Is your event affected by the non-committal “California Syndrome”?


The “California Syndrome” as explained by Business and wealth coach JT Foxx. (JT is from Florida, and he’s got a refreshing perspective on Californians. I was attending one of JT’s seminars in Silicon Valley recently, and scribbled these notes.)

21728138_10155245649669051_8884119878215795637_n

Or: “Why everyone is so annoyingly non committal about committing to your event?”

JT quips: “It’s even worse in LA!”

Here’s an example from his event, which I attended:

Registered: 1112
Confirmed: 491
Actually showed up: 119

In my experience, having promoted more than 100 events, conferences and festivals, you need to invite 10 times as many people to your Facebook event page as you possibly hope to see. Yes, it’s the “California Syndrome,” also known as “FOMO” or “Fear of Missing Out.” There’s also the phenomenon of some of us only registering “Interested”  to simply be polite to the host. Others will say they are “Interested” just to look cool. And some will lie and say we are “Interested” when we are actually “Going” because we want to protect our privacy and avoid stalkers.

Nobody tells the truth, unless it’s Eventbrite and they have to register. And even then about 25% of those who register and even pay will be no shows.

If you add the number of people who say they are “Interested + Going” you will come close to the actual turn out. So relax and don’t freak out when the number of “going” is much lower than you anticipate and your ticket sales are slow up until the 11th hour! It’s just “California Syndrome!”



Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

About Me

A writer, content marketer, publicist and event promoter, I have been helping visionary entrepreneurs and event producers get the attention they deserve for over 30 years.

What can I do to help you shift your visibility to the next level?

Newsletter

%d bloggers like this: