Happy Monday! We hope you had a great weekend, and that enjoyed some long-overdue sunshine!

To ease you back into the working week we’ll be giving you a round-up of last week’s main event industry news, including any interesting stories and insights that can help you improve yourself, your company, or your events.

Enjoy!

EVENT INDUSTRY NEWS

Facebook curated events [from TechCrunch]

Last week Facebook revealed they were launching a human-curated featured events list, once again showing us that targeting the events industry is high on their list. 10 U.S. cities will see the option for ‘Featured Events’ in a carousel within their list of upcoming events. Facebook’s curators will peruse each city’s top art, entertainment, family, festival, fitness, food & drink, learning, community, music and sports events and select a few with the capacity to accept some extra foot traffic. This is no doubt an experiment for Facebook, and depending on what results they see, will depend on this going worldwide, so keep an eye out for any updates!

10 reasons why event planners hate venues [Event Manager Blog]

Event Manager Blog gave us a great run down of some of the pressure points all event organisers have had to deal with when working with a venue. If you’re just starting out in the events industry, these insights will help you learn what to expect, as well as learn from past eventprof’s mistakes. For veteran organisers, you’ll no doubt go through the list and relive those cringe moments you had with venues all over again.

PRODUCTIVITY

WordPress tools [Eventbrite UK]

Running a WordPress event website? Well we’ve created a list of WordPress tools that you need to be using to get the most out of your site as possible. From contact forms to calls to action, simple login solutions to A/B testing, you’re going to want to check out these plugins.

How to put the right amount of pressure on your team [Harvard Business Review]

If you run a team, you’ll know there is a state of equilibrium where everyone has the right amount of pressure applied to them, to get the most out of the team without burning them out. This state is not easily achieved. Lucky for us, Harvard Business Review have written this article showing you all the elements you need to address, to make your team work as efficiently as possible, without any fallout.

Begin with the end in mind [99u]

Have you ever gotten to the end of your week and feel like you haven’t nearly achieved everything you set out to do? You feel like you’ve put in the hours and yet still didn’t accomplish the tasks you most need to. Enter Ryan Carson and his talk on ‘begin with the end in mind’. Carson explains how he gets all his work done each week to give him the time he needs to spend with his family. Who wouldn’t like to improve their work/life balance?

MARKETING

Facebook to change news feed to focus on friends and family [New York Times]

Facebook announced changes to its newsfeed which willl result in more focus on posts from family and friends than anything else (including brands and publishers). With algorithms ever changing, this update sounds great for Facebook users, how will this effect news outlets, marketers and advertisers? Whilst it is still unclear just how much non-family and friends content will be seen, or in this case not seen, it is clear that a large amount of traffic that companies and associations are used to seeing from Facebook will decrease.

Marketing device sensor

We’ve all seen those futuristic films that show completely personalised adverts playing to people as they walk pass a billboard or store; well this is set to become more of a reality. The multi-sensing box will be able to sense a device by searching for WiFi or Bluetooth, and target the device with deals and tailored advertising. Whilst sounding intrusive to start with, these could well be an upgrade from the static buy 1 get 1 free signs that you are used to seeing.

10 tried and true SEO tactics that will pull you out of a traffic slump [Quicksprout]

If you’re looking to increase the SEO of your site, Neil Patel gives us some great tried and tested tactics to help you out of your traffic slump. There are a lot of actionable takeaways from this piece, so you should be able to see a positive change in traffic in no time.

AND IN OTHER NEWS…

Iceland Foods Twitter [Mashable]

Whilst England played Iceland last week, a number of people mistakenly tweeted to Iceland Foods. Whilst you may be scratching your head thinking how did this happen? Who are these people? There were some funny consequences to this, enough to distract any die-hard England fans from one of England football’s all time lows.

Enjoyed this? Well make sure to visit our site again next Monday for another great round-up of event industry news! Or even better, sign up for the newsletter to never miss any of updates again!