to comment and enjoy our evolving insights. If you ideas around this topic please contact us!
