Today's guest post is by Calvin Scharffs, VP of Marketing and Product Development, Lingotek, a website translation solution. For more information about Lingotek and Drupal, please visit https://drupal.org/project/lingotek

Here at Lingotek, we rely on Drupal as one of our main channels to distribute our translation solution. With the Lingotek – Inside Drupal module, users can translate and localize massive amounts of content from right inside Drupal.

Sponsoring DrupalCon Portland, the world’s premier Drupal event, was something of a no-brainer for us. DrupalCon is the keystone conference for the existing Drupal community and the premier place for new users to learn about Drupal. Anyone who’s anyone in the Drupal community was there, as well as vendors like Lingotek, who are integrated with Drupal, and Drupal users. This year’s Portland conference co-located with the Symfony Live and WebVisions conferences, offered interesting overlap in the open-source, enterprise and mobile space.

Learning the Right Way to Sponsor an Event

When we decided to sponsor DrupalCon, we realized there was a bit of a learning curve when it comes to getting the most out of a conference. It’s not just about following the guidelines set by the conference and printing a sign. You really have to offer users a great experience that they’ll associate with your brand. We did this by focusing on engaging our audience with a Twitter contest.  Any DrupalCon attendee that came by our booth and pick up a free t-shirt had the opportunity to win a Google Nexus 7.  All they had to do was follow us on Twitter and wear our t-shirt. Once a day we would tweet that the first person to come by our booth with the Lingotek t-shirt on would win a Google Nexus 7.  We gave a total of three away with the record time of 20 seconds to show up at our booth.

Drupal and Lingotek: Partners for the Future

We’re proud to have sponsored DrupalCon 2013 in Portland, and look forward to an exciting relationship going forwards. We will also be sponsoring DrupalCon Prague as well as several Drupal Camps. Drupal is one of the world’s leading CMSs—3 percent of the world’s websites run in Drupal. At Lingotek, our partnership with Drupal is seamless.