If you’re a globetrotting type who likes to take in industry events and conferences as a regular way of staying in touch with your profession, you know that keeping track of the ever-changing cities, events and venues can be a full-time job in and of itself.
Luckily, there are a wide variety of tools out there that can help make that job easier, keeping track of your comings and goings so that you don’t have to.
Below are five tools, along with event examples of events in a variety of niches, to help you to create your own event calendar through the spring/summer of 2013. (Check out more events to add to the calendar here.)
5 Tools to Create Your Event Calendar
1. April 2013: Google Calendar / Google Docs and Pubcon
It’s easy to mention Google Calendar as our first entry, even if only because it is one of the most well-used online calendars in the world, allowing you to have private calendars, calendars that are shared with friends and colleagues and the all-important reminders to help to keep you on your toes about what’s up next.
Google Docs is another great tool to use here. Here’s a good example of conferences in the Google Doc (courtesy of StateOfSearch):
When filling in your Google Calendar for April 2013, consider adding a stop at Pubcon New Orleans conference, the place to be for learning about the present and future of Internet Marketing – and how your business endeavors can benefit from it.
2. May 2013: CalendarsQuick and Mom 2.0 Summit
If online calendars aren’t your thing, CalendarsQuick offers you the ability to quickly and easily design your own calendars to print, allowing you to fill them in with every imaginable bit of information before making it available to grace your wall.
Before you hit the print button on your May 2013 calendar, be sure to include the Mom 2.0 Summit on your to-do list, an event that aims to bring together women and mothers of all stripes to learn about how to take their professional endeavors to new heights, networking all the while.
3. June 2013: ReminderFox and EmMeCon
If a full-fledged calendar application simply falls outside of your humble means, the ReminderFox plugin for Firefox is an excellent tool that gets right to the business of giving you a heads up about a given event, without the need to add anything other than a title, a date and a time.
For your June entry, everyone in business should think about the possibility of attending EmMeCon 2013 in San Francisco, a place where business leaders and the technologists who provide them with the tools for success congregate to exchange expertise and contact information.
4. July 2013: RSSCalendar and MozCon
In some cases – as a blogger, for example – you may want to make your event itinerary available to your readers. For these cases, RSSCalendar is exactly the tool that you need. Via a slick and easy to use interface, you can create simple event listings for yourself, then instantly republish them for the world to see in an RSS feed.
If there is only a single event entry in your calendar for July 2013, it should most definitely be MozCon, a Seattle-based conference that will bring together the best minds in SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing) and social media to discuss the direction of the Web, and how businesses can best climb aboard for the ride.
5. August 2013: Outlook and An Event Apart
Deserving of at least an honorable mention is the well-used calendar functionality to be found in Microsoft Outlook, a piece of software that most of us use, but few of us really give the credit it deserves.
Tack on the use of Office 365, a cloud-based technology from Microsoft that many businesses are implementing, and you’ve got the ability to collaborate with others as you keep track of the events you’ll be attending, all from within your email client.
Finally, to top off your summer with style, check out An Event Apart in Washington, DC, a gathering strictly aimed at people who design for the Web. Workshops, keynotes and hands-on sessions will abound, helping you to stay ahead of the curve in the ever-evolving business of making beautiful, functional designs.
These are some very novel ways of using the tools. Thanks for pointing them out (and since I’ll be attending Pubcon it’s doubly interesting).