The Hubvine Blog

We are very pleased to announce The Austinot has joined the Hubvine network of calendars!

Thanks to everyone for all the great nominations we've received. We're in the process of going through them and will be scheduling time to talk to our finalists in the very near future. We plan on announcing the winners by May 15.

The deadline for submitting a nomination to receive a free community calendar is almost here!

There is a better way to manage your events online, and you can make it easier for your favorite non-profit to keep an community calendar too -- Ballet Austin did it, and so can you. 

Nominate your favorite non-profit to receive a free community calendar from Hubvine -- nominations are due by Monday, 4/30.

Three cheers for Damon Clinkscales, an Austin developer who has gone above-and-beyond in order to connect the local technology community. This quote, from Laura Beck, just about sums it up:

[Damon] is this quiet, understated dude who knows everyone and is always the first one to make time to help. He'll jump in wherever he's needed, and he wants nothing in return. He's just an advocate — seeing people succeed is the reward for him."

Curious how Hubvine was born? How did the team come together? What keeps the co-founders up at night? Check out our interview with AGBeat to get the complete scoop on Hubvine, including our Calendar Giveaway program!

Have you ever wished that your professional association did more to help you promote your events? Are you involved with a special non-profit that you think does great things, but they need serious help promoting their events?

Here's your opportunity to help, and it's as easy as typing a few characters into a web form. Nominate your favorite non-profit (any 501c non-profit, including professional associations, chambers of commerce, and traditional 501c3 organizations) for a chance to win a free community calendar from Hubvine. 

Sound interesting? Want to know what's in it for you? More details and the nomination form are available here:

A very intriguing read, this article does a great job of explaining some of the benefits of coworking spaces, especially the concept of "weak ties:"

In his classic 1973 paper The Strength of Weak Ties, Stanford professor Mark Granovetter described the powerful role that "weak ties" – links among people who are not closely associated - play in spreading ideas, finding jobs and helping people join together for action. Coworking members tend to see an increase in the size and usefulness of their weak ties. The power of these ties comes from exposing people to new ideas and information that they might not be exposed to by their traditional social and business circles.

We found this article courtesy of GoLab Austin, a coworking venue in downtown Austin, and a customer of Hubvine. 

Hubvine has officially exited Beta. But we know that labels such as "beta" are subjective and we have lots of features and ideas we are planning to implement. In fact, we recently held a brainstorming session with several Hubvine customers to generate some ideas with those who would benefit most from our efforts. 

And that's what we want to ask you -- what do you need to help make Hubvine more useful for you?

Take the Hubvine Brainstorming Survey Today >>

Tell Us What's Next

Recently, we conducted a brainstorming session with several Hubvine customers. From this session, we generated a ton of ideas on how we can make Hubvine more useful. 

While having a bunch of ideas is incredibly nice, we need help deciding which ideas need to be implemented sooner, and which ones can be brought out later.

So we're inviting you to help us sort through these ideas -- ideas generated by Hubvine customers for Hubvine customers -- and tell us what's next for Hubvine!

Take the Hubvine Brainstorming Survey Today >>

The survey is a very short survey -- it should take less than 5 minutes to complete, and consists of some "high level" ideas/categories and some very specific areas of concentration. We'd love to know how we can help make Hubvine better for you -- so take 5 minutes out of your day right now and help shape the future of Hubvine.

Interesting look at completely changing the calendar as we know it. The problem with our current calendar is that it is made up of 7-day weeks and contains 365 days (most of the time). However, 365 is not evenly divisible by 7, so we are left with a bunch of various mechanisms to make things work out (like 28 day months, leap years, etc.).

The new calendar concept makes the year conform to our existing schedules and makes it so all things (such as birthday and holidays) always fall on the same day of the week every year. However, it's less accurate in regards to revolutions around the sun, so eventually Christmas could end up in Spring, not Winter. To account for that, they've added Xtr time, which is an extra week added to the calendar every 6 or 7 years.

Facebook events has always been a somewhat interesting -- if annoying -- way to share events. Yes, it can be interesting to see which events your friends are going to, but the whole RSVP system is as messed up as anything Facebook has put out. Many people just respond "yes," not because they are going to the event, but because they realize that responding in the positive gives your event a little extra marketing promotion. 

Google+ has recently come out with Schemer as their events engine. Although still in private beta, and we're not involved with it, it sounds more like an activities recommendation engine than a true event promotion feature. Still, it will be interesting to see how it matures over time.

