Advent of Memes + 2024 Schedule Notes
The ticket challenge is almost over
It’s been a fun December with our first ever Advent of Code Ticket Challenge! We’re looking to give away 22 tickets ($3,300 value) and we had 18 participants on our private leaderboard, so your odds of winning something this year are very high if you decided to participate! You can still join too. Completing as little as 2 challenges can give you a chance to win.
After the competition began, we also became aware of some other types of challenges like Advent of Code that were happening in both the cybersecurity and data worlds, so next year we may look at running some additional December contests to broaden your opportunities to win tickets through learning!
We expect to announce this year’s winner by December 28th.
“UPDATE - Due to an oversight on my part getting one of the participates the entry form to submit results for judged categories, we’re going to postpone the results of this content until early January to make sure that every participant has a chance to get their hard work shown.” - Barry
Advent of Memes
It can’t be overstated that one of the driving factors of a competition like this is to continually to raise awareness of the conference on social media. I’m personally new to the social media marketing world and because of that there’s a lot of experimenting going on to increase engagement.
The more engagement we get across channels, the easier it becomes to promote the conference every year and the wider reach we have to amplify everyone involved: speakers, sponsors, podcast interviewees and the great work you’re all doing.
So…we tried that time honored internet tradition…MEMES! Here’s the recap if you somehow didn’t see them on our socials. If you didn’t go find them and give us some likes and shares!
We also had a community contribution, so thanks Olivia!
We even tried paid promotional posts, which did actually work pretty well. As long as things come together with our sponsors this year, there should be some budget available to strategically promote more posts on the social channels.
One posts however, got flagged as a “Scam” which was lifted on appeal. You’re learning more code, I’m learning social media marketing. If you’ve got advice, please send it my way.
Social Media
The initiatives had good results as we’ve added about 150 followers across our social channels over the last 30 days, which is great considering we’re less than a year into each account.
LinkedIn is by far the leader in the house, with 538 followers outpacing our 440 Substack subscribers followed by Instagram with 103, Twitter/X with 85, YouTube with 55, Threads with 30, Facebook with 18 and Mastodon with 16 followers. YouTube didn’t have any content until September, so that’s encouraging. Facebook has been a real disappointment so far.
I’ve been advised by several people who have more experience with social media promotion than myself that focusing on fewer platforms is potentially a better option, so we may look at pairing some of these accounts down in the future.
Schedule Notes
Call for Speakers
At the moment, we expect the Call for Speakers to open in January between the 1st and 15th, running through the end of March. Subscribe here to get the announcement.
If you’ve spoken before, feel free to apply again. Our focus every year will revolve around balancing diversity of topics and technologies. With a 2 day schedule this year, we’ll have even more speaker slots available and now that the podcast is going that can present some additional opportunities regardless of whether you’re selected.
Call for Sponsors
Our 2024 Call for Sponsors is officially underway! We’re already seeing great interest after the success of last year’s event. If you have interest, questions or would like to schedule a call or meet for coffee to learn more don’t hesitate to reach out directly. Meeting during other events is also a possibility. I’ll be at Tech After Five in Greenville tonight.
Invoices for sponsorships that are committed prior to January will not be due until January 15th in order to allow flexibility within your annual budget requirements.
Ticket Availability
As with last year, we will hold ticket sales until after speakers have been announced. You can expect early access tickets to begin in April with general availability beginning in May!
Subscribe here to be the first to know as things develop.