Nolan Apostle, Editor In Chief
Event City Creative Magazine

I recently had the opportunity to review some material from a company called Backbeat Media. I couldn’t find anyone who knew them, both in the world of Advertising and in Our world. So I decided to look in on them and see what I could learn. What I found, was pretty simple. They have a good idea that is working for them and their clients and this is good. Especially now as the world economy is in shambles, anyway we can make an extra dime here and there, “show me the money”!

At the end of this article you will find an Event City Poll, it pertains directly to companies that are part of the Events & Creative Industries. It will take you about 10 Seconds to answer the question, thank you for participating!

An EVENT CITY POLL

BackBeat Media works under an interactive advertising philosophy distinct from many current targeting trends. Rather than relying solely on inexact cookie technology for tracking habit patterns across an otherwise unspecified terrain, we believe in the cultivation and targeting of online communities. We see the web not as a vast sea of faceless buyers to be tracked, but as burgeoning communities with which the advertiser interacts. BackBeat Media’s boutique networks are designed with these specific communities in mind.

Ok, so what if you are the PUBLISHER? Many Event Planners, Meeting and Hospitality industry companies are “Publishers” and don’t even know it. On a very basic level, publishers are content providers that create usable, positive, content which their visitors or customers can benefit from using.

BackBeat Media was founded with a simple principle in mind: take headaches away from site publishers, and they do it well. They started their business before the word ‘Blog’ really existed, ironically though, that is their target publisher. The individual or small group of people who have a message to deliver, just like us at Event City, there are many links and bits of information for Planners, Corporate PR & Managers, Hospitality, Art and all of the Events & Creative Industries; these people usually know how to deliver information well, that’s a Blogger. Most good Bloggers are great at Blogging, they don’t want the headaches of going out and running the rest of their Internet business.

This is Backbeat Media’s niche, at least from a Publisher’s standpoint. There is much more to the company and you can see it at Backbeat Media Services. They can help you to possibly generate revenue like you never thought possible! Check out Backbeat now!

If you are involved in one of the Events & Creative Industries and have a web presence, please take a moment to answer our polling question below. We promise it will only take a moment.

EVENT CITY ONLINE ADVERTISING POLL:

Nolan Apostle – Talent, Producer and Contributing Editor
Event City Live, Event City TV & Event City Creative

Why not? Sure that’s the easy way out. Ask a question give a simple answer. For the last year or so since we have talked to many of our Alpha and Beta testers about being more successful on the Internet we have heard this question time and time again. Why Advertise on the Internet? Why spend any amount of time investing in the Internet besides a website? It’s too confusing. It’s too difficult. Hackers will just steal what we do anyway! How can we earn revenues when there are experts out there doing just that? We will attempt to answer for you all those questions and much more as we visit Ad Tech San Francisco at Moscone Center over the next few days. This is a fascinating subject and the technology behind it all is brilliant!

First things first though. If you are involved in any of the Event City’s industries, the Events & Creative Industries you definitely should be attending Ad Tech. As we cover this three day show in San Francisco, we already realize the magnitude of it’s presence here in San Francisco alone. Social Networking a huge buzz word in general and at the show is seems to be a perfect fit for the Social Butterflies of the City By the Bay. Well as we come to realize there is so much more to “Social Networking” than one might perceive.

Ad dollars are just a part of what Ad Tech is all about. Sure the Goods are where the Gold is, or Cash is King (or is that Cache is King) but is that always true, especially in this day and age? I’m not too certain anymore. Tiny startups to major players like Google, Yahoo, Nestle and Kodak (Yep, even Nestle’s Chocolates and Kodak Film company) are here, and you can bet they are not just Chocolates and no more film for the once gigantic firms. So what are two companies like these doing here? Who incidentally fall into the realm of the Event City’s “Events & Creative Industries“?

Come on down and find out. Or if you can’t make it to Ad Tech San Francisco, please visit their website and learn about Ad Tech’s world tour, probably coming to a city near you. So if you are one of those who think that the Advertising and Marketing world on the Internet is not very important, you better think again; and that’s no threat, it’s reality. Come to Ad Tech and learn, that’s where I will be. Here are some highlights of this great show.

Attendees will converge on ad:tech San Francisco (http://www.ad-tech.com/sf/) April 15-17 at the Moscone Center to attend panel sessions, workshops and keynotes during three action-packed days of learning from today’s digital marketing industry game-changers. Attendees will take away the tools and techniques they need to compete in a changing marketing world, and gain first-hand insight into emerging opportunities with online video, social networks, mobile marketing, digital out-of-home advertising and more.

Hear from four of the hottest stars of online video, including Kevin Rose (pictured) of Diggnation, Ask a Ninja’s Kent Nichols, Jeff Macpherson of Tiki Bar TV and Martin Sargent of Revision3. View the live taping and hear and explore how you can leverage programs like these to expand your own audience.

That’s the key to what Ad Tech can offer. How you can learn to leverage programs like those above, and so much more to expand your own audience, no matter who that audience is. The Special Event, Meeting Planning, Hospitality, Travel, Art, Entertainment, Music, Motion Pictures, Food & Beverage are all industries that can leverage these programs and expand audiences and reap the benefits.

I look forward to attending this show and covering it for all of you, my associates on the battlegrounds of the Events & Creative Industries- the EVENT CITY NETWORK!

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION DOES WORK

By Nolan Apostle – Contributing Editor, Producer
February 20th, 2008

Have you ever heard of the saying, “If you build it they will come”? Sure, I bet most of you have heard of it at one time or another. It refers to a business or a storefront or nowadays, an Internet presence or Website. If you build it they will come, quite frankly, if you don’t build it “they” will have nowhere to go….

….one might think.

As many of you know, especially those of you who are previous beta testers and current Alpha testers, we have placed the Event City Network project in high gear over the last few months and things have been hopping, to say the least. Well, our main domain, “eventcity.net” is a pretty plain page. Not much there. I mean, it is STARK! We have a couple of links inviting visitors to become Beta Testers (again, primarily for our 100 or so Alpha clan), on the left column of the page we have some links to our BlogaZine. Ok, that’s it, done. So how is it that we have an above average page rank, since the 1st of the year we received an extraordinary amount of unique visits, and our redundancy rate is very high? While at CES we must of passed out, at the most a couple hundred business cards and post cards, that’s it.

Well, we have been told that what we are doing, our writing “styles”, our domain “interaction”, the keywords and keyword phrases we are using and a bit of “this and that” are our reasons for unwanted success. You see, we really don’t have a site, but people are coming! So what’s our next step. First off, when this happens, and yes, I have heard of this happening over and over again, but you know, it really doesn’t “click” until it happens to you. In fact, it’s almost hard to believe that it actually does work, until you experience it.

So you don’t really do any marketing or advertising, and all of a sudden you have an audience, then what. Of course, if you are an entrepreneur and most on the web are, in one way or another, you want to “monetize” your newly found success. That is what we are going to talk about in the upcoming issues of our Internet Retailing Column and our SEARCHING for Domains – The new Event City Channel created especially for YOU, the Events & Creative industry professional who wants to learn how to add some revenue ideas to their already unique business. We’ll help you understand that this complex world of Internet Advertising, Search Engine Marketing and Domaining is not as hard as you think it might be.

While we’re at it, if you are in the San Francisco Bay Area you might want to visit the Santa Clara Convention Center from Wednesday the 26th of February to the 28th, it’s the Annual SEARCH MARKETING EXPO, an incredible show filled with extremely valuable information for Veterans and Newbies alike. Visit their Website for complete details.

Keep your eyes peeled for complete coverage of this awesome show.

By Nolan Apostle, Associate Editor & Producer

Event City Industry’s Upcoming Events and Sony Online Entertainment’s New Game, PIRATES of the BURNING SEA. Exclusive Interview with the creators of the game, coming soon!

Most of you are well aware of our recent trek to the big Diamond in the Desert (What I call Las Vegas – long story about that one)? I know, many of you have asked about our Kevin Costner & Mary J. Blige Photos and Peter Frampton Video – These were awesome shows and you will soon get the exclusive on Event City Live! Plus many interviews – including an exclusive with the creators of the new Sony Online Entertainment game, (Which is a Hot, Hott, Hottt, Hotttt GAME)!

Pirates of the Burning Sea
Check out these screen shots of Pirates of the Burning Sea as well as more to come including the Exclusive Interview with the Creative Team who developed this awesome game.

Pirates Screen Shots show the incredible graphics of this new Sony Online Entertainment Game.

Swashbuckling Duels & Cinematic Animations make this a winner for Sony – Launching January 22, 2008

Did I mention this was a Hot Game?!

Ok, so we had a great (and an extremely busy) run at CES 2008 – the Consumer Electronics Show and then flew back to San Francisco (in our wonderful ECTV SUV) to make it just in time for MacWorld Expo. A tiny show compared to CES (the Mammoth of all Tradeshows) but what a great collection of Exhibitors showcasing some wonderful products both for Mac and Windows computers. Of course we will have much more for you to see on the CES & MacWorld fronts, but let me give you a glimpse of what you can expect from your Friends at the Event City Network.

My crew is telling me not to let the cat out of the bag quite yet (they want to have all the fun with these great upcoming industry events), so I will let them have at it. OK, but for now I’ll give you a couple of hints -

It’s a Photo-imagers Disneyland come the end of this month. Then sometime soon after you will have the opportunity to join us at this next show which is the CES for the Hospitality industry; one of the Event City Industries biggest and most illustrious Tradeshows ever! And finally – It’s Our party and we’ll cry if we want too, but just don’t miss all the great Halloween and Event industry products at this outrageous tradeshow. Industry insiders and surely many outsiders say of all tradeshows for all industries you will not have nearly as much fun as you will have at this upcoming Halloween and Party show in March 2008!

Keep your finger on the mouse and point it here for many updates on these “Must Do” tradeshows for the Events & Creative Industries(tm). We will keep you posted with all the details on these great shows.

Please don’t forget to comment with your questions, ideas and overall feedback on what we are doing for the Events & Creative Industries.

Has anyone heard about FlyTunes?
I read online that it gives you Internet radio on your iPhone or iPod touch.
The FlyTunes website says it’ll be available for other PMP soon.

Posted by Kay

By Nolan Apostle

EVENT CITY CREATIVE

May 27^th, 2007

So are you an Internet Retailer? Do you sell products over the global Internet? Do you currently sell on eBay or some other electronic online sales business? If so, then you probably know how difficult it is to find out where your Web orders are really coming from, right? When someone comes to your site, or one of your many sites and purchases something how do you know where they came from? Until now, if you were using Early Impact’s, ProductCart shopping cart software, just like many using various e-commerce software products for their online storefront, you couldn’t really tell where they originated from.

ProductCart-powered stores can now take full advantage of Google’s service to track sales and Web statistics. Additionally there is a free update to its product that will allows its customers to take full advantage of Google Analytics, the Web statistics service provided by Google. Without any of that kind of information it’s virtually impossible for an online retailer to measure the return on its marketing investments.

Google Analytics and ProductCart can help online store managers find out what’s generating the most sales on their Web storefronts. Order data is automatically transferred to Google Analytics from a ProductCart-powered Internet store. Then, Web statistics and online sales are intelligently merged by Analytics into a variety of highly useful reports.

