Feast or famine: The art, science of event marketing at The Record's Community Media Lab in downtown Troy

I suspect accountants get queried regularly at this time of year for free tax advice. So when one publicly offers to give it for free, you would expect a mob.



Full house at a Troy Record
community discussion on
Irish geneaology.

Well, one of troyrecord.com's community bloggers, Kevin O'Leary of Marvin and Company, P.C. in Latham, did just that this week. He held a discussion at The Record's Community Media Lab and no one showed up. We felt bad for Kevin but our attention turned quickly to a Irish genealogy talk a couple nights later. Were we poorly marketing these events? Did no one want to come to The Record and participate in our community discussions?

Well, in the space of a couple nights we had two very different turnouts. We had more people show up than space. More guests than chairs. All told - 50 people showed. A great problem to have  - especially on the heels of the outcome two nights earlier. Good thing we were already working on a solution to expand our Community Media Lab.

So, as The Record's Tom Caprood points out in his blog, we are learning in a trial-by-fire fashion how to organize, market and execute events. With three more scheduled in March (see link 1 and link 2) and a slew coming in subsequent months, I am sure we'll have more highs and lows. But we know three things for certain: We are onto something. We're going to get better at it. And we'll be much better for it.