Founder of Socially and The Guest List. @getsociallyapp turns rooftop small talk into pipeline that closes. Posting about secret meetings and the daily grind
About half of marketers say events help close at least half their deals. (Splash, 2025)
Their tracking software gives events credit for about 6 deals in 100. (HockeyStack, 2025)
Why the gap? The software counts clicks. Nobody records who came to the dinner.
Meta's AI agent Muse told a Facebook Marketplace buyer "Yep, I'm here!" The seller wasn't even home.
Event teams should pay attention. If AI sends your guest messages, never let it share a private address or claim someone is at the door.
Unpopular: the post-event survey is mostly for the event team. Satisfaction scores tell leadership the night happened.
What they want: which open deals had someone in the room, and what happens next. You should send that list to sales before you send the survey.
Building Socially, the smallest word causes the most trouble: attended.
Registered? Checked in? Stayed for dinner? Met the rep? Every team defines it differently, so the event report never matches the CRM.
My suggestion: pick the strictest one and write it down first.
Meta's Muse agent reportedly shared a user's home address with a Marketplace buyer and set up a pickup without asking. I probably would have just paid the marketplace seller out of pure embarrassment 😅
65% of event pros use generative AI. 16% say it has significantly improved their work. The gap sits in the parts that happen between people: the seating chart, the intro, reading the room.
Nine things AI still can't do 👇
Sent 50 event invites and got a reply like: "please stop wasting my time."
The problem was never the invite. It was who got it.
Socially finds who's actually ready to show up, invites them right on time, and shows what the event earned.
A B2B buying decision can involve as many as 22 people: 13 internal stakeholders, 9 outside influencers.
Your last dinner had maybe 18 seats. Stop asking how many came. Ask how many buying groups you reached, and how deep your influence is growing in key accounts.
An event platform just gave Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot read-and-write access to attendees, check-in and payments. Agents running event ops is here.
The hard part won't be the agent. It's whether your check-in list ever matches the CRM.
Building Socially, one decision keeps paying off for us: the unit is the account, not the lead.
Three people from one company at three different dinners looks like three weak leads. It's one account warming up.
Lead scoring can't add them up. That's the gap we're closing.
Registrations are the MQL of events. Easy to inflate. Great in the recap. Tell finance almost nothing.
@basecamp added a refundable $100 deposit: signups fell from 84 to 55, attendance rose from 38 to 50.