Google has made it quite easy for the ProductCart customers to activate the powerful system. They only need to copy and paste their tracking code from Google Analytics into their store’s interface. The task only takes a few minutes. Once the code is in place, it’s pretty cool what the user can do from there:

1. Track store-specific Web statistics

A plethora of interesting statistics related to a merchant’s online catalog will be available through their Google Analytics account. For example most frequently viewed products and categories, most popular entry pages, most active times of the day, and so much more.

2. See reports that combine Web sales with traffic information

3. ProductCart automatically notifies Google Analytics of a new order, with details down to the item level. The information received from the shopping cart is then processed by Google Analytics and presented in meaningful reports that can help understand where a specific order originated. For example – an Internet merchant will be able to see which keyword phrases used on a search engine like Google or Yahoo! ended up generating online sales. Or whether Web orders mostly originate from search engine traffic or other Internet marketing initiatives.

4. Adjust for refunds and cancellations
New features have been added to ProductCart to allow users of the shopping carts to notify Google Analytics when an order is returned or cancelled (including partial returns).

5. Google Checkout and Google Analytics
ProductCart is a Google Checkout certified shopping cart. The software has been updated so that orders that are placed with Google Checkout are also tracked by Google Analytics. ProductCart users can also setup special Google Analytics “goals” to monitor shopping cart abandonment rates and other interesting metrics.

“Seeing exactly which keyword phrases used in a search translated into orders (or sales leads) really changes the way you look at your Web statistics” said Massimo Arrigoni, CEO of Early Impact. “For instance, our reports recently showed sales originating from customers looking specifically for a ‘Gift Registry‘ feature. Clearly, they needed shopping cart software with that functionality. This tells us that it might make sense to do additional marketing focused on the ‘gift registry’ features in our software. We never had that kind of insight in the past.”

Google Analytics is a service provided by Google free of charge to most websites. For more information, please visit http://www.google.com/analytics/.

The ProductCart shopping cart software is available from Early Impact and its resellers. All Web designers and resellers enjoy discounts, sales leads, and priority technical support. Existing users can update their storefront to take advantage of the integration with Google Analytics free of charge. For more information about ProductCart and Google Analytics, please visit: http://www.earlyimpact.com/productcart/googleanalytics.

GoECart’s Innovative One-Page Checkout Helps Ecommerce Merchants Increase Sales

By Nolan Apostle

EVENT CITY CREATIVE

May 27^th, 2007

Elegance, Intuition, Quick and Easy – do these words define what you might consider an ecommerce experience? I didn’t think so. GoECart.com is making a bet that when you look at their new innovative one-page checkout feature for GoECart® 7.0, the newest version of the company’s turn-key software solution you will think so.

GoECart expects to improve usability making it easier for customers to checkout on GoECart-powered sites, GoECart 7 really does deliver a highly intuitive and elegant ecommerce shopping experience while simultaneously helping web merchants to increase sales. As we shuffle through the software company’s star product, we realize this is an incredible leap forward for this company’s merchandise. This latest version of the “Software-as-a-Service” online store solution helps web merchants almost completely decrease shopping cart abandonment.

“Providing an ecommerce experience that is both fast and intuitive is absolutely essential to the success of today’s growth-focused web merchants,” said Manish Chowdhary, CEO of GoECart. “By continuously innovating with customer service technologies like one-page checkout, we greatly boost the chances for our clients to succeed in the highly competitive ecommerce marketplace.”

GoECart enlisted the help of various professional web usability consultants to design the single-page checkout feature’s user-friendly interface. An extremely intuitive new design ensures a checkout procedure that is easy for customers to understand and completes the entire process in almost the blink of an eye. While a few other ecommerce vendors, such as Volusion, Inc., offer one-page checkout, we found the GoECart’s implementation far more flexible. For example, the GoECart solution allows merchants to toggle between using one- and multi- page checkout on the ecommerce site. We could not find any other products that could claim that feature.

Could this be a potent remedy for Shopping Cart abandonment? Online retailers should hope for a positive solution to this situation, according to a recent study by market research firm www.MarketingSherpa.com, a staggering 59.8% of online shoppers abandon their shopping cart instead of following through with a purchase. That adds up to a lot of lost sales revenue.

