Something new always seems to come out of the SXSW event in Austin each year. The music/film/technology conference has attracted lots of folks in the technology field over the past 3-4 years. Last year the big story was how everyone was using Twitter to communicate and organize impromptu meetups.

This year the big story seems to be how Twitter is enabling attendees to interrupt sessions they don’t like, voice their displeasure, and direct it into a different discussion. It’s a phenomenon that seems limited to the technology events at this point, but it’s interesting to read this article on Fortune Online and how social media technology is enabling attendees to “discuss” the session while it’s happening and even quickly and quietly organize a way to change the direction if they are bored. Except, when the time comes, it’s not so quiet as attendees simply stand up and begin yelling their thoughts and questions to the speakers and moderators.

Moderators are also now getting very publicly critiqued. Jeff Jarvis has long been a proponent of a shake-up in the conference industry - and rightly gets very upset when organizers don’t treat their speakers with respect.

Gone are the days when folks would sit quietly and endure the boring one hour sales pitch - and it’s for the best. The early adopters of technology are starting to take action immediately when a conference isn’t meeting their needs. Your industry is next! Consider yourself warned!

Yesterday was the day we sent out all of the acceptance and rejection letters to speakers for the New Media Expo in August. I have a love / hate relationship with this day because I know I’m going to make a few people very happy and a lot of people very disappointed. We’re fortunate enough to get hundreds of proposals which means we can pick and choose from many topics to fit the “feel” and content we’re looking for in that particular year. We received over 700 proposals for just 52 spots.

Because the New Media Expo focuses on a “newer” industry, the speakers are chosen not because of how well they are known, but about how well we feel they can educate the attendees. The question I ask myself when making the final approval is, will this speaker/session have the attendee saying to themselves, “Wow, that session made the entire trip worthwhile. If that was the only session I attend here, it was worth coming!” Get 50-55 of those types of sessions and you’re conference will always be a winner.

I personally send every invitation and turn down email to every single speaker that sent in a proposal. It takes two days to send them all (doing nothing but that all day). Is it the best use of my time? I don’t know that I’ll always be able to do that, but it just feels right when someone has taken the time to put together a proposal and send it in. The downside is that I have to tell a lot of people I consider friends, that we don’t have a spot for them at the show. Sometimes it’s overlap in content, and sometimes it’s giving a shot to someone we’ve turned down the last three years and has refined their proposal over those years to be something really terrific. We had to turn down some pretty darn good proposals and it’s difficult to do, but tough choices have to be made.

Most people who are turned down are appreciative of the fact that we let them know and valued the time they put into the proposal. From my experience, most events simply don’t get back to the speakers - you know you haven’t been chosen because you never hear back from them. That’s not how I want to run my company and so whether I do it or our conference coordinators do it, we will always let the speaker know either way.

But as you can imagine, some speakers don’t take it well….at all. Each year we have at least one reply to the turn-down email that I post on our bulletin board in the office hallway - for a quick laugh and also to remind everyone that burning bridges is never appropriate.

Here’s this year’s:

Oh darn…Gee, I wonder how many of those 52 speakers are professional speakers? Like me. Gee, I wonder how many of those 52 are women? Women over 60? A women Professional Speaker over 60 into New Media. Very unusual, Very sought after…tell your committee to cram it….I’ll go elsewhere in August. Sour grapes, you betcha!

Probably a boys/geek fest with no class anyway…..well, that felt good to let it all out……..

Now bring on the real jobs…….

Patti Serrano
www.eClubNetworking.com

Aside from the fact that we have more women speaking this year than ever, all I can say is, thanks for confirming we made the right choice, Patti.

But we’ve got our conference lined up now and it’s one to be proud of. I’m looking forward to August!

I spent the weekend doing an aggressive early spring cleaning of our exhibitor database for New Media Expo. Over the last few months I’ve realized that although I’d like to have a large base of prospects to call on to have a booth at the show, quite honestly we’ve been spending too much time calling on prospects that just aren’t a good fit.

Like most everything else, the 80/20 rule applies very well to tradeshow sponsorship and exhibit sales. Roughly 80% of our revenue comes from 20% of the database and I’ve decided that sales needs to concentrate more on growing that 20% and less time calling those companies that have said “no thanks” for the past 4 years.

Could one of those “no thanks” turn into “OK we’ll give it a try” if we continued calling every few months? Sure, but the cold truth of the matter is that the time spent calling all those marginally applicable companies just doesn’t pay enough dividends to warrant the work.

