Still Wondering How Important Bloggers & WiFi are to Conferences?
I’ve been monitoring the “crash and burn” of LeWeb3 over the past few days. I have to admit, I hadn’t heard a lot about this conference until bloggers started talking about it, but essentially it is a technology/blog/web conference in France. It’s warning bells on a variety of levels for conference and tradeshow organizers, but here is a long story made short:
1) Conference organizer sells attendees on a certain schedule of speakers and topics
2) Conference organizer replaces several speakers at last minute with politicians who talk politics instead of blogs/web/technology
3) WiFi doesn’t work well or at all (and conference organizer is blamed along with biggest sponsor)
4) Bloggers everywhere slam the event, the lack of wifi at a blog conference, and the organizer for delivering a conference different than what was promoted and sold
5) Conference organizer calls one of the bloggers an asshole in the comments of his critical post
6) Blogger responds that he will be creating his own events to compete with name-calling organizer
7) Blogger is fired by his employer
Anyone still not sure about the power of bloggers need only read some of the linked posts above. It was covered in agonizing detail in those posts so I’ll let you go to town rather than repeating them here, but some important points:
1) We organizers have to be fanatical about making sure the conference content serves the needs of the attendees - and should resist vehemently anything that gets in the way of that including commercial messages, political messages, etc.
2) Wireless internet has become mission critical to our conferences - it is not a luxury, it is not a “nice to have” - it is absolutely imperative to the success of our events
3) We, as tradeshow organizers, are desperate to have hotels and convention centers understand #2 and make it a priority because it is us that is blamed when it doesn’t work - not you or the exclusive provider
4) Your only as good as your last show
I have yet to be at any event, anywhere when 1,000 bloggers can be in a ballroom for a session or keynote and get stable, fast, wireless internet. Is it not technologically possible? Or is just so darn expensive that it just isn’t feasible? My guess is the latter. It used to be that if the content was great, but the wireless internet wasn’t, it was forgiven - grumbled about perhaps, but forgiven. Not anymore.
December 18th, 2006 at 8:08 am |
Talk about an opportunity for a provider to step in and provide a solution plus corner a huge market. (Tim I am not sure if it is possible to service so many people)
But look at hotels 10 years ago with phone banks. When we looked for venues for our clients conferences/events one of th main client concerns was how many phone banks the venue had for the attendees to use on conference breaks. Try and find a pay phone now….
Hotels/venues need to evolve and it is obviously a problem for organizers price/service.
Maybe two different services - the regular spotty one for large conferences (free) and a high speed internet package is an add on to the conference package. If the price is right I know I would buy it. (Again Tim I am not sure if this is technologically possible either…)
February 14th, 2007 at 6:17 am |
I could not agree more about the necessity of Internet access at a show and about the importance of bloggers. At the DNC Winter Meeting this year, they took a step in the right direction by setting up a table for bloggers with network cables for the bloggers to plug their laptops into. Bloggers were able to give a firsthand look at the conference, helping to generate more attention from the mainstream press.