Confronted with increasingly savvy web consumers who no longer tolerate lengthy checkout procedures, clever web merchants are moving quickly to combat this “shopping cart abandonment” phenomenon. Research shows that the most effective method to reduce cart abandonment is to streamline the number of steps in the checkout process. While most ecommerce packages employ a complex methodology for checkout, GoECart’s one-page checkout feature dramatically increases the number of purchases by reducing the number of pages required for shoppers to complete during checkout.

If you are interested in getting more information about how GoECart’s innovative one-page checkout feature and how it can help you combat shopping cart abandonment on your Internet Retail site, please go to http://www.goecart.com/shopping-cart-abandonment.asp and/or http://www.goecart.com/Quick-One-Page-CheckOut.asp

Another feature this reporter saw as a valuable tool in the highly competitive Internet Retailer world is the ability for Rapid Order Placing for returning customers. The One-Page Checkout also makes life easier for returning customers too. When a returning customer wants to make a purchase, all they need to do is sign in and enter their credit card information and select their shipping method. They can then purchase any product they want with just a few clicks. All of their billing and shipping information is retrieved from a secure database which they can choose to edit it before placing the order.

According to the Marketing Sherpa study, more than 27% of consumers surveyed stated the reason they abandoned their shopping cart was pretty simple, “not enough time to complete the transaction.” Through GoECart’s streamlined checkout process and simpler interface, merchants achieve more sales.

Unlike some other one-page checkout systems that are highly-restrictive, GoECart 7.0’s super-fast one-page checkout supports the full spectrum of popular ordering options already included with the software. These complement other Customer-Centric checkout features listed below:
§ Gift Certificates
§ Discount Codes
§ Product Reviews and Ratings
§ Gift Wrap Options
§ Fast Checkout Survey
§ Special Instructions
§ Support for Payment Methods like PayPal®
§ Installment Payment Support
§ HACKER SAFE® Certified Code

These seamless checkout features are just a part of GoECart’s overall value proposition. With its one-of-a-kind, search-engine-friendly architecture, GoECart automatically helps pages in ecommerce sites achieve optimum visibility in the major search engines like Google™, Yahoo®, MSN®, and many others. In addition, the latest version of the software combines over 250 super-friendly ecommerce software features with a highly customizable online store web site, enterprise-class ecommerce hosting (99.9% uptime), and a robust shopping experience for customers—all at a very reasonable price. Overall, this is certainly one of the better bargains we have found for anyone interested in becoming an Internet Retailer wishing to host their own site.

Hello and Welcome to the new Blog-a-Zine, Creative Internet Retailing, created for the Internet Retail business as it applies to the Events & Creative Industries!

Here you will find many articles and valuable information pertaining to buying and selling products on the Internet that you would use in these industries and their vertical markets:

Special Events, Meeting Planning, Hospitality, Travel, Art, Entertainment, Music, Food & Beverage, Publishing & Printing and Associations (Conventions and Tradeshows).

You will be allowed to review many different types of merchandise, in some cases, prior to them being released to market. We expect to showcase many new and exciting products for your perusal and feedback. Additionally, because you will see many of these products first, you will have the opportunities to purchase them at discounts and be the first on your block to own them. This will give you a great advantage over your competition, and more importantly increase your buying power ten-fold!

Please share with us what you would like to see here and we will deliver!! I am your Associate Editor, Chief Retail Guru, Product Photographer Extraordinaire, and all around nice guy. Do not hesitate to leave your thoughts and ideas on this website. We urge you to be our partner in this Blog-a-Zine, in our Magazine (Launch date Q2 2008) and our Creative Retailing(tm) Email newsletter- sign up at emporium@eventcity.net.

Now let’s get this show on the road and a happy Internet Shopping experience to all!!!

Cheers,