Next Generation Event

The Conference Industry Might Learn a Thing or Two from Bookstores

Image by James Cridland via Flickr

When I was in college, I worked at Barnes & Noble. The place was busy open to close. I have vivid memories of heated exchanges with women who came to buy Princess Di memorabilia books only to learn we were sold out.

I have even better memories of customers looking for a certain story, but unable to put a title to it.

"I think there's voodoo in it... and it's in the South... and it came out a few years ago..."

When I would reply, "You must be talking about Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," the customer acted as if I was a genius, even though it was now sitting on our bestseller shelf thanks to the recent release of a hugely successful Hollywood movie.

There were customers searching for far more obscure titles. One that sticks out was my geology professor. He was searching for a book for his wife called Ham Hocks and Poppycock. I was searching for a way to make up for a recent and embarrassing incident during which I had complimented the rock in my professor's office only to find out it was a "mineral." Thankfully, we both found what we were looking for.

There were the customers who came in multiple times a week to browse and see what was new. There were customers who came in every Sunday at a set time. There were people who came to find a quick gift ten minutes before they were heading to the party. And there were the customers who came to study and [sometimes] drink coffee (often their own from home) at the tables sprinkled throughout the store.

You don't have to be a bookstore executive to get a general idea of the industry's customer base:

1. People who know what they're looking for
2. People with relatively easy queries
3. People with more advanced queries
4. People who browse and often buy
5. People who have last-minute buys that can't wait for shipping
6. People who don't buy anything now but we cater to them because we want to be the go-to place in the event they ever decide to buy something.

I went to college in the nascent stages of grand-scale e-commerce, so the industry probably should have been a little more concerned about this customer line-up than it was (or, preferably, should have seen the great opportunity of the emerging medium). Using Borders as an example, it dabbled in e-commerce, then decided to hand the reigns over to Amazon in 2001, then took it back last year, and, finally, effectively gave up on it this year.

In doing so, it effectively gives up customers 1, 2, 3, which I would guess were a substantial piece of its business. The browsers might love books and the bookstore more, but the people who knew what they were looking for or had searches (all of which can now be performed online) must have been a significant piece of the foundation of the business. While there is definitely a great business that can be built for browsers and booklovers, I doubt it was the kind of business that mega-stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble were envisioning a decade ago.

I haven't even mentioned conferences yet, but I think the analogy that can be drawn is pretty clear. There are all different types of attendees. While I am a big proponent of the live event, not all of our attendees come for the live benefits (networking, community, etc). Many attendees come primarily for the content, most of which can now be effectively delivered online.

So as I see it, you have a few options. You can shun the online medium and focus on creating fantastic live events. This is a great option, as long as you recognize and embrace your market and realize that content-only attendees will stop coming as competitors make online content available. If you're the bookstore that focuses its entire business on booklovers, you happily watch them go.

Of course, you can also do online-only programs, but you do so understanding that you alienate some of the most engaged people in your industry because these are some of the same people who love live events.

Or you can take a hybrid approach, offering both options to reach a larger audience. In some ways, this is the obvious option, but I also think it is the hardest option (which may be why massively successful corporations have struggled with it). You are now dealing with two very different customers and two very different products.

What do you think? Can we learn something from the book industry? Are there other courses we can take? How can we successfully implement the hybrid approach, if that's the path we choose?

Considerations When Taking Education Programs Online

ASAE has posted a video recap of a session about online education from its recent Great Ideas Conference. In the recap, Howard Horwitz of the American College of Healthcare Executives talked about things to do when rolling out online education that has been repurposed from live content.

Some of the ideas he mentioned:

1. Start with a market awareness campaign to get people familiar with the new medium.
2. Offer giveaways or deals to help generate interest.
3. Solicit feedback from your market by sending a free program and offering education credit to those who respond with feedback on the medium.
4. Look at products with most appeal and lead with those to enable immediate success.
5. Stress the benefits and counter resistance.
6. Consider a blended platform. For example, offer the "hard content" as a typical online program, but then provide an opportunity to particiate in interactive exercises online with other attendees and speakers.

