Another very good presentation at the Online Marketing Dusseldorf 2007 was the one held by Donata Hopfen, Head of Business Development at Going.com, an online community for events that helps you finding fun things to do in your city (currently available in New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco).
Going has a neat design and is very easy to use, comfortable to find events and meet people with similar taste that want go to the that event. In order to check people’s taste, Going is forced to make you a lot of questions about you during the registration process, that’s not that bad, now a days people are most used to that.
Mrs. Hopfen said that she is planing to make money selling event tickets and through special features like “build your own community” and email newsletters.
One of the OMD panels
Going is focused on cities right now and is not clear (to me) if they are planing to expand the service to other regions. Mrs. Hopfen also said that for them the most important thing is to offer a site that is easy to use, specially the navigation of articles and events. It seems that Going is taking usability seriously.
Going is also making a good job integrating other services. For example, it gives the possibility to share your event on Facebook and Myspace, and has an import-friend’s-emails feature during the registration.
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