Going Solo

I’m fallen a bit behind on introducing our sponsors for Going Solo Leeds, and as you can see in the sidebar or on the Sponsors page, the list is growing fast.

I’d like to start by pointing out some of our recurring partners.

Expectnation

Expectnation were our first partner for Going Solo Lausanne, and I have to say that all through the preparation of the two events, Edd Dumbill (the brains behind the machine) has offered support going way beyond the normal “tech support” one would expect in such circumstances. So, thanks Edd, and very happy to have the opportunity to use Expectnation and contribute in a small way to making it an even better service.

SmallBizPod

If you remember well, last time around Alex Bellinger of SmallBizPod recorded some great interviews of the Going Solo speakers. This time, Alex will actually be present at the conference and interview freelancers during the day. I’m really looking forward to having him with us!

TheNextWeb

Famous for their “Men in White”, TheNextWeb are with us again this time. A last-minute incident prevented them from being present in Lausanne, but we’re confident we’ll be seeing coverage of our Leeds event on The Next Web blog!

If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, we still have some sponsorship positions open.

There are also sponsorship opportunities for individuals (not just companies) – there has been a lot of positive feedback about the idea, but we’re still waiting to see who will actually take us up on the offer! 😉

Promoting an event like Going Solo is a huge amount of work — often more than what you’d imagine (and more than what I imagined initially). That’s why everything the community does to help counts.

We don’t have a team of online marketers to get the word out there. It’s basically down to me, and of course to what all the kind people supporting Going Solo are willing to do.

I’m a blogger and a busy person, and so I know how easy it is to “want to do something” but not actually get around to doing it. Or how easy it is to think that what I can do won’t really make a difference.

So, I’ve tried to make it easy for you to “do something” to help get the word out about Going Solo Leeds (to your readers/network/community/friends) if you feel like it.

First, logos and blog badges which you can easily insert in a blog post or a sidebar by copy-pasting the code we provide, like these two for example:

<a href="http://leeds08.going-solo.net/" title="Going Solo Leeds Conference: 12th Sept."><img src="http://leeds08.going-solo.net/files/going-solo-leeds-logo-yellow-rectangle.gif" style="height: 75px; width: 150px;" alt="Going Solo Leeds logo." /></a>

<a href="http://leeds08.going-solo.net/" title="Going Solo Leeds Conference: 12th Sept."><img src="http://leeds08.going-solo.net/files/going-solo-leeds-badge-180x260.gif" style="height: 260px; width: 180px;" alt="Going Solo Leeds Badge." /></a>

(You can find others on the Promote Going Solo page.)

Second, the Going Solo Leeds home page provides you with the main information and links, as well as a brief description of the event if you’re looking for some stock text (we encourage you to speak in your own voice, of course, but sometimes it’s handy to know what the key points are).

Third, the videos and photos of the Lausanne conference are available (and embeddable — Flickr and DailyMotion) as illustration material. I guess this is particularly relevant if you were present in Lausanne and want to point out one of the highlights of your Going Solo experience to tempt others to follow in your steps.

Fourth, there are events on Upcoming and Facebook (as well as a Facebook group) to which you can invite your friends very easily (you certainly know how it works if you’re on one of those two services).

Fifth, if you’re into offline stuff, you can ask me (steph at going-solo dot net, or @stephtara on Twitter) to have a box of Going Solo MOO cards sent to you, or print out our posters and plaster them all over your neighbourhood:

And sixth, so that you don’t have to figure it all out for yourself, there are two links you can use to point people to registration:

• http://goingfar.expectnation.com/gsleeds08/public/register/order is the direct link
• http://leeds08.going-solo.net/registration provides some extra information.

While we’re at it:

• http://going-solo.net is the Going Solo blog
• http://leeds08.going-solo.net is the Going Solo Leeds website

Happy blogging, thanks in advance, and let us know if you don’t see your post appear in the coverage list soon!

Update 01.08.08: bloggers and community managers can now ask for their discount/referral code.

Enter the twisty roads of branding. Going Solo Lausanne ’08 was branded simply “Going Solo” (and a bit in a rush!) — so with the preparation of Going Solo Leeds ’08, I’ve been wondering how to deal with the website (I’m figuring it out, thankfully, as you can see if you start clicking around) and also, what to do about the logo.

Those of you who were already around at the time will remember that the badges and logo for Going Solo were whipped up in a bit of an emergency by the lovely and talented Stephanie Troeth, who in addition to being a precious advisor to Going Solo, also took part in the panel Solo in a Networked World in Lausanne.