So, as of Monday morning, any company that

a) is somewhat of a fit, but really is not a great target (example: iPod case companies - yes our attendees who create podcasts and online video are heavy iPod users, but accessories just aren’t the focus of our show)

or

b) we’ve been calling on for four years and have never had success in explaining the value of exhibiting

…are gone from the database. (I’ve made two or three exceptions for companies that are 100% perfectly on-target prospects whose target market is EXACTLY our attendees and for whatever reason we just haven’t been effective at communicating our value.)

But to the rest: Thanks and good-bye. Call us anytime if you’d like to look at a floor plan, but we won’t be reaching out to you anymore.

I’m feeling a bit guilty about it. I can hear hundreds of sales trainers who have written the hundreds of sales books I’ve read screaming, “Never give up! A “no” is just a request for more information!” and “Take a different tact - you haven’t done a good job of finding their pain!”

But as an owner of a small company in the real world, I think it’s important to focus our energies where we can provide the most value and generate the most revenue.

Blogs have definitely made tradeshow and conference planning more transparent. I didn’t come upon his post until just now, but Loic Le Meur, who organizes the Le Web event in Paris each year very publicly outlines where the event hit home runs and where they struck out in this post on their home page. Most show planners would sooner run naked through the exhibit hall than admit areas where they failed, but I think doing so makes for happier attendees who know you’re looking out for their best interests and hear them when they give feedback.

One of the “failings” that caught my attention:

“failed wifi but with a 120K EUR investment and about 6 full time Swisscom team dedicated on it we tried really hard…

It doesn’t surprise me a bit that even $120,000 Euros and six techs couldn’t keep the WiFi up - but it sure makes me want to scream. It’s absurd that we as organizers continue to get ripped off by empty promises from convention and hotel Internet providers. I feel your pain Loic.

Doing this kind of exercise is a great example for us all and I think I’ll be doing a similar post after the New Media Expo this August.

So the rumors are flying that Apple has pulled out of NAB 2008. I posted that Avid had done so a while ago, meaning this is the second major exhibitor to opt-out of a booth at NAB 2008. It’s disappointing, for sure, but the red flag is in the comment by the Apple spokesperson:

“Apple is participating in fewer trade shows this year,” said Anuj Nayar, senior manager of PR at Apple. “Often there are better ways to reach our customers. The increasing popularity of our retail stores and Apple.com Web site allows us to directly reach more than 100 million customers around the world in innovative new ways.”

We organizers need to constantly re-make ourselves and prove our worth to our industries. It’s not enough anymore to simply say “by exhibiting you’ll be supporting the industry you sell to, thereby ensuring the health of the industry you sell to.” Exhibitors need compelling reasons to exhibit - and the face-to-face interaction that cannot be duplicated online has got to be a huge component of that argument.

Apple’s case is a bit unique, because they have their retail stores for face-to-face interaction so it’s tougher to make the case with them. But it’s a good reminder to me that I’ve got to make our case for exhibiting based on how it’s going to benefit their company and their bottom line and not why it’s just “good for our industry.”

As if it’s not difficult enough to fill room blocks these days, we now have outside travel firms attempting to look like official travel vendors for shows. This has most likely been going on for a while, but the problem of rogue group travel companies attempting to snag attendees away from booking hotel rooms within your room block is worsening. More and more I’m seeing these companies buying Google AdSense keywords for names of tradeshows in an attempt to book rooms for attendees outside the organizers block.

But it doesn’t stop there. Looking at the ad itself, and then clicking over to the group travel company site, an attendee might think they ARE booking in the block because the travel company makes it seem like they are an official vendor of the show. It’s happening at the moment to The International Traders Expo (the first tradeshow I lanched and later sold), but I saw it happening to another newer tradeshow I attended as well.

See the screenshot below (click on the image for full-size):

Click on that ad and you see this (click on the image for full-size):

In this particular instance the company is HDMC. Come on HDMC, long-term this is not good for our industry or YOUR business. If we can’t fill our room blocks and have to pay attrition because you’ve duped our attendees into booking elsewhere, eventually we’ll stop doing the event - and you’ll have less and less conferences from which you can poach hotel rooms.

Hotel executives: how about helping us out and by NOT taking reservations from the worst of these violators?

So Avid won’t have a booth at NAB this year. As usual when an anchor exhibitor and sponsor exits, a few people are talking doom and gloom for the future of the show. A blog over at CreativeCow.net has interesting discussion about the issue.

