It’s that time of year again when we begin gearing up for conference season. And, between multiple, competing panels, on- and off-site networking events, dinners, dance parties, and semi-private talks in hotel rooms over drinks, you’re going to need some help.
Fortunately, at CircleBack, we’re conference pros, and after consulting with the entire team, we landed on the following as the MUST HAVE conference apps of 2016.
Apps for conferences that you’ll need this year:
- Network And Stay Connected With CircleBack: More than anything else, conferences are for networking and making connections. CircleBack offers OCR business card scanning and email signature capture to make adding new contacts easy, quick export-to-Salesforce functionality for all your CRM needs, and automatic contact updates that ensure that, even if your contacts change contact info, you can still reach out.
- Know What’s Going On With Conferize: Typically, large conferences will build their own apps to help attendees get organized. However, if the conference is smaller, Conferize offers access to a variety of schedules, officially organized meet-ups, and the like. Conferize also allows displays prominent attendees of the event, making it easier to strategically plan networking moves.
- Join The Conversation With Twitter: Though there’s literally no chance Twitter is unfamiliar to you, you may not understand just how important it is. Any event will come with its very own #hashtag, and it’s guaranteed to generate a conversation. By joining in, you’ll meet people, get info you might have otherwise missed, and you’ll have a better idea about meetups you should attend.
- Know Who To Meet With Foursquare: At any large, industry event, keeping an eye on others is important. Foursquare, an app that allows users to “check in” at different events, can provide invaluable information about networking hotspots, unknown (or unannounced) events, and can, in a pinch, help users reconnect with friends lost in the sea of the conference.
- Track Your Expenses With Shoeboxed: Keeping track of costs is the most painful, necessary part of any kind of business travel. Shoeboxed makes it easier by letting you snap photographs of receipts (which it then scans and uploads for you) and creates simple itemizations of expenditures. It also offers expense categorization and the ability to create (and send) expense reports directly from the app.
With these apps in place, you’ll be ready to crush your next conference. You’ll be in touch, aware, and part of the conversation. Which is good, because those late-night “networking events” may leave you needing some technological assistance 🙂
Also, be sure to check out our article on “Must Have Travel Apps” over at Entrepreneur for tips on traveling for business.
For networking and keeping in touch, try CircleBack for iOS or Android. CircleBack is the only truly intelligent contact manager and uses sophisticated data solutions for keeping all the contacts in your professional network updated and organized.