I had a feeling that the heavy emphasis on live broadcasting, twittering and blogging during conferences would have a downside.

One attendee has had it and I can understand why.

Even the best social networking tools have their limits. And that limit seems to be reached when, instead of networking and speaking to the people in front of you, you’re “networking” and “speaking” to the people who are not.

After reading this post, an absurd thought came to me. How long until a conference reception with 400 attendees is completely silent because all the attendees are live blogging and twittering instead of talking to the person next to them? Heaven help us.

Jason Calacanis posts about an email exchange from the AlwaysOn conference that, quite honestly, makes me embarrassed to be in the same business as some other conference organizers.

Heading down the slippery slope of selling speaking spots (and giving the impression your “awards” are for sale as well, will never lead to long term success.

It all points to the fact that if you run a legitimate conference that keeps the sales team and conference team completely separate – you need to be screaming that fact from the top of the nearest mountain.

Charging to give a demo, if that’s your model, is fine if you are upfront about that fact. But approaching prospects by making it sound like a legitimate speaking opportunity is just plain bad form.

A favorite meeting blogger, Sue Pelletier, comments and links to a completely bizarre situtation, in which the attendees of a conference began receiving charges on their credit card when the event organizers failed to pay the hotel bill.

I would have thought it to be an April Fool’s joke, except the story is from April 5th. There’s no way this is going to fly in court.

So, along this line of reasoning, if my grocery store can’t pay their rent I’ll start to see their rent charges appear on my credit card because I’ve shopped there? I don’t think so.

I always like to see two areas of interest coming together. In this case, it’s online video and tradeshows. TradeShowNews.tv recently launched.

Looks like a great way to bring your show to anyone who can’t attend and it might just convince them to attend the following year.

Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today about how the South By Southwest event is dealing with the flood of outside parties.

It’s a difficult balance. You want attendees to have a lot of reasons to attend. Yet if more and more dollars go to the outside event sponsorships instead of to the main event itself, there will cease to be a reason to put on a main event and therefore all the outside parties will cease to happen as well.

It’s a vicious cycle…

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.”