I decided to keep the logo for the Leeds event (Steph tells me she wasn’t expecting it to stick around so long!) with a slight modification to indicate that it is not the Lausanne event anymore. Corinne Stoppelli (Exoconcept) came up with the Leeds stamp you can see below:

The logo also exists as a square, and on a white background. Sébastien Baudet kindly took over the rather ungratifying work of exporting the logo (and badges!) from Photoshop over and over again in various shapes and sizes. The “Promote Going Solo” page (lovingly put together by Virginie) will give you access to all the different versions, with handy copy-paste code so you can easily use this material on your site.

Oh yes, there’s a hint here. Now that you have shiny visual material close at hand, we’re expecting to see many a blog post!

So, here we are: Going Solo on tour. Take the same concept, the same great speaker team, the same programme, but another city.

(When I say “same”, I mean “almost the same: little changes here and there, improvements based on lessons learned, but basically, the same idea.)

Going Solo Leeds will take place on September 12th, 2008. I’m letting you know straight away (I had confirmation this morning for the venue, the Old Broadcasting House (BBC) where met:space is located) so that you can book dates and start making travel arrangements if you want.

I’ll be publishing information about Leeds and making promotional material available as soon as possible. Registration will also open… as soon as I’ve set it up :-).

Now that Going Solo is going on tour, the website is going to have to evolve. Instead of having a 1D website (one event and that’s it), the Going Solo site is going to have to become multi-dimensional: add time and space, and you have a 3D site. Different cities, different moments in the year. Even if it is not “planned” that Going Solo will take place in Lausanne again next year (it’s not that kind of event), who knows — it’s perfectly possible that it’ll come back some day.

So, how do I archive the “Lausanne” event? This isn’t as simple as 2008, 2009, 2010 subdomains. Or subdomains with city names. “lausanne.2008.going-solo.net”? Blogs are easy, for that: just keep on writing.

Also, what about visual branding? Keep exactly the same logos and colours (and update city/date information on them), or make a subtle change (which one? add “Leeds” somewhere?) so that people realise it’s not the same event?

Also, tags: goingsolo, goingsololausanne, goingsolo2008lausanne, gs2008lausanne, gs2008leeds, goingsololeeds — heck.

I suspect I might have to move away from wordpress.com to find an acceptable solution. While I’m perfectly capable of hosting a blog (I do that for CTTS), it’s quite nice not having to worry about maintenance and downtime.

Ideas and suggestions welcome — for Going Solo Leeds as well as for the website.

Well, there we are. Tomorrow is the big day. Tomorrow! I can hardly believe it 🙂

This has one consequence for those of you who may still be thinking of making a last-minute registration decision: we’re closing online registration tonight around 8pm. We’re really happy we managed to keep it open until now, but at some point we need to lock the numbers and print the badges.

So hurry up and get it done today. If you miss tonight’s deadline, you may still show up at the venue, but

• the walk-in price is 700 CHF
• we will ask you to pay in cash (there is a cash machine next to the hotel)
• you will have to write your name on your badge by hand
• if you are in possession of a discount code, it will not work
• of course, you’ll get all the other benefits (including goodies) like any other attendees, no fear 🙂

This is where you can register online. See you tomorrow!

There have been a few questions on Twitter, so here’s some information for the Big Day.

First of all, aside from Sébastien who will be filming and uploading the talks, Charbax who will be conducting video interviews, and Ernst-Jan who will be live-blogging for The Next Web blog, Swiss podcaster Thierry Weber of Culture Pod will also be present with his camera to report on the event.

And then, there are all of you, the people formerly known as the audience ;-), Going Solo attendees, bloggers, podcasters, videobloggers, photographers or reporters in your own right. You are most welcome to blog, photograph, record, sketch all the happenings of the day. We’ll do our best to keep track of everything that pops on our radar, but you can help us by:

• tagging your various productions goingsolo
• sending a tweet @goingsolo with the link or an e-mail to steph at going hyphen solo dot net

We encourage you to use a Creative Commons license, by-nc-sa for example, but of course you’re free to do what you want with your work. If you produce video material, we’d be really happy to be able to include it on the official Going Solo DailyMotion page (with a link to the original, of course), if you’ll let us.

As far as the backchannel is concerned, Twitter is of course the place to go (use @goingsolo in front of your message if you want to make sure we see it). If you don’t have an account yet, open one now!

There will be folks hanging out in channel #goingsolo on the Freenode IRC network, too. I’m already there – come on in.

Update: if you’re on Twitter, join the Going Solo community on SixGroups. Give them your Twitter name and @sixgroups will start following you. Any of your updates using the hashtag #goingsolo will appear in the SixGroups livestream.