This time tomorrow, I will be at London Olympia helping run Be2camp@WorkingBuildings2009, our latest Be2camp event, which runs through to Thursday afternoon, 8 October.
The room and equipment for this year’s event has been generously provided by United Business Media and puts Be2camp alongside three of its major trade shows focused on the Built Environment: Total Workplace Management (“The FM and Estates Event”), M&E (“The Building Services Event”), and Energy Solutions Expo. Event director Adrian Newton tells me that pre-registrations are up on last year’s show; pre-bookings for Be2camp are also looking good, but I expect there will be a lot of casual visitors intrigued to learn more about Web 2.0 for the built environment and about ‘unconferences’ in general. Certainly, if the website stats are anything to go by, interest in the London event is going to eclipse the figures we had for our May event in Liverpool and for Be2camp Brum in August.
Looking at visitor numbers, the most popular pages and the time spent on the Be2camp site, it seems that having lots of good content encourages people to linger. Apart from the home page and members’ profiles, the event pages are easily the most popular, with visitors often spending several minutes browsing presentations or watching videos. And, these pages also get a lot of returning visitors, suggesting that rich multi-media content is making them ‘sticky’. I will be monitoring Google Analytics to see if this trend is maintained by interest in participants’ outputs from the next couple of days – might make it an interesting opportunity for potential sponsors of future Be2camp events!
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