There’s nothing like experiencing the very products we work on because the experiences offer valuable lessons about how they are actually useful. Despite the best predictions we make about the benefits of tools that we build, utility sometimes come from very unexpected places.

One such experience came for me recently with our own Presdo Match.

We were delighted to provide the event networking product to TiECON Dallas this past October. TiE itself is the world’s largest network of entrepreneurs consisting of 13,000 members across the globe with 56 local chapters. I was honored to be the keynote speaker at the conference, and it was also one of the first events I attended which also used Presdo Match.

As I began preparing my speech, I assumed that I knew who my audience would be, being familiar with similar organizations in Silicon Valley.

It was fortunate that our product provided ways to browse event attendees and their profiles before the event, as I was able to use it to learn about my audience.

After glancing through many profiles, I began to realize that my initial assumption about the audience was in fact not on target. Instead of an audience of technology entrepreneurs, I found that many attendees had sales and marketing backgrounds. Many were indeed small businesses owners, but many others were from established companies. My keynote had to be designed to appeal to the audience I had.

It was this valuable insight which inspired me to focus the speech on anecdotes around marketing themes over entrepreneurial ones. I focused on recounting how we at LinkedIn acquired users in the early days, and how we took early learnings from user behaviors and incorporated them in virally growing the professional network that is LinkedIn today. Overall, I felt that I had given a better keynote because of this realization than without.

All it took was the simple ability to browse through all attendees and the ability to learn a little about each that made all the difference in how I approached the keynote.

It was an insight I never expected, but it completely improved what I did. Social media tools like ours, when brought to life at events, have the potential to offer attendees many interesting insights, making events that much more rewarding for the people who go to them.

Eric Ly
CEO, Presdo Inc.

Today, we are very excited to talk about a new product that we’ve been incubating for several months with a select set of customers and partners.

The product is Presdo Match, and it helps enable face-to-face meetings at conferences, trade shows and other types of events.  It solves a problem that we all have experienced when we’ve gone to conferences and trade shows: who should we meet?

How many times have you shown up with not a clue about who you should meet or who you should be talking to?  Surely, networking has been cited widely as the most important reason to attend events, whether to develop important relationships or to close business.  Presdo Match is our answer.

We work with event organizers to set up Presdo Match for their events.  Once set up, attendees use Presdo Match to discover others they want to meet.  Attendees can search for other attendees based on interests and background, and perhaps more interesting, they can now find out who in their LinkedIn social network will also be there.  (In fact, Presdo Match makes great use of LinkedIn in several ways!)

Presdo Match also enables attendees to set up face-to-face meetings during the event.  It does so through the best scheduling user experience in the industry… something we know a little about!

For event organizers, Presdo Match increases attendance and helps get people to register for their events sooner.

There’s much more to say about Presdo Match.  We have a new section on our site that talks about Presdo Match.

If you are an event organizer or you will be attending an event, and you would like to see Presdo Match at your event, let us know.  We would be happy to tell you more about how to make it happen.

We’re very delighted to feature a new, tight three-minute video showing off the many cool features of Presdo!

It was recently created as part of a post about Presdo by DemoGirl, a blog that reviews new web software. DemoGirl makes learning about new web tools much more fun and exciting. Much better than looking at screenshots and reading FAQs to find out what a new product is about.

Just click over to watch the video.

We hope that after you watch it, you will sign up for Presdo and take it out for a spin.

Many thanks to DemoGirl for taking a few minutes to share Presdo in such an exciting way with the rest of us.

Thanks, DemoGirl!