Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 6 (Seminars)

Seminars (aka “pre-cons”) have been part of the DNA of SQLSaturday going back to #1. For those that weren’t there we started off with Joe Celko doing our first one and it went really well. I think we sold it at $99, included his latest book and lunch, and had about 70 paying attendees. That […]

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 5

More notes, many from a chat with Kendal. We wish we could see the open rate on email and an easy way to do A/B testing. The emailer in the site (mine, or a derivative maybe) was just built to send a lot of email, no bells and whistles. Would the open rate help? Don’t […]

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 4

I spent some more time last night thinking about the event and marketing it. Biased I am, but I think the event has a great value proposition and doesn’t require “selling” except to first timers (seminars are different). We seem to do pretty well at getting first timers to attend, so it worth extra effort […]

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 3

Not to short change fund raising, but the toughest goal to meet for this year is registration/attendance if we’re going to hit our 20% growth target. No, it’s not all about numbers, but our stance is that we’d like to deliver as much learning as possible – both to do good and to leverage our […]

Building the SQLSaturday Orlando Marketing Plan–Part 1

I’ve volunteered to lead the marketing effort for SQLSaturday Orlando this year. Broadly speaking that means drive attendance to the main event as well as any seminars we host on Thursday or Friday. We’ve hit a cap the last few years, never getting beyond the 275-300 range (I’ll get exact number later this week for […]

Is $160 Per Day a Lot?

Recently I was in a small coffee/sandwich shop for early morning coffee and while waiting watched one of the employees taking cookies from a pan and putting into paper sleeves. A bit later when I returned for a refill (and was more awake) I asked how many cookies they made a day. They had three […]

Interesting Approach-One Time Tools

Recently I ordered a Paolini Pocket Rule from Woodpecker. It is one of a series of OneTime Tools they’ve produced over the last couple years. They come up with a design, take orders for a couple months, and then process the charge when the item ships. Think about what it means to see a market […]

Say Seminar, Not Pre-Con for SQLSaturday

I read a note posted on the OPASS LinkedIn site today about our upcoming SQLSaturday and the two pre-cons by Stacia Misner and Kevin Kline. I say and think pre-cons, but does the new DBA? Their boss? Seminar, One Day Class, or something else, we need to call it something that resonates. Pre-con is in […]

Auto Tweets from SQLSaturday

I was chatting with PASS community pollinator Karla Landrum recently and she asked me my thoughts on the auto tweets that get posted when attendees, sponsors, and speakers sign up, especially with regard to privacy. I implemented or drove the implementation of the auto tweets, trying as best I could to build some starting point […]