The Conference of the Future – What will it Look Like?

Why does Seth Godin get all the best lines?! In a recent blog article, The New Standard for Meetings and Conferences, he wrote:

“If you think a great conference is one where the presenters read a script while showing the audience bullet points, you’re wrong. Or if you leave little time for attendees to engage with others, or worse, if you don’t provide the levers to make it more likely that others will engage with each other, you’re wrong as well.”

You’ve probably heard the dire predictions that real time conferences will be a casualty of skyrocketing oil prices, airline hassles and hotel pools that are never the right temperature.

Yup, and with some glee the predictors tell us that technology will replace meetings and conventions. Bound to happen, they say.

Seth may or may not agree with those predictions, but he does point out 2 of the main reasons why live meetings and conferences are certainly challenged.

The first is the continuing assault on audiences from PowerPoint bullets. However, Mr. Godin came down from the mountain quite some time ago with his Ten Commandments called “Really Bad PowerPoint.” That should have ended the assault. That it did not is a topic for another day.

As important as the deadly PowerPoint topic is, we want to focus on the second part of his warning:

“…if you leave little time for attendees to engage with others, or worse, if you don’t provide the levers to make it more likely that others will engage with each other, you’re wrong as well.”

That one sentence gets down to the core question about technology. We would ask it this way:

Do we look to technology to replace our meetings and gatherings?

Or, do we look to technology to make in-person meetings so crucial, special, entertaining and worthwhile that they will never be a threatened species?

In order to learn more about all of this, we called up Gary Schirmacher, a top executive with Experient, with over 20 years in the meeting business. He’s also a honcho over at PCMA (the Professional Convention Management Association), MPI (Meeting Professionals International), CSAE (the Colorado Society of Association Executives) and more. Good guy to tell us about the future of meetings and conventions.

(Gary will also be on a panel of meeting experts at the next NSA Colorado meeting coming up Friday, June 5 at the Renaissance Hotel in Denver. To learn more about that meeting, see the end of this article).

What Gary had to Say

We started by throwing Seth’s comment right down the middle of the plate to Gary:

Gary: I agree with Seth. The biggest challenge for content providers is to make it memorable and exciting, and even add bells and whistles – what some refer to as the MTV experience. People nowadays take for granted that they will have a big screen experience – one that will help them learn, be entertained, and remember.

He went on to tell us about how things are changing:

Gary: When you hold a meeting these days, whether it’s a corporate or association meeting, you have to appeal to three generations – and within each generation a host of different learning habits. And you have to ask, is the classic lecture format sticking to the wall for them? Just take one example. I’ve seen the traditional Q&A session transformed by speakers who encourage their audience to text message their questions to the stage.

In that vein, we asked him how video, blogging, twitter, and podcasting are affecting conferences and meetings. Are they just baloney?

Gary: They’re not baloney at all. Our industry is being impacted every day by blogs. It’s amazing how they can change people’s minds. The last thing I want is someone to have blogged negatively about my company. Conversely, if people are saying good things about my product and my service it can make a huge difference to my success.

He didn’t mention this incident in our interview, but if you want a real world example of how powerful your audience is becoming, just read this article from Expo Magazine called “Blogging the Show.”

Having just talked to Rob Johnson of Eventvue.com (we’ll write about them soon), we asked Gary if online social networking platforms for meetings were gaining any traction.

Gary: That type of online conference networking product is very popular. Experient partners with a different online provider called introNetworks.com. There are issues and challenges to address, of course. Everyone is busy these days, so one is “time.” And the other, of course, is that participation differs among the generations.

Sheryl then asked him the question we thought would put him on the spot and make him squirm a little bit – “Are you seeing more virtual conferences to replace live meetings?“

Gary: We’re not seeing that much, but for training and product demonstration there is some activity on SecondLife. Because of the cost of travel and oil, a few companies this summer and into ‘09 might be forced to look at different ways to get people together, but I don’t think it will last. Group business is still doing well. Association meetings tend to be as strong as ever.

In other words, here was a meeting expert who did not foresee the collapse of his industry. We were not speaking to someone who was quaking in his boots or who was reworking his résumé.

It was refreshing, really, to get the perspective of someone clearly on the leading edge of the issues and trends in meetings and conventions – and who was in no way predicting disaster or even contemplating a huge downturn for his industry.

He was reminding us that we are all “content providers” – and that we all (speakers, meeting professionals, speaker agencies) have the same goal, which is to keep live meetings and conferences going strong. Perhaps Ian Rogers, formerly of Yahoo Music, now of Topspin.com, said it best, “Our jobs are all the same: make stuff people love.”

If we do that, they will come – even in person.

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Editors Note: Friday, June 13, the Colorado Chapter of the National Speakers Association will meet at the Renaissance Hotel in Denver. There will be a panel of meeting industry experts, a panel of speaker agency experts and a keynote from Mark Sanborn, the current Cavett Award recipient, and author of the soon to be released, The Encore Effect. Don’t miss this meeting.