Over the past 6 years, I’ve attended nearly 100 conferences on search, online marketing, startups and technology. I’ve given presentations or sat on panels at nearly all of them. I’ve organized our own SEOmoz seminars here in Seattle and in London, built panels for a variety of other conference series and sat in the audience for many hundreds of sessions. Oddly, in the past 3 months, I’ve had more discussions about the conference format and the optimization of the experience than I can ever recall in previous years.
I don’t know whether it’s me thinking about the problem more or just stumbling into conversations that center around conference strategy and business models, but like Twitter and conversion rate optimization, it’s been finding its way into the nooks and crannies of every lunch, dinner, casual coffee or post-session beer.
Wow… Even Google Trends says this is a hot topic.
I consider the organizers of conferences like SMX, SES, Pubcon & many overseas events (RIMC, SMX Sydney, the SMX/SES shows in the UK & Europe, etc.) to be both good friends and good people. This blog post is in no way meant to denigrate or cast aspersions at their intents or achievements (which have been remarkable – SEO itself has gained tremendous legitimacy because of their efforts). Quite the opposite – it’s meant to highlight some of the reasons why things we, as conference goers and speakers, complain about continue and why it’s hard to change the status quo. I’m also going to try putting forward some ideas at the end of the post that I have seen work well and would love to see more of (or more experimentation with) in the future.
Competing Incentives
On one side, we have conference & event organizers. They have businesses to maintain, revenue and profits to grow and pressures from owners/investors/boards to meet certain goals. They have to please advertisers
On the other, we have attendees (and, to a lesser extent, speakers) who want to learn, have an enjoyable experience and get personal and professional value from the event(s). Most attendees are not paying themselves – this is a business expense they need to justify and hence, managers and C-level types hold the pursestrings.
In the subsections below, I’ll try to walk through the competing incentives and goals of these two parties and why they make the conference experience so tough to perfect.
Venues, Locations & Timing
This is one of the easiest dichotomies to describe. In one corner, we have the organizers, who are optimizing on cost. In the other, we’ve got attendees, who want the best experience (particularly if they’re traveling). Not surprisingly, every organizer wants to hold their event at the best possible time in the most optimal location. That means, at least here in the US, winter events in warm weather climates like southern California, Las Vegas, Florida and Hawaii, summer events in mild climates like the Pacific Northwest or the Bay Area and events in extreme climates like the Northeast and Midwest in Fall/Spring.
Economics dictates that supply for these optimal locations at optimal times will be low because demand is high. This also means that prices will rise accordingly. Organizers know it’s hard to pass those costs on to attendees. Once a conference’s price has been set for a few years, fluctuating dramatically is challenging.
What many may not realize is some of the additional, behind-the-scenes inputs. For example, conference venues like to book 12-18 months in advance (sometimes more for very large/expensive/high demand events/locations). They require down payments and guarantees, since re-booking a space if an event cancels 3 or even 6 months ahead often proves impossible. In addition, advertisers, speakers, exhbitors and conference goers themselves get accustomed to certain events at certain times in specific places. Changing an established event always carries risk.
Next time you wonder why SES has a show in Chicago in December and New York in March or why RIMC hits Reykjavik in winter, remember that costs, momentum and contracts make those very hard things to change. If we were all willing to fly to Anchorage in January, you can bet the costs would be rock bottom.
Attendance Level
This one isn’t quite as clear cut. For some attendees, an intimate, small show experience is ideal. You get one-on-one time with the speakers, more opportunity for Q+A, a less stressful environment and, typically, easier times with everything from getting good food to booking hotels to scheduling meetings with other conference-goers/speakers. However…
The incentives are frequently the reverse for both speakers (who want large crowds so they can justify the travel expense and preparation time) and for organizers (who have a tough time charging enough to a small group to make up for what a larger base could bring). Organizers also want to signal that their events is ”a big deal” and high attendance numbers is one of the best ways to do this.
So why not go for huge venues and trim the costs down to minimal levels I hear you ask? Good question.