Side note: ASAE has come under recent attack about the ways it has chosen to interact (or, more accurately, not interact with its attendees on social media), and while it may have some things to learn from its members about Twitter, I continue to believe it is doing a great job of using tools like YouTube to inform and educate those who can't attend its conferences. This is especially critical in this economy for organizations like ASAE, which are seeing their members' budgets slashed (often to $0). The more people ASAE can reach during this tough time, the more members it will see when budgets start loosening up.

Twitter Event Chat Tonight - #eventprofs

Just a quick post to point you to the Eventprofs Twitter Chat, an initiative started by Ready2Spark. She's started a weekly chat (Mondays, 9pm EST), the agenda will be driven by you, and it's shaping up to be great.

Instructions for participating are here.

Are Attendees and Individuals Redefining the "Virtual Event" As We Know It?

I've been preparing to moderate a panel on virtual technology for the Green Meeting Industry Council's annual conference at the end of this month, so I've been thinking a lot about virtual events. Watching a couple of conferences online over the last couple of weeks (MeetDifferent and Legal Tech NY) got me thinking about a very basic question: What is a virtual event?

At first glance, the answer is obvious. There are any number of virtual event providers we can look to. Companies like Unisfair and ON24 give us the platforms that house the events we've come to know as virtual events. They give us modern day chat rooms and online exhibit halls in an attempt to replicate the experience of a live conference or tradeshow.

But as more and more individuals begin building their own online communities through blogs, Twitter, and other tools, we're also seeing the creation of informal virtual events. Attendees are tweeting, blogging, and engaging each other and non-attendees in a new way. They're meeting fellow attendees before the conference, spreading the word and talking amongst themselves during the conference, and continuing to share information long after the conference ends. Things they only had time to Twitter during the conference become blog posts. Those blog posts are shared and commented on and act as catalysts for new posts.

This raises challenges for organizers (from what I've seen, people are far more willing to tweet or blog discontent than to voice it in the conference room), but it also opens up a lot of opportunities.

And don't think it's not coming your way. I work in an industry known for its late adopters, but we have an ever-growing group of exceptionally savvy lawyers leading the charge. The recent Legal Tech conference I mentioned above was all over Twitter and has inspired countless blog posts and videos. It's not the norm yet, but I did meet up with a fellow Twitterer at a recent in-house family law conference we did (he sent out a tweet that he was at the conference so I tweeted back that he should stop by my office if he had a moment). It's coming.

What do you think? Are these informal, events-focused online communities that are cropping up around live events becoming "virtual events" in their own right?

Didn't Make It to MeetDifferent this Year? You Don't Have to Miss All the Fun.

There are still ways to keep real-time pace with the discussions they'll be having this year.

1. Tune in to the opening general session today at 10:00 am EST (information on Meet Different's website).
2. Follow it on Twitter. Several attendees are talking about it and you can easily track their comments because they mark them #meetdifferent (take a look at the screen shot below). If you're on Twitter, consider following people like @mcallen and @jkhewett who are really pumping out the updates.

If I come across other ways I'm tracking the event as it proceeds, I'll be sure to update you.

It's More Than Online Reputation Management (and Why "Podunk" Blogs Matter)

Meetings and Conventions Magazine has a great article this month on online reputation management for event planners. Most of the experts interviewed agreed that you should both be monitoring and responding to online conversations (whether glowing or scathing) about your event or organization.

By doing so, you get the obvious benefit of having your response right there in the conversation--this can be especially helpful in the case of criticism. But even more importantly, you get the opportunity to elicit more constructive feedback from attendees and potential attendees that you can use to make the event better. Not to mention that you also get a unique opportunity to build closer relationships with the very people you hope will come next year.

