I'm just coming up for air after last week's Mashup event, and already we are planning another smaller Mashup event November 6-7 in Boston. A couple of folks have asked why Boston vs. New York? We would love to do an event in New York at some point, but our friends at BU have generously offered to open up parts of the campus for this event at a very low cost to us, which makes the cost of producing the event much more manageable than if we had it at a hotel. Plus if we're talking about college students, there is no bigger college town or city than Boston. I'm also excited to be back in my old stomping ground (I lived in Boston for almost four years after college!).
Ypulse is still a very, very small company -- right now, we don't produce and sell our own research and we are not a youth marketing agency that offers consulting. Our revenue as a media platform comes from site advertising and events. This is why we have to keep our costs down at events as much as possible while still producing the highest quality program we can. It's why we can't pay our speakers and why we rely so much on sponsors to offset our costs. I'm being transparent about this because I think we do what we do on a shoestring so well, that folks think we are much bigger than we actually are.
Folks have also asked about another tween event -- we plan on producing a pre-conference focused on tweens at next year's San Francisco Mashup. Right now our event strategy for '09 includes our third annual Ypulse International Mashup in San Francisco (I want to give next year's event a bit more global focus) and in fall of '09 an even bigger Ypulse Mashup East (depending on how Boston goes, and what other locations open up, site tbd). In some ways, Boston is our pilot for a regular Mashup East. We want to focus on creating two high quality larger events vs. doing lots of smaller events that ultimately require almost as much planning and don't earn quite enough revenue. Of course this could change, but that's what we're planning for now. You may see us pop up at other folks' events as well offering a day-long or half day program if it makes sense. Some have also suggested producing smaller virtual webinars or online seminars -- readers, would you pay $150 - $200 for a Ypulse webinar? Assume it has an amazing speaker/presenter you really want to hear...
We are just beginning to work on our Boston program, so I wanted to invite Ypulse readers to suggest speakers and programming ideas. Since we will be on campus at Boston University, we are going to focus our event on youth ages 16-24, think high school juniors and seniors and college students. Our focus continues to be on reaching youth with technology and includes speakers from brands, media/technology companies, non-profit organizations, academic or other independent experts, and of course, young people. We will have sponsored case study slots available and invite agencies and others to contact Charles Pelton for more information. To learn more about our speaker selection process, read this post. To suggest ideas, feel free to email me or leave a comment!
Posted by anastasia