The obvious answer is profit margins, but it’s not the whole reason. Advertisers, sponsors, exhbitors and even speakers want to be in front of “qualified” audiences. An audience of web marketers paying $100 to go to a show is hard to pitch as a compelling and potentially lucrative base to these groups. However, if tickets are $1,800 and 5,000 people show up, every speaker and sponsor in the world wants to make their voice heard and presence known to that group. Even the big industry players like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. will be willing to lose their top notch talent for a week to get in front of the audience, mingle with the crowd and network with the best and brightest.
Some attendees are also more excited by large events. They provide greater opportunities to meet a high quantity of peers and help lend credibility to the value and importance of the event. They also tend to draw big name speakers and presenters, which means a perception of greater value from the learning aspects of the conference.
Of course, this is all balanced by the availability and affordability of venues. SMX Advanced happens in Seattle and for each of the past 2 years, it’s been completely sold out. The organizers could go to a larger facility, but Seattle doesn’t have many that support in excess of 2,000 people without dramatically raising the costs (and likely lowering quality). It can also be a positive signal to consistently sell out a show – every SEOmoz seminar we’ve thrown has sold out weeks before the event and this means more early bookings, greater consistency in attendance and revenue and an easier time planning (to be fair, SEOmoz’s seminars are a small fraction of the size – 150-250 attendees – of large conferences like Pubcon, SES, SMX or even OMS).
Speakers
Things get more contentious and thorny around the issue of speakers. Attendees and organizers alike can agree that in a perfect world, only speakers who consistently earn top ratings and attract large followings would present. Sadly, in virtually every industry, these individuals comprise only a handful of players. Google’s Matt Cutts and Avinash Kaushik are likely among them as is Danny Sullivan of Third Door and Seth Godin. However, I’m hard pressed to name many more that would attract paying audiences simply with their presence.
There’s also a large group of phenomenal second-tier speakers like Greg Boser, Dave Naylor, Vanessa Fox, Jessica Bowman, Marshall Simmonds and the like who are excellent presenters, incredibly valuable to the audience, and, together with other positive signals, are likely to draw in paying attendees. This is where the trouble starts, though. These individuals didn’t necessarily start out as remarkable presenters. In fact, I’ve personally seen speakers I’d consider “rock stars” today many years back and the same couldn’t always be said of them. It takes a trial-and-error, weeding-out process to determine who’s going to be great, and that means you need to try out new names and faces as an organizer.
Finally, you’ve got groups of new or nearly-new speakers, some of whom may be diamonds in the rough and others who may be complete duds. Organizers have little information to base this on other than their CV, a pitch form and possibly recommendations from previous events. Tragically, even great online writers/bloggers/personalities sometimes turn out to be less-than-amazing when placed in front of hot lights, a restless audience and 15 minutes of Powerpoint.
Organizers complain to me all the time about the necessity of finding the new stars, getting those diamonds-in-the-rough enough experience to shine and providing a diversity of speakers. Many technology conferences face the constant problem of gender imbalance and I’m certainly not immune to it. Last year, between Seattle and London events SEOmoz & Distilled had less than 15% women give talks - a shameful number, but one that can be hard to overcome.
Everyone can agree that we need more truly great speakers and fewer mediocre/poor ones. But when you’re trying to discover new talent, mature up-and-coming stars AND bring as many speakers into the event as possible (see the next section),
Session Formats
This might be the toughest problem of all. More speakers = more attendees. And yes, that often holds true for even new speakers and those of low-middling quality. The reason is that speakers frequently invite clients, partners and colleagues as well as promote the event on their sites, blogs and social media accounts. If you want your event to have thousands of attendees, get 100+ speakers and they’ll (hopefully) help spread the word for you.
The problem is the session formats this creates. In order to maximize numbers of speakers while fixing the event length, you move from solo presentations to panels with increasingly larger number of participants.
Some organizers argue that panels are a good thing and I’d agree in moderation. For something like an “Ask the Search Engines” panel, having a representative from both Bing & Google makes sense. For Q+A sessions in general, 3-4 panelists can help to spark discussion and even get into vigorous and valuable debates (at SMX West last week, my friend Roger Monti and I got into a nice tiff that I thinked seriously helped keep the audience on its toes – and yes, it was all in good fun and good humor).
