How to Engage your Conference Audience

I like Dave Lutz of Velvet Chainsaw, and I see him all over the country(IAEE, Expo! Expo!, etc). He's teaming up with Jeff Hurt of Midcourse Corrections, and I love this article to shale up the format of the average everyday conferences.

Enjoy his article:

If you wanted to create a conference environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like today’s conferences, meetings and workshops. If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you would design a full day of lectures in general sessions and breakouts. (Just like today’s learning institutions).

What if associations tore down old traditional conference models and started over?

Here are four brain-friendly principles from brain scientists that association leaders and meeting organizers should consider when planning their next annual meeting. (There are many more!)

Passive Listening Versus Movement And Interactivity
1. Your brain is not designed to sit passively for eight hours a day listening to lectures.

In the evolutionary process, our brains developed while working out and walking. The brain still craves that experience. Movement boosts brainpower. Physical activity is cognitive candy.

Suggestion: Conference organizers should encourage presentations that get people up, moving around and require interactivity, not sitting in chairs all day.

Your Short Term Memory
2. Your brain is not designed like a recording device—push record to learn new information and push playback to remember it.

German psychologist and memory researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus is best known for one of the most depressing facts in education: people usually forget 90% of what they learn in a class within 30 days. The majority of this memory loss occurs within the first few hours after the presentation. Wow, normal conference attendees only recall 10% of what they learn at the annual meeting. That’s low ROI.

The moment of encoding, or learning, is mysterious and complex. We do know that the process is similar to a blender running without a lid. The information enters the blender, is sliced into pieces and splattered all over the insides of our mind. Content and context are stored separately. Recalling that information requires more elaborate encoding in the initial moments of learning.

Suggestion: Conference organizers need to structure and provide emotional arousal, context and meaning which lead to more elaborate encoding and thus better recall.

Adult White Space
3. The brain is not an open vessel that you can constantly pour content into during an eight-hour day and expect it to recall the information at will.

Have you seen the film Mondo Cane? The Italian shockumentary consists of vignettes intended to raise Westerner’s eyebrows. One memorable and disgusting scene shows farmers force-feeding geese to make Pâté de foie gras. They stuff food down the throats of these animals and then fasten a brass ring around their throats, trapping the food inside the digestive tract. Repeatedly jamming them with an oversupply of food eventually creates a stuffed liver pleasing to the world’s chefs. The geese are sacrificed in the name of expediency.

Most conferences try to overstuff their attendees with several days of eight to ten hours of presentations. Subject matter experts shovel data dumps into attendees’ minds thinking more is best. Pushing too much information, without enough time devoted to context, meaning, connecting the dots and digestion, does not nourish the brain. The attendee’s learning is sacrificed in the name of expediency. The brain needs breaks.

Suggestion: Conference organizers need to schedule adult white space: time for attendees to discuss new learnings with each other. They should plan for moderated chats where attendees re-expose each other to the information and share detailed elaborations of their impressions. When attendees spend time in these gabfests sharing their new learnings, retention increases. Brains recall information that is repeated out loud. The more the experience is retold, the more the brain encodes it and the more likely it will be remembered.

Attention Spans And Boring Things
4. The brain does not pay attention to boring things. (I know, you’re saying, “Duh!”)

Research shows that presenters have 30 seconds to grab someone’s attention and only 10 minutes to keep it. Most conference presentations are 60 to 90 minutes long. If keeping someone’s interest in a presentation were a business, it would have an 80%-90% failure rate.

Presenters and conference organizers can help grab attention by ensuring every 10-minute segment is rich with meaning, stories and emotional connections. Connecting each segment to previous segments also helps the brain learn and remember.

Suggestion: Conference organizers should secure speakers that change their content and raise attention every 9 minutes and 59 seconds to restart the attention clock.

These four brain-friendly principles are just some of the things association leaders and meeting professionals can do to create brain friendly conferences. What others would you add?

Here's the link to his site: http://jeffhurtblog.com/

For some reason, blogger is not letting me hyperlink right now, must fix!

Social Media: What’s all the fuss and how do I make it work for my company? Part Two

This will appear next week in my CW Allen Group column:

As I mentioned in my last column, I am in the process of building a social media practice as it relates to events. For those who didn’t read part one of this article, here it is: http://www.cwallengroup.com/newsletters/sept09/social_media.pdf

In the last article, I emphasized the importance of making sure that you business philosophy aligns with the ‘rules’ of social media, those are:

• You must offer valuable content with no expectation of immediate payback;
• You must want to grow your market segment for everyone(including competitors);
• You must make a commitment to be in the social media sphere for the long term;
• Everyone must be welcome(although you can treat certain segments better than others) including potentially competitors.

