If you’re just joining us, welcome! To honor the start of a new year and to aid in this ever-changing hospitality industry landscape, BLME is creating a series of tech platform reviews. For the second installment of the series, we are diving into a platform that we couldn’t have made it through 2020 without: Socio. This is an event hosting platform that prides itself on “powering virtual, hybrid, and in-person events.”

Tech Platform Review Series: Socio

Overview

BLME first used Socio for the VOICE Summit 2018 and loved the hands-on approach that this team has to ensuring that its client's events are a success. Most recently, BLME utilized Socio for our client, Living Beyond Breast Cancer’s, Strength in Stories gala. Like we mentioned in part one of our tech review series, this typically in-person event had to go completely virtual in 2020 amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. We truly don’t know how we would have made this transition successful without Socio.

Using Socio, we built a custom app for our event (accessible via smartphone, web browser, tablet, and compatible smart TVs) that each attendee used for access to the event. In addition to using the app during the actual event, users could download it before the event to get access to information on speakers and sponsors, communicate with other attendees via a social message board, and get a sneak peak of auction items. 

Highlights

Socio offers a plethora of amazing options for hosting your event. We could go on and on about all of the incredible features, but here are some of our favorites:

• The ability to make a custom, exclusive app for your event 

• Intuitive, customizable app templates 

• Organization and storing of attendee’s names and email addresses

• Accessibility from multiple forms of devices

• Linking to other websites within the app (AuctionFrogs, Zoom, etc.)

• Allowing attendees to see other attendees’ profiles to encourage networking before, during, or after the event

• The ability to make announcements that will be pushed to all app downloaders 

• The option to upload your own photos and documents, can use to create slideshows 

• A plethora of optional features to add to your app such as:

  • Q&A

  • Polling

  • Event game

  • Agenda

  • Social media links

• Having a “live broadcast” feature that launches a broadcast link from your app 

• A friendly, responsive, and communicative support team 

• Newly-added native registration and streaming services within the platform

The Bottom Line

BLME cannot sing Socio’s praises enough. Taking an in-person gala and transforming it to a virtual event is no easy feat, but Socio made the job possible and painless. Even in the transition back to in-person and hybrid events, we see ourselves using Socio to create an app element for many of our future events. For anyone looking for a virtual event platform, we would highly recommend Socio.

Be sure to check back in for more installments of our tech platform review series!