When I saw the press release I was both relieved (that we, people amongst event organisers who thought this would happen someday were right) and also curious on what exactly this meant for our business.

Digging further, I found more details on another press release, which talks about the product in more detail with features like: Receive Event Recommendations, Search for Events by Industry, Date, Location, See Attendees going to specific Events, Indicate your participation status, Event Updates and History... All music to our ears, but here's the catch...

that press release is from 10 years ago! 

I know what you think.. like WHAT? The first time Linkedin "announced" Linkedin events was November 7th 2008, and the current one on November 9th 2018... Literally 10 years and two days apart. You just can't make this up!

Getting over that shock, let's concentrate on here and now. So what's in the new one then? What have they added? What have they excluded? Let's have a look. The current iteration has the following functionality: Create an event, Promote your event, Manage your event, Have conversations with fellow attendees, See who else is going

So they went from an attendee approach to an organiser approach. Nice! But with everyone on the platform able to create events, they're clearly not aiming at the B2B organiser/media space. And if you look closer to the hero image provided, it's a university class reunion "event" (you've guessed it, class of 2008!) 

So all in all, this is a meetup/facebook events type solution, which means (if it takes off) there'll be tens of micro events created by users within our events on this new medium (as well as on facebook events and meetups). As the Marketing Director of one of the top organisers of the world, I cannot see how this can help us unless Linkedin creates a pro version that would bundle these potential micro events onto the actual B2B event we're hosting and provide powerful tools (integration to our systems!) for professional organisers. 

On the other hand, for certain type of event tech providers this, even with its current form might pose a challenge. But these are very early days. I guess we'll have to wait for the mysterious group of event organisers in San Francisco and New York to field test this with their class reunions first. 

Who knows? Perhaps we'll see those pro-tools for organisers or we'll wait for another press release on November 2028!

I'd be very interested to hear from you all. Please comment below.

#linkedin #events #digital #B2B #marketing