In the last blog, I mentioned one of the purposes of venture
forum, is for people to networking and communicating their ideas. However,
venture forum also contains more important mission – gather entrepreneurs,
investors and sponsors at one place at one time. That means, all the parties
can obtain what they are looking for. Most of the sponsors are business lawyers,
and patent lawyers. Another important group of people who compose the forum
that I want to point out here are the volunteers. They are acting as
representatives, marketers, organizers, etc. Without volunteers, it will be
hard to run such big events.
From the information I have collected on the internet, WPI
Venture Forum was founded on 1990. As a WPI employee or student, we are free to
go to the WPI Venture Forum. For alums, the admission fee is $15. However,
other people need to pay $99 individual membership fee or $250 membership fee
to attend the event. Those are the major ways how WPI Venture Forum earns its
revenues.
Since it is not a non-profit organization, online marketing
should be the best way to promote this program. The first suggestion I want to
give here is to strength the search engine marketing (SEM). One of the methods
we discussed in the class was about keyword search – use key works for links,
so that search engine such as Google and Bing can be easily detected. Also, although
we can be easily guided to WPI School of Business webpage through a link on WPI
Venture Forum, it would be more convenient, efficient, and noticeable to do the
other way around.
Secondly, word of mouth (WOM) affects a lot! In order to generate
awareness for the audiences, social media marketing (SMM) is essential. Here I
want to use MIT-CHIEF (MIT- China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum) as a reference.
This organization holds some activity such as giving out MIT-CHIRF t-shirt for those
targeted audiences who twittering about the WPI Venture Forum events. This is a
really smart method to do the referral marketing online.
Another online marketing is to set up a community in WPI
Venture Forum official website to let people express their thoughts and
comments for such event. Some people may argue that online community may be not
healthy for intellectual property (IP) or patent especially for entrepreneurs.
However, I want to say that the community can set up some rules about the words,
so that people there only can discuss about the ideas that is on the table.
Moreover, entrepreneurs can absorb more useful advices through such community.
The biggest advantage for this community is to networking – not like normal social
networking websites, WPI Venture Forum Community gather professional business people
together in the same region, with same interests and preference in a casual
way.
The final advice I want to give here is to post some
successful cases on the websites – not necessary the confidential documents,
but some summary of examples. Just like white paper on technical companies’
websites, to show the expertise and profession. As I noticed before, WPI
Venture Forum used to post online video on its official websites to show the
events. It is an effective way to allure and trigger the interest for audiences
who have the desire to attend such events, and it would be nice for them to keep doing this.
Reference:
WPI Venture Forum
Kevin Barrett, Matthew Fiore, Mark Thomas, Caitlin Wood. WPI
Venture Forum: A Market Analysis
