Ruining It For Legitimate Conferences
My brother Emile sent me an instant message this morning. He spotted a post on Valleywag that caught his attention and in light of my recent post about unconferences, thought I’d be interested as well.
Seems Red Herring is producing a conference where the speakers are charged $2,500 for the privilege of presenting - same price as the attendees.
With conferences like these, no wonder folks think the conference business is just out for a buck. I guarantee any speaker that pays $2,500 is going to consider it a ticket to promote their company and give a sales pitch during their panel - a total disservice to the attendees. The funny thing is, it seems the higher the conference price these days, the more likely it is that attendees will get nothing but ridiculous sales-pitch-infested content.
Conferences like these make us (show organizers) all look bad and I’m embarrassed to be in the same industry as them.
March 25th, 2007 at 8:04 am |
I totally agree. What kind speaker pays? As a professional speaker and author if I did that I would be basically saying that I am such a low rate speaker that not only am I desperate for business but I am such a bad speaker that I have to pay others to watch me speak. Honestly, who is going to hire this guy?
I get the calls all the time, an invitation to speak at a conference and the person is pretending to be a confrence organizer but they are actually one of many un-confrence sales people in a boiler room.
March 25th, 2007 at 8:48 am |
Shane your comment doesn’t make a lot of sense. Un-conference organizers don’t pay speakers. Not sure what your point is in the second paragraph and I’m tempted to delete the comment entirely.
March 28th, 2007 at 7:00 pm |
TIM….I was responding to “Seems Red Herring is producing a conference where the speakers are charged $2,500 for the privilege of presenting” Possibly I misunderstood your posting? Then the statement was: “I guarantee any speaker that pays $2,500 is going to consider it a ticket to promote their company and give a sales pitch during their panel - a total disservice to the attendees.” Wasn’t that post about speakers being asked to pay to speak? (Something that seems very foreign to me as I get paid to speak as an author) A lot of these paid to speak events start of telling the speakers that they have been specially selected etc. etc. and once you’re roped in they drop the “by the way it will cost you $2500 (as much as $20,000 for one group) for the privelege to speak.
Cheers,
Shane Gibson
author
Closing Bigger the Field Guide to Closing Bigger Deals