However, when it comes to learning about an individual topic in a robust, in-depth fashion, not even conference organizers will argue that having a highly talented panel of 4 or 5 speakers give 10-14 minute slide decks can compare to a single 45-50 minute session with a single great speaker who can go both broad and deep (and then take questions). The highest rated panels (from my understanding and from direct experience with the ones I’ve seen) are always those where a remarkable presenter has the full time to dig into their subject matter. Three weeks ago I was at OMS San Diego where Dharmesh Shah spoke on Twitter and Tim Ash presented on Conversion Rate Optimization. The difference between that and a panel approach is night and day – there’s just no comparison.
But, as an oragnizer, if you optimize towards these high rated sessions and kill the panels, you lose speakers which costs you reach and buzz and, likely, attendees. Happy attendees might rave about the value of the session in their reviews, but no one has the incentive to fill the seats like a speaker (even a bad one). Solving this issue might be a pipe dream.
Session Topics
What about the topic choices themselves? I hear attendees constantly complain about certain topics going missing while others get too much coverage. Organizers, meanwhile, struggle with how to fit in esoteric, but likely fascinating topics against tried-and-true (and in-demand) popular sessions.
The best thing an organizer can do is to survey their audience ahead of time and plan/prepare from that feedback. But, this is much easier said than done. Organizers don’t necessarily know who’s going to be at a show with enough lead time to arrange speaker schedules and build a topic plan. It’s also very hard to get commitments from a large number of speakers with a shorter deadline and nearly impossible to nail down keynotes and big names without months of advance notice.
When Will Critchlow and I do the planning for the SEOmoz/Distilled seminars, we get to cheat in a lot of ways. First off, we have the email addresses of all the PRO and registered (free) members on SEOmoz, so we can survey to our heart’s content ahead of time (and do). Second, we actually optimize to speakers – since we largely reject the panel approach, we pool together a list of the speakers we’ve seen in the last 12 months that have wowed us and then ask them to give performances that speak to their strengths and experiences. Since we only need 10-15 speakers per event, we can personally invite a handful of top-notch folks each time.
Can a larger conference use these tactics? Almost certainly not. Their audiences aren’t nearly as nicely packaged ahead of time, and panels are critical to growing the number of speakers, providing the diversity, giving experience to the “diamonds-in-the-rough,” etc. Conferences like Pubcon, SMX, SES and OMS would also almost certainly take a huge amount of heat if they stopped accepting pitches and simply relied on a smaller contingent of consistently excellent speakers. Advertisers, exhibitors and sponsorships would likely drop too (even though they’re technically not at all tied to the editorial programming side of the equation), and these are a massive source of revenue.
Amenities
As an attendee, we probably think that things like reliable wifi, better food and comfortable seating with tables and power outlets in session rooms makes a big difference. The problem is, these don’t tend to correlate with how we actually choose conferences to attend and/or return to. I know organizers who’ve invested hugely in the attendee experience, only to see retention rates drop (despite the fewer numbers of tweeted/blogged complaints). When those dollars are re-invested in marketing the conference, drawing in bigger keynotes, or optimizing other aspects, the numbers get better even when cardboard sandwiches and grade-school chairs are employed.
We, as conference goers, vote with our wallets, and we apparently don’t care as much about the amenities as we make out to (personal note – please, conference organizers, don’t use this knowledge against us too much; I love comfy chairs, good food and great wifi).
Press Passes & Guest Passes
Speaking of thorny issues – little in the conference world raises as much public ire as this one. For nearly every event it makes good sense to give bloggers and journalists press passes. However, when a big, expensive, popular event is thrown, these can quickly gobble into profit margins with questionable returns.
The problems are myriad – bloggers don’t often deliver the extent or quality of coverage they promise and traditional journalists frequently make no promise of coverage at all (and then write nothing). Feeding and seating them alone can run into the hundreds of dollars per day (trust me, you don’t want to know what a trade venue will charge for a cup of coffee or a bag of Cheetos). And, as savvy organizers know, some (possibly even many or most) bloggers would pay to attend the event if their press pass request was rejected. You don’t want to anger this vocal minority, but you also can’t afford to be taken advantage of.
