And what’s the best way to find a corporate event entertainer in South Africa?

Here is an article I wrote that was published in the March/April 2010 edition of”Meetings SA” magazine that should help you answer these questions.

Launch of new health, safety guide for event organisers

The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) will launch the second edition of the standards guide — Health and safety at events — requirements at the Development Bank of South Africa in Midrand, Johannesburg, on Thursday, 21 January 2010, at 3.30pm.

This edition expands on the current edition and is a critical resource for all event organisers wishing to organise events that conform to legal requirements. Printed copies, normally R295, will be made available for attendees at a discounted price of R200 per issue.

“The presentations will cover the need for the new issue and overviews of the standard and various health and risk management issues,” explains Petro du Plessis, standards writer at the SABS. “The evening will end with entertainment and cocktails but bookings are essential as places are limited.”

For bookings contact Petro du Plessis on +27 (0)12 428 6011 or email duplesep@sabs.co.za.

Originally posted on bizcommunity.com

Marcel combines the power of Magic and Message, using tried and tested techniques and tools, to help create valuable relationships that will directly influence your bottom-line.

For the past 5 years, Marcel has presented customized performances for team-building events, keynote speaking, marketing presentations, entrepreneurial training & sales events.

Marcel’s strength lies is being able to understand your company’s event goals and to deliver them so that the audience locks in and remembers the key points.

Marcel also offers a unique feature – a ‘Customized Script Development’ service that can be of immense benefit to your event!

Marcel travelled to the USA to be personally trained and mentored by the world’s leading infotainer, Joel Bauer, in presenting customized performances that deliver your message in a engaging, interactive & compelling manner.

Marcel can be engaged to speak on the following prepared topics:

• “The Magic Within You“
  A highly engaging keynote designed to inspire your audience, Marcel demonstrates that everyone has the ability to be remarkable & that creating “magic” in your business or job is a matter of making the right choices.
• “You Make The Magic“
  Originally designed for Volkswagen & Audi South Africa, this keynote presentation focuses on the importance of great customer service & how it impacts your business’s bottom line profits.
• “Branding & Illusion“
  Originally designed for the UCT Graduate School of Business, during this keynote Marcel gives insight into how your prospects & customers attach an emotional meaning & context to your business’s branding, & how every staff member is responsible for reinforcing the brand.
• “Creating Customers For Life“
  This 90-minute seminar is filled with the best strategies & techniques taken from Marcel’s book, “The Serious Business Owner’s Guide To Creating Customers For Life”. Your audience will walk away with a greater understanding of sales techniques, why great customer service is vital, & how to turn prospects into life-long customers.
• “Marketing Magic“
  During this workshop, Marcel demonstrates how to “think like a magician” when creating & initiating your marketing campaigns. He teaches & helps the group to implement a simple step-by-step formula that explains how to create a compelling message,  deliver it to a targeted audience & how to maintain the campaign’s inertia to generate continuous referral business.  Although designed for small business owners & entrepreneurs, this formula can be used by any business in any industry.
• … or your own CUSTOM message!
  Provide us with the topic & research material & Marcel will discuss how he is able to turn ‘boring’ content into a exciting & valuable presentation.

Your audience can also learn from Marcel’s insights with his presentation based on his first business book, ‘The Serious Business Owner’s Guide To Creating Customers For Life‘.  Not only do we offer this book as an excellent gift to every delegate, but we can also print your company logo with a special message to each reader. This is an excellent way to provide even more phenomenal “take home” value to your audience!

Click here to view the embedded video.

I decided to take a look at the post to see if I could find any new resources so that I could compile a  new list that would have helpful hints, tips, resources or free software that would be appropriate to South African event planners & event management companies.  I have found a number of great NEW resources that I will compile into a list to post here soon, but as I started working my way through the list, I visited Event Manager Blog.

Well, did I find a WEALTH of information there!  I was looking for ”South African’-friendly posts so that I could link to them and I realized something … in my work, I present and perform all the time at events and functions, and I almost never see half the technology they’re describing on that site.