I think the term "online reputation management" falls far too short of the actual benefits you can reap from responding to and learning from the feedback that is out there. The term implies to me an almost obsessive need to control the message and bring it back to the corporate brand you penned in an office of executives during an all-day branding meeting.

Guess what? You can't control that message anymore--at least not in the traditional sense. Maybe you did once, back when information was a one-way street. (Remember those days? When public opinion was limited to a few opinion letters that were chosen by the editorial boards of newspapers and magazines?). Maybe you even had control for the eight hours you spent in your branding meeting. Now it's out there and you've lost it, but you've gained something far more powerful.

At least that's my "Podunk" opinion.

And that leads me to the other notable portion of this article. "Podunk" isn't my word. It came from the director of communications for the American Society for Microbiology who says her staff monitors for mentions of the organization's events online, but notes:

[G]enerally, if there's misinformation on a blog, we tend to ignore it... The New York Times is one thing. Somebody's blog in Podunk is another.

People, and especially directors of communication, who view blogs with this type of disdain seem to have their heads in the sand.

For one thing, your event is probably not going to be mentioned in the New York Times. Your group may be cited in the Times frequently as the leading group with expertise on your topic (and the American Society for Microbiology, the leading society on germs, definitely gets some well-deserved coverage), but you're unlikely to get New York Times exposure for your upcoming conference.

And even if you did, you're not reaching your specialized, target audience. I read the Times, but I won't be going to a microbiology conference just because the Times mentions it.

Who can reach that specialized audience? Trade publications, certainly. And blogs. Your members are reading niche blogs in their areas of focus. If you're not building relationships with those bloggers (and monitoring and responding to what is being said about your event and your organization), you are squandering great opportunity to promote your event and make it better.

"But Our Model Doesn't Work Online"

Image by kevindooley

Last Friday, I started a new position with the continuing legal education arm of our state bar association (more on this to come but, generally, I'll be working on online strategy for CLE programming). When I saw this post from Seth Godin today, it was a reminder--not that I've needed one--about why I chose to take on this position. From the post:

People look at PCWorld magazine and they say, "that will never work online." And they're right, it won't, because the business is organized around print and monthly or weekly editions and display ads and a sales force and ...

"Our business will never work online."

And they're right.

My new organization knew that taking things online was a whole new game. But they also knew they had to (and wanted to) do it. The combination makes it a pretty good place to be.

Here's to An Exciting New Year

I stayed in Denver for the holidays this year, but thanks to technological advances, I still managed to be the center of attention at my family's gathering back in Lansing, Michigan (if only for the duration of a phone call). That's me on the screen with my cousins--one now lives in the Twin Cities and the other in San Jose.

I miss my family and would have loved to see everyone in person, but as we talk about all the time on this site, sometimes that's just not possible. As you can see, my family decided that wouldn't stand in the way of some family pictures.

Thanks for joining me this last year. I'm looking forward to exploring all sorts of new ideas and opportunities with you in 2009.

Do You Poken?

Or so asks the URL of a new company that is sick of business cards. I was turned on to Poken by Streamlined Mind, a great productivity blog for students. The author, Hugo, used Poken at a recent conference in Amsterdam. The device allows users to exchange social networking information instantaneously.

I hate business cards. They take up space. They needlessly use paper. I have to manually enter the contact information I receive from them. They don't change automatically when a person's contact information changes. People always seem to be patting their pockets and realizing they forget their cards. I could go on.

I want a tool that makes exchange of information easy and instantaneous. And I want more than your phone number and email. I want to connect with you on networks, as well. I am glad to see companies like Poken moving in that direction, though I agree with Hugo that the more ideal solution would be a build-in on my phone. With Poken, I still have one more gadget to remember when I head out the door.

All the Top Web Conferencing News

Alltop has just created a whole section for web conferencing blogs. Some I already follow, but others were new to me. It's definitely worth a look.