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:
How to plan the Social side of your conference or event:
There are two kinds of people you should care about when planning a conference or event*:
attendees
prospects to become future attendees
* no one else matters.
I was asking a conference planner this week if they were planning to stream content from their event online. The disappointing answer was, that attendees will be twittering and later (months later?) we’ll post video from the event on a dedicated web site.
That’s NOT good enough.
I’ve said it before, but here it bears repeating, “Your attendees are coming for inspiration, motivation and to make connections!” Giving your content away – far beyond your walls is paramount if you want to grow your event for the future.
mesh provides a great resource that makes bringing business cards to the event irrelevant – helping attendees and non-attendees connect on their site. And, they make it easy for attendees to spread the Mesh goodness far and wide online.
Business Cards – Who needs ‘em?
By providing a social networking platform, attendees can put names to faces before, during and after the event. As well, links to all the important contact information is available right on the mesh site. By investing in a social platform, attendees will come back to the site again and again to connect with people they met at the event and extend those all important personal connections.
Your event, becomes the social networking hub where attendees’ business cards reside. By encouraging attendees (and non-attendees) to frequent the site, they connect your event with the real value you bring – Connections.
The mesh social site not only makes it simple to share conference content beyond the walls, they outright encourage attendees to share video, photos and more with those not in attendance – where? – right on the Mesh Site!
So even non-attendees will go the to the conference site (often) before, during and after the event to siphon up information from the event. Go back to the three most important take-ways from your event – information is NOT one of them. Information is free online.
If you were a potential future attendee, wouldn’t access to this kind of value make you even more anxious about the conversations and personal connections you missed out on?
This distribution of information away from the event in no way diminishes the value of your conference or event. Remember, you only care about attendees and potential future attendees. They’ll love permanent access to conference proceedings.
What can mesh teach conference or event planners?
Plenty:
make your conference site a hub of social networking for attendees and future attendees.
encourage attendees to share conference information far and wide , especially with future attendees.
forget about non-attendees (those who will never attend your event) – These people may get information from your site, but they are not likely to learn anything new; they already have an entire Internet full of information at their fingertips.
If you follow the mesh example, next year’s conference or event will start filling with attendees sooner than you can imagine.
