Or, how to win friends and influence people (for free)

As co-founder of Upcoming.org, the events community recently acquired by Yahoo!, I spend time thinking about how people share and discover events and build communities locally, just as you spend your time thinking about developing good content, building strong communities, and optimizing your ads around that activity.

Going back to the BBS era of the 1980s, I’ve been fascinated with the interaction between online and offline groups, which eventually led to the development of Upcoming. Since Upcoming’s launch in September of 2003, it’s become more than a great way to discover and share events online. It’s also a powerful tool for publishers and bloggers to encourage real-life interaction and experiences, which leads to deeper, more powerful engagement online.

Here are a few tips to get you started building your own events community with Upcoming:

Find the Good Stuff
Whatever your size or topic—say, a blog about environmental conservation or a huge discussion forum on the organic food industry—there are events happening every week that will interest your audience. Relevant conferences, meetings, lectures, concerts, workshops and readings are going on all the time. The most powerful thing you can do for your readers is to sort through the noise, find the local events they’ll care about, and feature them on your site. But how?

On Upcoming.org, anyone can add events to be viewed, shared and discussed by the rest of the community. Get started by creating an account and adding the event. To see an example of how to do this, watch this screencast video which will walk you through the process of getting started.

If your site covers a topic already popular on Upcoming.org, such as music or technology, you may find that the events your audience cares about are already on the site. In that case, mark yourself as watching or attending each event, and it’ll be added to your watchlist and ready for redistribution on your own site.

Get a Badge
Now that you’ve joined some events, how do you share it with your readers?

The easiest way is an Upcoming.org badge, a simple widget that instantly displays events on your own site with no programming required. With three clicks, you can customize your badge and receive a little chunk of Javascript to paste into your own site’s template. You can see an example here on the Yahoo! Publisher Network Blog, listed in the sidebar under the “Upcoming.org Events” heading. 

Choose from a stock template or style it yourself to fit the look and feel of your own site. Or, if you want nearly unlimited flexibility and know how to program—or know someone who can—we offer a complete API for deeply integrating events into your own site.

Stay tuned for more Upcoming.org networking tips later this week.

—Andy Baio, Co-Founder, Upcoming.org