Now, I don’t mean just the technology that is used at the actual event  — like the Twitterfountain used at #Netprophet, or liveblogging.  Although using intelligent lighting, specialized sound equipment or using a visual facilitator are great ways to use technology to augment your event, for most of the events that I am requested to attend these would be too expensive. That’s OK: the market for this is developing in South Africa. But when you look Event Manager Blog, you’ll see that there’s a plethora of online services that event planners can use to plan the agenda, budget, manage registrations & perhaps most importantly: how to market an event (virtually) free using Social Media.

Here’s what I found:

• Many of the web-based applications that handle event registration require either a Paypal Seller account or a credit card payment gateway.  Unfortunately, due to the South Africa foreign exchange control laws, South Africans may still not register for a Paypal Seller account (as I understand it).  That means that you cannot accept credit cards for payment.  The work-around is that you register the event as ’Free’ but charge tickets at the door; that’s a little disappointing, knowing that it could be so much easier.Why is there no South African company offering online event registration management like Amiando, Eventbrite or Ticketleap?  I believe there is a South African online ticketing solutions but I wasn’t confident enough to register for it.  There’s a definite gap in the market here.
  [UPDATE: This is now possible through First National Bank. However, you can only charge in US$ and not in ZAR]
• There seems to be far more co-ordination in sharing the material presented during the event and sadly, that lack of planning was evident at this year’s Internetix conference.  Don’t get me wrong, I fully appreciate that I was able to learn from expert speakers, enjoy meals and drinks, AND receive a bag full of goodies (thank you Internet Solutions!!).  But in the ’gift pack’ I received a CD with all the speakers’ presentations on it … why? It looked fancy and it was useful, but for that small amount of data why wasn’t it posted to Slideshare?  A whole extra piece of plastic had to be printed for something that has been designed to be thrown away.  That was not cool of Internet Solutions, but here is a suggestion: next year, don’t doubt that those attending take away great value from the event.  We wouldn’t be disappointed if there was less “stuff” in our free bags and you know what? Sending us to a website encourages traffic and interaction, so everyone wins.It just makes sense: find a community website for your event (like Ning), use an email auto-responder (like ActOn Software), use a Wordpress blog, or create an event page on Slideshare, and share the resources and material electronically.  It’s faster, it saves on printing expenses, and it’s better for the environment.I think there’s a real opportunity here is for a South African communications company to handle the whole Social Media account purely for the pre- and post-event interaction.
• Suddenly there’s this new “buzz” in my industry about “marketing with Social Media”, and being an early-adopter I see that local event planners are only now beginning to ask questions.  By far the majority of event invitations I receive are either by (a) email invitation and/or spam, or (b) Facebook Event invitations.  As you would expect, the 27Dinners are entirely marketed by using Social Media, but that’s the only consistent event that I know that runs smoothly using this technology.  Let’s go back to Event Manager Blog’s slideshow and see what they suggest are “15 Different Ways To Market Your Event OFFLINE“:

  Hmmm. If you’ve spent any time organising or attending events in South Africa, you might have seen at most 5 of these suggestions used for any event.  How many South Africans use meetup.com, would accept proximity marketing, have advanced knowledge of LinkedIn, or know what a vcard is?

In order to get the competitive edge, event organisers these days are more and more interested in using cost-effective and time-efficient techniques to market their clients’ events.  Yet, there doesn’t seem to be anyone giving them the shortcuts and existing resources!

I’ve become more active in presenting live marketing seminars, so I’m considering hosting a 1-day event, “Social Media For Event Planners 101“, to be held in Cape Town.  If 10 people are even vaguely interested, I’ll post you each more information.  But I’m hoping that I can get an opportunity to show at least 10 people during 1 full day how to use existing and free resources to plan, market and organise an event.

If you know that understanding how to use Social Media in event management would be a huge competitive advantage, post a comment below and I’ll reply with more information!