Amiando, the undisputed leader at the Exciting Commerce Stars 2008, lives up to its reputation in 2009. They are consistently moving forward with their networking strategy. Along with widgets, ViralTickets, seamless integration to external websites and the integration with Facebook Connect, Amiando now has eventSense. With eventSense, Amiando is launching further distribution and marketing opportunities for conference and event organizers (German press release, PDF).
Decentralized Event Marketing
eventSense is performance oriented and takes its cue from Google AdSense. For that reason, perhaps at first the effort doesn’t appear to be very spectacular. But for Amiando it is the logical next step. And one starts to wonder, why isn’t there a JobSense, TravelSense, a RealtySense and so on? At least there is type of StyleSense in the works (German press release, PDF)
At latest since Google stormed the scene do companies realize how lucrative it can be to think in terms of platforms, services and leveraging networkability. Nevertheless it feels here in Germany like 999 from a thousand internet companies (and 990 from a thousand startups) have a traditional marketplace or portal business model instead of one focussed on tools and services.
Of course, Amiando could have evolved into something of a MyHammer, eBay, or Expedia – and end up offering the ultimate event directory. But somehow the team at Amiando succeeds in convincing its investors of its vision and is able to present itself as a service starting from Day 1. As a result, even to this day you won’t find a category overview or prominent search function on the site.
What would Amiando do?
Not surprisingly, people are not giving enough credit to the site which is already helping to organize thousands (according to Amiando, over 50,000) large and small events with participant logistics and marketing. That’s due to the fact that the marketing occurs largely decentralized and is user driven. With eventSense, Amiando can spread it’s presence further and also work with event organisers who don’t have any online presence and have scant experience with online marketing.
Amiando is and remains an epiphany of immense strategic value and is from our point of view the only German internet company who will be able to keep up with the Facebooks and Googles of this world. Perhaps someday instead of people asking themselves “What would Google do?”, they’ll be asking “What would Amiando do?”. We, at least, are excited about Amiando’s future.
In comparison, EventBrite is also worth a look. They have more features, but at the same time, a much more conventional strategy.
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Originally posted in German by Jochen Krisch, adapted for excitingcommerce.com by Jason Soo.
