Project Brief 2.0 – Revised Proposition

“It’s fascinating to consider that events based industries such as live music have succeeded in growing their overall pie, whilst so much of the digital media debate is about cannibalisation.” – Publishing Rights Society (PRS), UK[1]

Live events are an important social, cultural and economic component of many of our lives. They are both a revenue-generating industry for many economies as well as being memorable and emotional social and cultural experiences. As the opening quote from the UK Publishing Rights Society (PRS) illustrates, events-based industries seemingly have a bright future, despite the apparent damage digital technologies are supposedly bringing about to the entertainment industry. In fact, the press release from which this quote is taken goes on to recognise the importance of the Web in the future of the events industry, explaining how the PRS plans to partner with event-based social networks, such as Songkick, to support its work.

Building upon this trend, then, EventHive will be an event-based social networking platform that will bring together event organisers of all kinds and potential attendees. In the remainder of this brief, the EventHive team will explain the premise of the EventHive platform. The platform’s aims, market positioning, key features, expected user base, and business risks will be outlined here. This Project Brief foregrounds our online portfolio and the content found on this blog explores the themes discussed in this brief in further detail. EventHive wrote an original ‘Project Brief 1.0’ when we first began designing our platform. We made the decision to version and re-write the project brief to illustrate to our audience how our concept has shaped over time.

Aim

The service will create opportunities for event organisers to promote their events, and helps potential attendees find relevant and nearby events. EventHive will gamify the experience of attending events, by rewarding users for attending events, allowing people to compete with each other. These key features will be combined with a strong and distinctive brand identity and user interface that will set our service apart.

Over time as EventHive grows more and more followers and solidifies its brand reputation, EventHive will be able to extend its service and collaborate with more companies. More high-value and popular sponsored events, such as the FIFA World Cup, could be partnered with to drive more interest in the platform, as well combining this with more sponsored advertisement and points rewards.

Market Positioning

There are several competitors in the market of Event Based Social Networks (aka EBSN), and they can be categorized based on the type of service they offer. There are EBSNs that cover a wide variety of events such as MeetUp, FourSquare and Eventbrite. There are others that only focus on specific type of events like 5gig for music events, Bizzabo for business events and LiveCrowds mainly for sport events. Finally, there are social networks that include an event managing functionality such as Google Plus and Facebook.

In spite of the number of available EBSNs, none of them is a clear leader in the market. The reason behind this might be because all of them basically offer the same functionality to the users. This represents a big opportunity for EventHive to overtake them and become the leader in this area. By offering extraordinary, unique and interesting features, EventHive can stand alone against its competitors.

In order to achieve this goal, EventHive must focus in three important aspects to engage users: It must be fun and addictive, it must be profitable and it must be functional. Taking into consideration these characteristics will position EventHive as one of the most important social networks on the Internet.

Features

Since the initial conception of the EventHive network, the expected functionality of the platform has been largely refined, particularly in terms of the need to bestow upon it a Unique Selling Point or ‘hook’ to bring initial users in and grow the service.

This point has thus been devised in line with our overall aim: to drive event attendance. To this end, our refined list of core features of EventHive is designed to encourage going to things, attaining positive feedback for doing so (in the form of points and prizes), encouraging others to do the same (through manipulating the Fear Of Missing Out), and enhancing the event experience by encouraging connections and shared content.

The core features of EventHive are therefore as follows:

• EventHive acts, in keeping with its brand, as a massively worldwide connected directory of events, including a “dashboard” of events – the eponymous Event Hive – featuring sponsored, local, friends’ and recommended events.

• EventHive also drives event attendance through the Event Feed feature, which makes recommendations for events to attend (including recommended content and integration with other social networks), events which your friends are attending, prompts to organize the logistics of attendance, and basic chat features to put users in communication immediately and use one another’s presence to persuade their attendance.

• Recommendation algorithms are driven by a ‘buzz count’ metric, a popularity metric that helps people to assess the liveliness of nearby events, personalising the content of the Event Feed to further drive appeal of attendance.

• Users may amass redeemable Event Points by engaging with the network, for example by creating an event, attending an event (verified by GPS check-in, given that points hold currency value and hence must be regulated), uploading multimedia content to an event page, inviting others to events, and many other ways. These points form the basis of a gamified online leaderboard and discount store, where points may be redeemed for merchandise and small refreshment discounts at event venues etc.