On the one hand, I think the move by Avid may bode well for us - we’ve been trying to get Avid for a few years to exhibit at our small event. Because our audience of content creators is relatively new to the video editing industry, Avid could reach an untapped audience who hasn’t yet determined their loyalties - 99% of the NAB attendees already have. Dollars no longer allocated to NAB could be up for grabs.

On the other hand, Avid may find their “change of strategy” to meet with potential and current customers directly (through road shows or small meetings in the customer’s offices I’d imagine) may prove difficult. This strategy and argument isn’t new of course - many exhibitors who have pulled out of tradeshows have come to the same conclusion. The trouble is, a major tradeshow like NAB serves the attendees well for one simple reason - they can take 2-3 days and demo all of the products in one fell swoop. They can speak with all of the company representatives, get all their questions answered, and then make an intelligent buying decision while all of that information is fresh in their minds.

If the top 20 companies decided to take the road show model, and I’m a potential customer, I then have to attend 20 different events or have twenty different meetings in my office over months and months. At the end, when I’m finally ready to take all the information I’ve gathered and make a buying decision, I’d find myself saying, “Now did product X that we demo’d a few months ago have feature Y? I can’t remember now!”

Tradeshows work because they save people time - plain and simple. The pendulum of show participation swings back and forth for all industries. My guess: Avid will be back - just like IBM returned to CES after not participating for several years.

I just came across a great blog post that describes, in detail, how one person attempted to live-stream a conference online and in Second Life. As expected, bandwidth issues presented major problems. However, it’s an interesting read for anyone wanting to tackle internet broadcasting of your sessions.

http://efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2007/11/diy-streaming.html

I’ve received a handful of emails asking where to find our speaker agreement. Here it is. I’m open to any suggestions anyone has to improve it.

Yes it’s long, but it’s actually about one-third the length it was in the original drafts. But the length and detail, I believe, let’s our speakers know how serious we are about the commitment and quality we are expecting from them.

I was asked to guest post over at the Confabb Blog. Here is my post below.

Naming a new conference or tradeshow is tricky business. I know - I’ve changed the name of one of our shows every year since the inaugural event - and probably broken every brand marketing rule in the book by doing so. Our 2008 event, the 4th Annual, will have it’s fourth rendition of the name in as many years.

On the one hand, it’s given bloggers in the industry a lot to talk about after every show and allowed us to focus more directly on the true nature of the industry each year. On the other hand, the event is known by a multitude of names - and variations of those names - no doubt causing confusion among attendees and exhibitors.

When launching a tradeshow for a brand new industry, that industry tends to change quite a bit in the first five years. It’s incredibly diffcult to nail the name the first time around when so much changes so quickly. Here’s the list of the names our show has had and why we changed each time:

1) Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference

We de-emphasized the word Podcasting the first year because very few people had even heard the term. The iPod was the hottest gadget around and we thought the direction of the show in the future would be about creating media for portable devices

2) Podcast and Portable Media Expo

Podcasting was now a more recognizable term and it was a hot topic for companies looking to get on board

3) Podcast and New Media Expo

We realized people weren’t creating content just for portable devices like iPods and MP3 players, but creating content for the web and allowing their audience to consume it wherever they wanted. Time to de-emphasize the “portable” aspect of the event.

4) New Media Expo

Podcasting and New Media has become redundant - a bit like having a “Book and Publishing Expo” so time to drop the podcasting term and go with the term that covers all aspects of online content. We were also getting pidgeon-holed into the reputation of being just for hobbyist podcasters and not serious business content creation.

In order to avoid this name jumping altogether, consider a more generic name that alludes to your subject matter. The “E for All” show is a great example. No mention of gaming in the name, yet it’s the primary focus. But it also allows the show to grow in various ways they may not see at the moment without having to change the name down the road.

10 years ago, a frequent name change may not have mattered too much. But in an era where everything is “tagged” with terms - photos, videos, blog posts and articles, it may become difficult for attendees and exhibitors/sponsors to find content on your show if they are searching for an old term. Recent photos and blog posts about our show may be tagged with the term “Podcast Expo” and yet the current name is “New Media Expo.” An interested person searching for Flickr.com photos of our shows may not find them easily when they are tagged with old names.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have taken the “E for All” approach and named the event something that is both easily put into an acronym (”Are you going to SEMA this year?”) and something that would allow me to take the show in different directions without having to change the name.

Give yourself that flexibility and you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches down the road.