December 2009

People attend conferences and events for education, entertainment and engagement – a desire to engage in meaningful conversation with other attendees and with presenters.

Gary Vaynerchuck’s presentation at LeWeb sparked a blog post on Why Livestreaming your conference is a no-brainer.  His followup interview with Gianfranco Chicco extended my thinking on the value of the conference / event experience to attendees.

Perhaps the highlight of Gary’s presentation at Le Web was his interaction with Loic LeMeur, founder and host of Le Web who said: “[Le Web] is not a conference, it’s a community” to which Gary exploded with this remark “If this is a f*%king community, why aren’t we doing Q&A?!”

I highly recommend checking out Gary’s full conversation with @Loic but be prepared, if you haven’t seen Gary Vee before, he uses the #F word at least a half dozen times in his presentation.

The future of Conferences

Successful Events can be measured by how successfully they balance the three E’s.

• Education,
• Entertainment
• Engagement

Technology has made access to information free.  Education can help attendees put the ideas and information to use in a meaningful hands-on sort of way.  This demands smaller breakout group sizes and meaningful interaction with presenters. This is why the unconference / barcamp learning environment has been such a successful event formula.

The Q & A forum advocated for by @garyvee is a good one, and the ability of the presenter to dance on their feet and provide great value for the audience will require recruiting speakers who know their stuff backwards and forwards, understand the needs of their audience and are comfortable in a “Bring it on” environment.

This clearly isn’t the entire spectrum of presenters who took the stage at #leweb, or any other conference or event you have recently attended. Some of the brightest lights in social media and tourism – sadly, are poor presenters on stage and do not engage their audience.

Entertainment and Performance Matter too

Gary’s points taken into consideration, some presentations are performances. Lawrence Lessig comes to mind. Give me a front row seat for one of Larry’s presentations and I don’t want to interact or engage with him.  Although the online version of his presentations will fail to fully capture the value he brings to every presentation I urge you to give him a few minutes to see what the Stanford Law professor brings to the stage.  We need more like him.

Rethinking Conferences and Events: Put the Three E’s front and center

I think the large conference / event format itself may be broken. Smaller breakout groups are really valuable and providing access for Q & A and authentic engagement is much more valuable than panel discussions because attendees can get exactly what they came for.

Big names will put bums in seats, but the measures of success that matter most to attendees will always be the richness of audience engagement and off-stage social interactions.

Are your attendees getting the education, entertainment and engagement they desire?  Consider asking this question to gauge feedback at your next event:

Did you get what you came for?

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