A live, 30-minute Internet radio show for the meetings and events industry is now on the air every Tuesday afternoon. The goal: old-fashioned conversation.
“We want to facilitate discussions, not just share links,” says Liz King of Liz King Events, who co-hosts the new show with Lindsey Rosenthal, founder of Events for Good. The two are enthusiastic about social media (they met via Twitter and between them have almost 13,000 Twitter followers) but are interested in “the bigger conversation,” says King. About a year ago they began working on the idea of a radio show as a way to get those discussions happening. “There’s so much content out there,” King says. “We want to talk about it.”
The show, called Event Alley, airs live at 1 p.m. EST on Tuesdays and can be streamed after that through the Event Alley Web site or downloaded as a podcast through the iTunes store. Each episode includes a news roundup (the Lowdown), a feature story, a call-in period, and sometimes other segments as well. For example, in the second episode, January 29, the Lowdown touched on Twitter’s new Vine app for video sharing and what planners can take away from Beyonce’s lip sync of the national anthem, while the feature conversation was about hybrid events, with special guest Michael Doyle, executive director of the Virtual Edge Institute. In addition, the show had a “Tech This Out” segment, a prerecorded interview with Jay Parmar, CEO of Picatic, a crowdfunding platform for events. (Paramar's interview can been seen on YouTube, the first video in Event Alley's YouTube channel.)
So far shows have drawn 125 live listeners and more than 1,500 downloads. This week’s show will focus on trends for 2013 with guests Sue Pelletier, editor at Medical Meetings and author of MeetingsNet’s face2face blog; Christine Born, vice president, editorial, Collinson Media and Events; and Chad Kaydo, editor-in-chief, BizBash.
Looking ahead, King and Rosenthal plan to focus on increasing their listenership and covering high-interest topics. They’d also like to sell the radio concept to meeting professionals andbring Event Alley to live events—hired by the conference organizer to interview speakers, as part of a trade show booth, or even doing the Event Alley show with a studio audience. Says King: “We’re open to see what this can evolve into.”