• Users may request to add other users on the EventHive platform or other social networks, acting as a screening tool for potential friends meeting at events for the first time.

• Event organisers, depending on their account level, may create sponsored events, instantiate points-redeemable discounts at these events, offer priority tickets and merchandise, view a range of analytics for these events including those surrounding engagement, advertise their events, distribute surveys/feedback forms, and output results in automatically generated reports.

Users

Potential Attendees

• Attendees will be provided with a series of services around events and they will be free to sign up to. The services includes three main functions: Easy to Find Events, Save Money, and Enhance Social Experience. These services are based on various highlighted features, including GPS services, gamification, statistical analysis system, event popularity metric and recommender system.

• Easy to find events: Attendees will find it is easy to find a preferred event on our platform. Our platform allow users discover ongoing events based on personal interests, attendee’s location, and popularity metric of an event; receive latest events notifications of their followed organisers; and benefit from a list of events their friends have attended recently, or will attend in the future.

• Save Money: Attendees will benefit from our points reward system that can exchange points for promotions or other rewards. Attendees will earn different numbers of points depending on their different activities in our platform, from creating an account with Eventhive, to attend a sponsor organised event, and share videos or pictures.

• Enhance Social Experience. Attendees will find potential friends based on GPS service and communicate with them, invite their Facebook friends to attend an event, and share their experience after events. In addition, EventHive’s points system will further enhance the use of EventHive, gamifying the experience allowing people to compete with friends.

Event Organisers

Organisers will have 5 main services: Promotions Before Event, Event Deals During Event, Create Events, Profiles, Surveys and Analysis Tools. These services will range from the planning stage to the after-event stage. Each organiser will have profile associated to it about an organiser’s detail, history events and follower status.

• Promotions Before an Event will allow organisers to advertise events and notify users to attract more attendees. Organisers can plan an event and create it on EventHive, which it can control the scope for. Details of a planned event will be stored and showed by EventHive.

• Event Deals During an Event is a innovative and interactive means to allow organisers to push promotion information and news of activities and all information will be received by all attendees.

• After an event, organisers can receive ratings and feedbacks, or to publish a personalised questionnaire. Lastly, an organiser can use data analysis tools to examine the effects of an advertisement, user behaviours during events or after events, and sales situation.

Business Risks

Alongside the competition that we may face, some potential business risks have also been identified and briefly discussed below. Fuller discussions around these issues and any attempts to mitigate them can be found within the portfolio.

• Privacy: EventHive relies heavily upon the usage of GPS location services to support its various features, including the recommender system and check-in system. Users are provided with the option to disable location services, but this will affect the functionality of the application. A privacy policy, which is informed by the policies of similar social networking services, has been submitted to this blog by Yani.

• Intellectual Property: EventHive will be encouraging the sharing of media content, such as videos and pictures. Attempts will need to be made to ensure that uploaded content is not in breach of copyright. In this portfolio, Tan Tan discusses in general terms legal issues relating to social networking services.

• “Cold Start” Problem: EventHive is reliant upon platform uptake from its two core user groups, event organisers and potential event attendees. Due to the two-way network effect, EventHive is in danger of experience a ‘cold start’ problem. EventHive’s freemium model and tiered premium subscription should mitigate against this. Our commercial proposal is discussed further by Rafael and the significance of network effects is explored by Jack.

Summary

This project brief introduced you to some of the key features of EventHive and situated the service in the various debates that are occurring around social networks. This document is a longer rewriting of our initial project brief to implicitly show to you how our concept has developed over time. We have not shied away from highlighting both our innovative features as well as some of the business risks that we may face.

The combined works found in this portfolio will present to you to in greater discursive detail our new commercial event-based social networking. Our platform is situated within a competitive market but offers intelligent and creative features for our two core user groups, event organisers and potential event attendees. Our social networking platform raises some interesting debates around the dynamics of social networks and some of these have been discussed also. We invite you to explore the rest of our EventHive portfolio blog.

References

[1] http://www.prsformusic.com/aboutus/press/latestpressreleases/pages/livemusiccontinuestooutperform.aspx