Meetings engagement app DoubleDutch pushed its Live
Engagement Platform to the market this week, along with a declaration that the "end
of the event tech era" is at hand.
According to DoubleDutch, the Live Engagement Platform
provides deep integration of meetings-engagement data into customer
relationship management and marketing automation systems. The DoubleDutch app
already enables mobile-engagement activities onsite—activity feeds that include
comments, likes and follows but also gamification, live event polling, audience
Q&A features and ratings and reviews. The engagement platform feeds that data
into Salesforce or Marketo, triggering automated marketing campaigns or initiating
sales activities. Additional integration partners are forthcoming.
"What separates our app is that we focus mostly on
adoption and engagement," DoubleDutch CEO Lawrence Coburn told BTN. "It's incredibly sticky. It
feels like a social network, not a paper guide transplanted to a mobile phone."
The basic DoubleDutch app tracks as many as 70 unique "signals"
throughout an event, such as bookmarking a session, following another attendee
and rating a speaker, and the average attendee logs 300 actions and 37 minutes
of app usage per event. With that kind of data, extending DoubleDutch's power
to drive business outcomes was the next logical step in order to serve customers,
according to Coburn. "Event marketers and planners pump this engagement data
into their Marketo system so they can run much more targeted email campaigns
after the event."
DoubleDutch also developed real-time automations to
influence attendee behaviors onsite. Called Live Engagement Journeys, the
service uses behavior triggers to automate messages and send additional
conference materials to attendees during the event. Coburn said the goal is to
drive a better event outcome for the attendee but it also will drive additional
data capture. "Sign up to go to a session on the app, and you are sending
a message to the app. If they book a session, they might want to meet other
people going to that session. DoubleDutch can now send automated chat messages
to attendees that say, 'These five people are also going to the session, maybe
you want to connect with them.'"
Additional automations enable DoubleDutch customers to send "discussion"
invites to attendees who are interested in specific sessions or email session
collateral like slide presentations to attendees even before they request them.
For now, the "journeys" features are fairly
limited. "These are programmatically delivered, very simple journeys that
are associated with a couple of actions in the app," said Coburn. "You
will see us go a lot deeper in applying machine learning so we are not sending
too many journeys or too few. The idea is that the more you use the software
the smarter it gets."
The End of Event
Tech?
The DoubleDutch announcement about the "end of event
tech" in tandem with the Live Engagement Platform echoed Coburn's musings immediately
following news that Cvent had agreed to a $1.65 billion buyout by Vista Equity
Partners. "It … feels a bit like the end of an era," he wrote on the
DoubleDutch blog site about the merger. "Is event registration officially
dead as a driver and center of gravity for event technology innovation? It may
be."
That now feels a bit like a savvy positioning statement in
advance of DoubleDutch's new product push.
It's no secret that mobile event apps and "return on
engagement" have become must-have tools for event marketers. Cvent
president of worldwide sales and marketing Chuck Ghoorah told BTN in October that the C-suite was all
over meetings-engagement tools, primarily for lead enhancement. "We are
moving squarely into onsite event technology: our mobile apps, social walls,
polling, etc.," Ghoorah said. "The C-level suite can see it, touch
it, feel it. They can see all this interaction [of attendees] with their
companies. It used to be that event tech was all back-office operations; it's
great but a thankless job. When the C-level sees the interaction now possible
and they see how meetings professionals are connecting the brands with clients
and partners, they get excited and they want to fund it more."
In Coburn's view, however, Cvent's CrowdCompass has been
weak on engagement. "CrowdCompass does not have an activity feed," he
said. "Honestly, I don't know how you run a live engagement app without
having a live activity feed. That's the core of the experience; it drives high
engagement and gives off lots of data exhaust. Without that, it's a hard to
make a compelling case as to why that data should be imported into the
marketing automation systems of the world."
A Cvent spokesperson disputed those claims. "CrowdCompass
and Cvent have invested heavily in developing ROI-measuring and lead-generating
tools for years, with engagement a centerpiece of helping event organizers
realize both," the spokesperson wrote in an email to BTN, adding that CrowdCompass has an activity feed with social
features, one-to-one messaging and session-level surveying and incorporates
beacon technology to track attendees and message them. The spokesperson also
pointed out that CrowdCompass integrates with the Salesforce Developer
Community and Marketo. "It's all a critical part of what Cvent has called
the 'meeting journey' for years. With a technology staff of over 580, we have pioneered—and
will continue to pioneer—innovation in the event tech space."
DoubleDutch has yet to pilot its Live Engagement
Platform with a client, but Coburn said it would do so within the next four
weeks. "The folks who are running events professionally are eager to get
this behavioral data into their other systems. We are starting to see a lot of
requests for data export … but there's a pretty broad spectrum of how data
driven event planners really are. It's still very early days."