Panel by panel: reaction to my comic con
Immediate thoughts about the event, and implications for the future
Yesterday (June 2) was the first edition of the Virtual Creator Con! An online comic convention focused on indie creators.
You may recall a previous post where I discussed the reasons and rationale for creating a new convention, so this post is focused on my immediate reaction to the event.
What worked?
The goal of this event was to i) raise awareness, and ii) to drive traffic to creators’ individual web stores. I heard from several creators that they did indeed make sales yesterday during the con - although we can’t say for certain that those sales were directly attributable to the convention.
So, the second goal was partially met.
As for the first goal, there were some folks watching videos, so that suggests they attended the event, but there wasn’t much sharing or discussion of the event on social media, beyond those creators who helped to promote it to their networks.
What could have been better?
As always, there are things that could be improved. For that reason, I also added a feedback form to the convention website to elicit feedback; but sadly, no-one responded.
I feel the graphic design needs to be improved to help establish the brand. I didn’t leave myself enough time to do this prior to the con, but need to figure that out before the next one in September.
I also need to have a better marketing strategy (and plan) for each event. This ties into the former issue about branding, as it’s not always easy to market something that doesn’t necessarily have a brand, but I need to do more than rely on my own social media and newsletter promotion.
We did have some attendees (both my website stats and GA confirm there were about 30 visitors), but I was hoping for at least 100 attendees. So, the lesson here is to work on finding ways to promote the event to much larger audiences. I feel that some live-streamed events may be able to better connect people to the event, so need to consider ways of doing that in future.
Overall, I was happy with how the event rolled out.
I need to dive more into the data to understand how people explored the site, but it looks like more visitors visited the site for 3-4 hours (suggesting they watched several of the panel videos), which suggests the content was ‘sticky’ enough.
These are just some initial reactions to the event. I plan to do a debrief next week and will have more reflections to offer at that point.
What do you think? Did you attend? What did you like? What could’ve been better?