Next, you need to know your customers and future customers intimately enough to be able to create ‘target personas’. For more detail on this, see my blog post here:

http://www.theeventmechanic.com/blog/2009/05/developing-target-personas-in-marketing.html


OK, the next stage is to pick the tactics of how you are going to do this. Here are the five major elements:

Content strategy

Here is where is points I made above come together. You’ll now need to establish a blog which linked to your website(or series of blogs if you are expansive). If you have identified the pain points of the your key personas, then you will want to find an expert within your company who can write intelligently about these subjects. You’ll want to do this daily if possible, but at least three times a week as you build your audience. Remember you need to keep up this consistency week after week, so three times a week is all you can do, please keep to that.

You have already assembled the key words that you associate your product or service with, so make sure the ‘tags’ of each post include at least one key word and make sure the title of every post includes a key word.

As you post more frequently and keep a focus on your key words, you’ll start to see yourself rise in the search rankings- this is called having ‘Google Juice’. Frequency of posts and newness of the posts contribute to a higher search ranking.

In addition, your content person should check out www.technorati.com or LinkedIn and comment on other articles(with links to your own blog), to start to stimulate discussion on topics relevant to your keywords, and to create further traffic to your website.


Search Engine Optimization strategy

This is probably one of the more understood parts of social media, that is, making sure your key words populate the website content and tags of your individual website pages. One tip I just learned at a conference was to occasionally make changes to the content or tags of individual pages as this will raise the Google rankings of those pages(per the point above).


Pay Per Click strategy

One of the ways to ‘artificially’ raise your product and service onto the first page is to pay to be seen on the right side(or top) on the search page for a specific term. This can be expensive depending upon how general a term you select, so be specific and make sure your choices relate to your key words.


Inbound Link strategy

Next to the content strategy, this is the most important aspect of your tactics. As part of your research, you want to have a list of the top 20 influencers in your marketplace. Next you want to connect with them and develop a relationship with as many of them as possible so you can get them to link to your content, website. Saying this and doing it are two different things however, as you have to make these people, pay attention to you where many are asking them to pay attention, and then have them see enough value in connecting to you.

Google also ranks you higher if you have a high number of inbound links, so this particular tactic should not be done by a junior person in your company, as the connection between an influencer is strategic and may include other elements.


Social Media Tool strategy

Lastly, we get to the tactical part which is often the first question I am asked when talking about social media. In the research portion of getting to know your customer, you should have asked which social media tools your current customers use(such as Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc). If they are high powered LinkedIn users, you should spend a lot of time building content in LinkedIn and linking back to your website for instance. Bottom-line is that you should know which social media ‘watering holes’ your target personas visit, unless you want to waste a lot of time and endure a lot of frustration.

Now an interesting caveat to this is based upon something which happened with a client of mine recently. We had a 9% twitter usership from the database, but found that more of the ‘amplifier’ types were using twitter worldwide, which helped us get our message out beyond they people we already knew, getting us a lot of attention from the ‘dark corners’. Experiment a little, and have patience.


Ultimately being successful with social media is a long term play, and one which won’t bare initial fruit for 6-12 months(or more). In doing it properly, you will be making a statement to your marketplace that you care about it, and in doing that you will reap more benefit than continuing to broadcast product messaging.

Good luck and let me know how it goes!

Warwick Davies is the Principal of The Event Mechanic!, a consulting company which helps event organizers realize greater revenues and profits by fixing ‘broken’ events and launch new ones both in United States and internationally . He is an up and coming guru on Inbound Marketing and Social Media for event companies. His clients include event organizers in the information technology, healthcare, biotechnology construction and design engineering and executive event markets. Previously, Warwick was responsible for internationally recognizable event brands such as Macworld Conference and Expo, LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, and the Customer Relationship Management Conference and Exposition worldwide. For more information on The Event Mechanic! and past ROI-Q The Event Mechanic! columns please visit http://www.theeventmechanic.com/resources.html . He can be reached at Warwick@theeventmechanic.com or at 781 354 0119.

Attending Expo! Expo!

I am attending Expo! Expo! in Atlanta for the first time(kind of odd considering I've been in the business for 18 years).

It's kind of funny as to why I haven't. DCI(my first 11 years in the business) didn't allow any employees attend any industry events because they were afraid staff would be poached. When I was at IDG, we went to SISO but not Expo! Expo!. In the last four years, I have either been too busy to go, or I didn't want to go to the particular venue, or something else. This year I planned to go in July around the time I went to SISO.

I had been told that Expo! Expo! is a 'sea' of people and difficult to navigate. My impressions on the first day is somewhat different, as I was invited to the 'first timers' brunch where I got an opportunity to meet folks, then we broke up into groups. I had a chance to talk about my 'The Five Steps for Long Term Social Media Success" concept which went over very well within the group. Seems like people within events are struggling with putting together a long term plan which can convince their bosses that the investment is worth it.

So far, so good but I have great expectations....