For sold out events, it gets even harder. Longtime “friends” and traditional receivers of press passes may need to be sacrificed to make room for paying attendees, especially if the event relies on those last 1-200 seats for the majority of the profit margin.
Organizers know they need to be careful to be generous, but discerning, or risk becoming known for “giving free access to anyone who can set up Wordpress.” They also want to try to give newcomers to the blogging/coverage scene a chance to make an impact, while being mindful of abuse and sensitive to the dangers of angering influencers. It’s a tough tightrope to walk and one that press pass requesters should be more sensitive to (I’m speaking from personal experience on this one, and know that we certainly owe some apologies for past requests and perceived slights).
Optimizing the Conference Experience
Now that we’re through all the reasons events are so hard to get right, I’ll try to provide some recommendations for every participant in the process. This is personal opinion, and unlike SEO, it’s not based on thousands of hours of experience, but probably just a few hundred and my own observations. Still, I hope it’s valuable, or, at the least, worth considering.
Advice & Experiments for Organizers
- If possible, try to shave panels down to more reasonable sizes. Both speakers and attendees will appreciate it, and
- Great networking events should be built into more conferences. Many attendees say that the most value they get is from the networking outside the sessions (which, to my mind means the sessions need help, but that’s another matter).
- This also speaks to the value of providing great areas to network during the event. Quiet areas with couches, tables, drinks and wifi can make for very happy conference goers (note: for some reason, putting these in/around the trade booths never seems to work very while, though perhaps I just haven’t seen an optimal configuration).
- Select speakers more carefully. Yes, it’s hard work, but it’s worthwhile. And consider optimizing topics to speakers rather than the other way around – if you know that a particular individual can give an amazing experience to attendees, block off 45 minutes, email and offer to pick up a flght and/or hotel. I’ve been consistently shocked by who will say yes (and then feel so guilty/thankful about having their expenses covered that they’ll put in twice the effort preparing and promoting) .
- Be harsh on returning speakers if their last presentation wasn’t up to standards. I understand having some new blood every time, but if someone under-delivered, you need to axe them, or make it clear that the next one needs to make the audience stand up and cheer.
- Likewise, bring back great speakers more often, but make them craft new content. In my experience, great speakers seem to do well no matter the topic (so long as they have some experience/relevance to it) far more so than experienced/talented professionals correlate with great presentations on those topic.
- Try playing with venues. OMS this year moved to a new location that was 10X better than their previous spot, and my understanding is that the cost was lower, too (SEMpdx’s Searchfest also had a new location in downtown Portland this year that was fantastic, though I don’t know the cost differential). When you find venues that will be accomodating, magic happens because your cost structure suddenly becomes less of a burden and more of an opportunity to do creative, interesting things attendees will remember.
- Big one – don’t let the room sizes dwarf the audience sizes. I was just at an event where the room could hold 1,500 people but only 200 were in the session. It feels to everyone – speakers, organizers, attendees - like there’s no energy or excitement. In comparison, I was at an event a few weeks back where the room could only hold 150 and 170 squeezed in. The air felt electric and every presentation, question and tip felt alive. Optimize this one carefully because it makes a huge difference.
Advice & Experiments for Attendees
- If you love an event, a speaker or a session, sing it from the rooftops. Tweet, blog, write reviews, tell friends and invite colleagues next time. So many of the incentive problems described above happen because as attendees, we don’t do the marketing or give the feedback we could and should.
- Don’t tolerate low quality speakers/presentations, but also don’t make it public. Tweeting nasty remarks about a speaker while they’re on a panel shouldn’t be any more acceptable than booing or throwing fruit. Make your voice heard to the organizers afterwards – it will have a real impact (and if it doesn’t, don’t come back).
- You get out what you put in. Come with an open mind, a stack of business cards, openness to new ideas and a slough of great questions. Introduce yourself, don’t be shy and make the most of networking opportunities; they often end up producing the most memorable value.
- Be the change you want to see – make sure to let organizers and speakers know what you liked and didn’t via email and feedback forms. This includes venue/amenities/location/timing. None of us are clairvoyant (though Google’s working on something, I hear).
