Show Business: What Makes a Conference Worth Attending
If you use conferences, meetings, or other events as a marketing vehicle, knowing the keys to a successful event is critical. The same is true if you can choose only one or two events a year to attend.
With that in mind, we spoke with two conferences professionals–Carl Pugh, president of Radius Events, and Joel Davis, president/CEO of JD Events—for their take on the most important drivers of a successful event.
Carl Pugh is president of Radius Events, an event management and consulting firm based in Fairfield County, CT. He has launched and run countless events and headed up three major trade show companies: CMC, Cowles Events, and Mecklermedia. More recently he was president of the technology events division for Penton Media (Penton acquired Mecklermedia in 1998), which generated annual revenues as high as $80 million during the recent Internet boom. Pugh is a board member of the Society of Independent Show Organizers and has also served as chairman of its annual CEO conference for the past five years.
My focus is content and credibility from a first-rate team. Certainly the quality of the session and the keynotes are at the core of it. But more broadly, content and credibility are all the things that are contained within the event. That includes special events, networking events, maybe award programs—all the activities that are going to take place.
First and foremost, to get somebody’s attention, an event has to be relevant and important. Someone who reads your promotion for the event has to be able to say, “Wow, those are exactly the issues I’m grappling with right now. I’d love to hear how other people have solved those problems.”
Again, credibility is critical. In the narrowest sense it says, Who? Who is going? Who has all the answers? Is it somebody I admire and respect? Is it somebody I trust? Is it someone I’ve seen rise to stardom within my marketplace? Someone who really nailed it and has made tons of money? Is he or she a glittering example of achievement within the marketing I’m working in?
The feeling of credibility comes from who’s producing the event. Is it a magazine I respect? An association of which I’m a member? Who are the keynotes? Are they people I’ve read about in the papers or the trade magazines and whom I’ve long admired from a distance? Those I’d like to hear from up close? Are the people giving the sessions names I recognize?
Probably the most granular form of credibility is who’s attending. Are my peers coming? My competitors?
On viewing the success of a conference, the first measure is they showed up. That measures my hype. It measures my marketing effort. It measures nothing else except what I claim. It measures the success of my promises. It does not measure the success of my delivery.
The second measure is how successful I was in achieving satisfaction. How happy were they? And that can be measured only after the event.
We use an online survey tool like Zoomerang, which I love because it’s instant. We deliver it by e-mail the day after attendees have gotten home so that the event is still very fresh in their minds. We don’t make it long—in fact, it won’t take them more than 60 seconds to complete. We get 30%-50% response rates in terms of completion of the survey, and we get very specific about what they likes and didn’t like, and measuring their impressions of the content and the overall experience.
All of what I’ve said applies to specific sessions as well as the event as a whole. I tell the speakers when they’re writing descriptions for their sessions to think of it as their marketing campaign for their event within a broader event. Those 27-50 words or four bullet points or whatever is going into the large brochure—and maybe it’s one of 200 descriptions—is their only hope of attracting an audience within that broader audience.
After that, it’s a matter of how many showed up, and we do count the number of people, because we want to know who went where within a conference to see what was most compelling. But we also have to measure the satisfaction of the audience, in case the subject was compelling but the speaker was not.
Joel Davis is president/CEO of Trumball, CT-based JD Events. Prior to founding JD Events in 2002, he spent 16 years as an executive in the trade show and conference industry, serving as industry vice president of Reed Exhibition Cos., president of Intertec Exhibitions, president/chief operating officer of eMarketWorld, and vice president/general manager of Imark Communications. He is a member of the Society of Independent Show Organizers and has served on its executive committee.
The first and really foremost critical component for success is getting people’s attention regarding the conference content. On some shows it’s a topic that gets people’s attention; on others it’s the roster of speakers. In travel, for example, the roster of speakers is really most important. On the other hand, when we do our satellite conference, it’s really what people are talking about that’s important. So every industry is different, but basically the point is that content is really what gets the senior-level executives in any industry interested and expected about an event.
But content has to be thought of broadly. Speakers are content. The subject is also content.
Sometimes of additional importance is the networking aspect. Who’s going to be there? Who am I going to meet, and who am I going to rub shoulders with? What types of contacts am I going to make there? We put a lot of emphasis on functions, receptions, parties, whatever can create networking.
And more and more these days there are matchmaking programs enabling people attending a conference to connect in advance and set up appointments. There’s also matchmaking that puts together people with like interests in an informal environment where they can talk with one another. We try to facilitate targeted forums, sponsored forums, or lunch meetings in smaller groups. In those groups you get a little more intimate, you get to know people.
We’re trying a couple of approaches to help exhibitors and attendees connect in advance by working with the exhibitor—giving them the attendee roster and saying, Handpick 20 or 30 people you’d really like to meet, and we’ll do some telemarketing for you and try to set up appointments with you. That’s aggressive on our part, but we think we’re serving the interests of each party.
We have also begun as part of our networking and matchmaking to bring buyers together with sellers, where an exhibitor can for a relatively small fee sponsor a “birds of a feather” table whereby they’ll pick a topic they’re going to talk about. During the executive luncheons there will be roundtables of 10 people. And each table will have a sign with the topic on it. It’ll also have the sponsor’s name on it, and we’ll send out fliers and put it in the exhibit guide. The topic is one of specific interest to the people at the table. and the sponsor gets to be a moderator. We certainly advise the sponsor not to turn it into a sales session. We tell them to get one of their best spokesmen, not necessarily the best salesperson, somebody who can work the crowd and talk about an issue. With their name associated with the event they’re going to be meeting people, and ultimately it may turn into some business. But they are getting people to sit a their table who are interested in the top.
Also important is the exhibit floor, which we always try to have at our shows. Sometimes it’s the dominant part of the show, sometimes it’s a smaller part, but that’s where the business-to-business aspect is conducted. If we do a good job of networking overall at the conference, that contributes to the connection made between buyers and sellers on the exhibit floor.
After the show, within a week or so, we go over very carefully what worked, what went well, what didn’t go well, what we need to do better next time. We do it while it’s fresh I our heads. It’s a tough self-evaluation process, and we begin immediately to put a plan in place that details what we will be doing the next time we have the show.
