SMarT Marketing

Local event web sites are gaining in popularity. There are several sites out there that are trying to capitalize on serving local markets by allowing users to search for and share local event information. Two companies that are at the fore front of this are Upcoming.org and Eventful.com.

Basically the two sites allow the user to promote a local event for a particular city or metro area free of charge. Both are simple to use and provide an easy way to search for local community events. The biggest difference between the two is that Upcoming.org is backed by the Internet powerhouse of Yahoo. With the backing of Yahoo, Upcoming.org distribution network includes Yahoo Local.

When comparing the two site’s Alexa ranking, Upcoming.org ranks at 7,403 while Eventful.com ranks at 14,975. Upcoming.org’s traffic seems to be going sideways a bit, but Eventful.com’s traffic has increased by 70% in the last three months. There does seem to be quite a few registered users (34,844) on Upcoming.org. I could not find a definite count on Eventful.org.

Pros and Cons

• - If you have several similar events that have different venues or dates, Eventful makes it easy by allowing one to copy and modify an existing event. Upcoming makes you create a new event from scratch.
• - Eventful allows you to submit your event to additional web sites and blog search engines such as Technorati, Delicious, Popbop blog and even Upcoming.org! Upcoming syndicates the events as well. I have seen some of the events listed in the Google Calendar search results (more on this).
• - Eventful allows you to add a venue type, such as hotel, airport or concert hall. The downside is that they do not display this information in the listing
• - Eventful is a little cumbersome when trying to add a new venue. They make you go through a couple of steps to enter the country and state. Not sure why they can not detect that I am a user from the United States and pre-populate this.
• - Upcoming allows you to choose only one category for your event. Eventful allows you to choose up to three.
• - Both sites allow you to place additional links to the “Official” site or other resource web pages, but they modify the URLs so you do not get a backlink to your site from it.
• - When adding a new venue to Eventful it tries to look up the venue name for any matching venues in their database. Unfortunately it does a global search and brings up venues not in the specific city that you are listing the event in.

Additional Local Event Web Sites:

• - Zvents.com
• - HeyLetsGo.com
• - Google Calendar (You need to enter events into your Google Calendar and make them public in order for those events to get picked up in their Google Calendar Local Event Search.)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 11:58 am and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.