Advice & Experiments for Budget Authorizers
- Give your employees freedom to choose their own events. Great people will choose wisely, and that’s who you want to keep anyway.
- Let them stretch their budgets and time – at SEOmoz, we fix number of dollars and let our people do the rest. If they want to spend it all on one big trip to a conference in Fiji, go for it. If they’d prefer to optimize for multiple events closer to home, that’s great, too. You’ll often find employees are much more accountable if they know their budget really belongs to them.
- Ask for an if it’s just internal docs or wikis or a 20 minute PPT during a brown bag lunch – from employees who attend events. It will force them to take some notes and provide some actionable value back to the rest of the company and it lets the employee be the star – the one who’s been somewhere and learned something no one else knows.
Advice & Experiments for Speakers
- Be empathetic – imagine yourself in the audience or better yet, remember yourself in the audience in the last session or at the last conference. What impressed you? Do that. What sucked? Avoid that.
- Go advanced – I have almost never been asked to go more basic at a search marketing event, no matter how adavnced my presentation or content gets. My takeaway is either that everything I do is way too beginner level or that audiences just love more “down-the-rabbit-hole” material. If you’re on the fence, lean advanced.
- Don’t pitch or present if you can’t kick butt. You owe it to the audience, to the organizers and, for goodness sake, to yourself, to do an amazing job every time you’re up speaking. If you’re not funny or charismatic, don’t sweat it – let the material do the talking.
- Fewer bullet points, less text, less time talking about each slide and less
- More images, more screenshots, more callouts (text boxes with arrows to important stuff on a slide/screenshot), more stories and more real life examples.
- Don’t ask for a business card to send someone a copy of your slide deck. Make it available online at a URL everyone can access. If your material is good enough, you’ll get plenty of warm leads.
- Prepare. I’m a busy guy – no, seriously, I mean really busy - and I still take hours putting together high quality decks for even small conferences and 12 minutes presentations in half-full rooms. If you don’t have the time to set aside and do great work on a presentation, you better either be incredibly naturally gifted on stage or have a team that makes great decks for you. If you can’t do any of these, don’t present.
- Remember you are why the event happens, you’re why everyone is there, and you have a massive responsibility to deliver something that will add value for the audience. Just one or two actionable tips can tilt the balance, but don’t settle for that. Do better than anyone would think possible and I promise the rewards wil be tremendous. This industry is still craving excellence from its presenters and you have that chance – don’t waste it.
- Experiment with taking questions in the middle of your talk, particularly if you’re going longer than 20 minutes (which, sadly, is quite rare). It brings a liveliness and level of engagement that’s tough to match with a purely “I’m going to talk at you” presentation.
Your Thoughts
I don’t mean to be forward, but I suspect a lot of organizers, speakers and attendees in the search marketing conference space will check out this post. Please, please share your thoughts and feedback below, with one caveat – we like to keep this blog TAGFEE, so no harsh insults or personal attacks. That’s what YouTube comments are for 
p.s. I’m just back from Searchfest in Portland (which was a terrific event that continues to get better every year). I was originally asked to give a 20 minute presentation on SEOmoz’s toolset, but decided I couldn’t be quite that self promotional and created a deck that covers a wider range. I saw folks giving my co-presenter, Enquisite’s Richard Zwicky, a hard time over Twitter for talking all about Enquisite’s software, but in fact, that’s what we were asked to do and I was the one who went off-focus (so if anything, you should blame me). You can check out my slide deck here - SEO Problems and the Tool to Solve Them. Hope you enjoy and sorry about the weird formatting; Scribd didn’t import PPTx very well this time.
By randfish
Interestingly, this initial version is still a little rough around the edges in terms of functionality. Also, there are just 18 extensions listed at the moment, and Google’s suggested design tweaks are on the way. We’ll let you decide whether the company’s gotten ahead of itself or made a smart move by involving developers and users as soon as possible.
So here I sit in the DFW airport hanging out with David Berkowitz and Joe Morin waiting for my connection to Austin. What better way to spend that 45 min than to write a helpful blog post? A big part of my “mission” for SXSXi is to create content after all.
Unlike last time, there’ll be no snafu about whether the time is right to reveal the new MSN Homepage–it’s now officially live for all.