From Jon Mitchell's article on Read Write Web:

We're not out of the woods yet, but Web publishing is starting to hit its stride. Product offerings are getting smarter, prices are getting better and, most importantly, the content is getting more interesting. We might not even be half way to the future of publishing yet, but the industry is picking up steam.

There are new ways to read, new ways to write and new ways to advertise. Publishing is a rapidly changing high-tech business now, so the tools change the content and vice versa. Established publishers have lots of inertia, so the changes won't sweep the world overnight, but here in the blogosphere, there's a palpable sense of excitement. Here's a tour of Web publishing's next level.

An interesting post by Richard Millington the other day on rewarding community members. If you're looking for ways to provide incentives to members of your community, this should prove to be a though-provoking read. Here's one thought that should be considered carefully:

Why do you reward them? Your most active members are often those you don't need to reward. They're already doing exactly what you want them to do. By offering a reward you can create expectations of rewards and upset others. You have to answer why you would reward this group. What would be different in the community if their behaviour changes?

Did you know that every time you add an event to Hubvine, you could create a Facebook Event posting as well? Well, we have found a great third-party Facebook app that will allow you to do just that.

If you're hosting a community calendar, you could also be doing your community members a solid by posting their events in your Facebook stream, helping to promote their events every time you approve one of their events on your calendar.

Sound interesting yet? Here's how you can do this:

First, visit the iCal to Event main page.

In the upper left-hand corner, click on "Subscription List." This will begin the process of having Facebook ask you to give the app permission to get access to your account.

Start a new browser tab or window, and login to your Hubvine profile. Then go to the admin panel for your chosen Group or Community profile.

In your admin panel, click on the Calendar tab. You will find your iCal URL here (this is available only for Hubvine Group and Community profiles).

Copy the iCal URL from your Hubvine profile.

Return to the iCal to Event page, then click on "subscribe a new calendar."

Fill in the fields as you wish, pasting in the iCal URL you copied from your Hubvine account into the appropriate field.

When finished, click on "Subscribe."

This will now link your Hubvine profile with your Facebook profile (or Facebook Page). Typically, a few hours after a new event is added to your Hubvine profile, you can expect it to show up in your Facebook stream. 

Here are some additional things to know:

The first time you subscribe a calendar to your Facebook page, it will pull in all current events (it will skip events from the past). As you go forward, it will only add events to your Facebook stream as you add them to your Hubvine calendar.

If you delete an event from your Hubvine account, it will also delete the event from your Facebook stream, although this may be delayed by several hours.

Updates to events in your Hubvine profile will NOT appear in the Facebook Event listing - this is a limitation of the Facebook API and the iCal to Event app.

This is a third-party app. Hubvine has no connection with this app, and this app was not built by Facebook. Any issues, concerns, or support requests should be directed to the owner of the app.

Are you looking for ways to promote your events online? There's tons of suggestions out there, such as this site that has 8 ways to promote your events, or this one (with 20 ways), or this one with a bunch of ideas, or a YouTube presentation with a lot of ideas, and more.

Go ahead and click on those links, but to save you some time, here's a brief summary:

Post your event to as many different online resources as possible.

That's it. How they say it is different, but in the end, that's all they are telling you to do. If we want to get a little deeper, here's a more specific summary:

Get your events on the big websites (like Facebook, LinkedIn, Upcoming.org, etc.)

Get your events on as many local calendars as possible.

Get your event on your own website, blog, Facebook page, etc.

And you know what? They are correct. The best way to promote your event is get your event noticed, and one of the best ways to do that is to put it up in as many places as you can (the real world equivalent of putting up posters all over town).

The problem is that it is a tedious, difficult, and mind-numbing process. Some have called it "soul sucking." It requires multiple logins, account user names, passwords, and website visits. Each website has it's own webforms, with it's own requirements of data to be entered, frequently making you come up with new event descriptions so you can fit it into their requirements. In the end, the process barely feels worth it.

We're trying to make this process easier. By using Hubvine, you can enter your event data once into your Hubvine profile, and with that singular effort, you can:

update your own website

automatically update your Facebook page with a Facebook event

create an event listing at Upcoming.org

get your event listed on a growing list of local calendars

What once may have taken 2 hours of work and hassle can now be done in just a few minutes. That's how we help and make it easier than ever to promote your events online.