Last useless thought for the day.
I’ve been given media credentials for the VON conference (thanks, Jeff). But I’m overwhelmed by the amount of PR invites.
Conferences are, above all, a social gathering. Information passing in sessions is increasingly secondary, since the Web, podcasts and RSS have transformed our ability to assemble our own media feeds and be as much “in the know” as many a journalist.
It would be great to see VON evolve into an “eat your own dogfood” event where it’s a showcase for networked social and personal communications. What would happen if you “Skype-enabled” VON? (Or for the SIP-heads, Xten and FWD…)
So some constructive suggestions/ideas.
All attendees get to register their interests. The system does a first-level filter and match on these to vendors. Ideally, you do some bizdev-type deal with networks like LinkedIn and Ryze to see which friends and friends-of-friends are around. More social lubricant in the conversation engine. Maybe freeform tags describing attendees and exhibitor interests, rather than fixed menus, have some play here?
Media attendees don’t have their main email address revealed; they get a temporary private address that PR mail gets forwarded to. They know there will be an end to their mailbox trauma! Same for all attendees, maybe.
Move away from e-mail; create RSS feeds, add meta-data to the invites; create an on-line conference calendar. Be able to tick off the sessions you want to attend, the meetings you want to go to.
Trackback, commentary etc. for every event should be automatically assembled. Much value comes from speakers; ever more comes from the feedback of others that confirms or debunks what they say. We’re past the era of speaker-worship where we all go to bask in the glowing thoughs of self-anointed industry leaders. (And I’m a speaker and self-promoted, so I should know.)
Backchannels are great, but should be unobtrusive. Hey, even Skype has bookmarked chat sessions - you could just set one up for each session. Where do we go for the “conversation”?
Make the after-the-event retention of business contact info quick and simple. A few clicks on the speakers you want to touch base with, and their details are in your Outlook address book, the actions in your to-do list.
PR companies need to re-invent themselves, and quick. I just can’t believe how bad some of the pitches I’m getting are. You’re a company I’ve never heard of with a mystery launch of a product you won’t talk about, and you expect me to turn up to dispel my unbearable suspense? Nice try. At the moment they’re inhibiting the conversation between me and their client. Something’s got to change.
The whole idea of a zillion scheduled meetings and one-on-one pitches isn’t really scaling well. Somehow we need to lubricate the rendezvous process too. Be able to flag “I’m available now”, get linked up with someone who has something of interest to say.
This was just a stream-of-consciousness set of ideas, and no doubt some are duds. I’ve seen some small-scale conferences re-invent the interaction experience using backchannels, wikis, videocasts, and live music. The difficulty is how to make this work for a hundred or a thousand times as many people. I can’t think of anyone better equipped to rise to the challenge than the pulvermedia team.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 04:36 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/562.