A few years ago, I read Keith Ferrazzi's Never Eat Alone (NEA) and it forever changed my approach to conferences. Pre-NEA, I basically met whoever I sat by during the first session of the first day and my nights were spent reading the materials for the next day's sessions. I had just graduated from law school, so this seemed very normal. I learned a lot, but nothing that I could not have gotten by simply reading the materials at home and listening to a podcast.
NEA let me in on a secret that successful people already know: good face-to-face conferences aren't really about content.
Coming from a person who spends hours a day carefully crafting the content of conferences, that is a significant statement.
You do need good content to get people to a conference--especially a new conference--but you need good people to call the conference a success. If you have good people, conversation and connections will follow and, before you know it, your conference is memorable and meaningful.
My post-NEA conferences (as an attendee) have been an entirely different experience. I do all my research in advance, learning everything I can about the attendees and identifying the attendees I would really like to meet. This is a lot of work, but maybe it doesn't have to be.
EventVue, a service offering online social networking for events, has recently beefed up its offerings. The service already enabled conference-goers to create profiles, complete with pictures and tags to identify common interests.
Now, we get the Chatter function, which pulls in attendee-generated content from blogs, twitter, YouTube and more, and allows attendees to subscribe feeds to receive the updates.
As an attendee, you can get to know others in advance of the conference, have collaborative live-blogging/tweeting, and keep in touch when the conference is over.
As a conference provider, you get to steal a glimpse into the minds of your attendees to help you plan a better conference now and in the future.
I love the new features. Focusing on legal conferences, my first thought was that this would be a ways off for me. But then this from Kevin O'Keefe. If lawyers, perhaps the latest of the late-adopting crowd, are already starting to look to twitter as a serious business tool, we might not be as far off as I thought.
NEA let me in on a secret that successful people already know: good face-to-face conferences aren't really about content.
Coming from a person who spends hours a day carefully crafting the content of conferences, that is a significant statement.
You do need good content to get people to a conference--especially a new conference--but you need good people to call the conference a success. If you have good people, conversation and connections will follow and, before you know it, your conference is memorable and meaningful.
My post-NEA conferences (as an attendee) have been an entirely different experience. I do all my research in advance, learning everything I can about the attendees and identifying the attendees I would really like to meet. This is a lot of work, but maybe it doesn't have to be.
EventVue, a service offering online social networking for events, has recently beefed up its offerings. The service already enabled conference-goers to create profiles, complete with pictures and tags to identify common interests.
Now, we get the Chatter function, which pulls in attendee-generated content from blogs, twitter, YouTube and more, and allows attendees to subscribe feeds to receive the updates.
As an attendee, you can get to know others in advance of the conference, have collaborative live-blogging/tweeting, and keep in touch when the conference is over.
As a conference provider, you get to steal a glimpse into the minds of your attendees to help you plan a better conference now and in the future.
I love the new features. Focusing on legal conferences, my first thought was that this would be a ways off for me. But then this from Kevin O'Keefe. If lawyers, perhaps the latest of the late-adopting crowd, are already starting to look to twitter as a serious business tool, we might not be as far off as I thought.
Thanks for the writeup! We can't agree more -- the best conferences are all about the conversations amongst the attendees. We're working away at making it easier to have connect with the people you most need to meet at a conference. Any other suggestions for stuff you'd like to see us do to help this?
Posted by: Rob | May 22, 2008 at 10:41 AM
Thanks for the great post. We're excited about the new features as well. Just wait till you see what else we've got coming! :)
Posted by: Josh Fraser | May 22, 2008 at 11:56 AM
Thanks for mentioning my take on Twitter Alli.
Though I think it's going to take some time for a app like Twitter to make significant inroads in the legal field, I am seeing Twitter discussed more and more. Just this week at a Law Firm PR Conference in Chicago, Twitter came up on a number of occasions.
Posted by: Kevin OKeefe | May 22, 2008 at 12:35 PM
Rob and Josh--Thanks for your comments. I am very much looking forward to the new features EventVue has to offer.
Kevin--a PR contact sent me a copy of the agenda for that program. Looked like a great line-up and a fun topic.
Posted by: AlliG | May 23, 2008 at 09:24 PM