In his High Context blog, David Gammel picked up on the "Ignorance Premium" discussion last week with a point I'd failed to make:
There is often a 6-month lead time between submitting a session proposal and actually delivering it at a traditionally organized event. That his a pretty big lag these days.
How much of a problem is that? And what can we as organizers do to address it?
You can argue that for some professions it just doesn't matter. Let's take architecture or interior design. The organizer submits the sessions for review by the AIA or ASID and attendees who sit thorugh the session get points toward re-certification.
You could suggest that the primary reason they're attending your event is to keep their licenses.
I imagine there are similar scenarios in medical education and in some specialty engineering fields.
Does timeliness really matter to these attendees? Perhaps not.
But for other fields, it does.
When analyzing the downfall of Comdex, Internet World, PCExpo/TechXNY and other large and mid-sized tech shows, we've been quick to point out that the stock market collapse was the main cause of their failure.
What about timeliness of content? Was that a factor? We know that exhibitors could no longer wait for the annual events to launch their new products. So doesn't it make sense that any education related to these new products also couldn't wait for the annual shindig?
Knowing the model had changed, couldn't these events have reinvented themselves as semi-annual or regional series of conferences with smaller exhibit halls or sponsorship models? After all, Comdex and IW both had annual paid conference attendance in the thousands, not hundreds. And isn't Gartner doing OK?
There's a lot of pressure managing a portfolio of events for a public company. Once you're on the decline, the panic is not only palpable, it can become all-consuming. Considering you were once making $20 million, does a $2 or $3 million conference-driven event even pique your interest (or that of your investors)?
What's happened in tech is that smaller events on much shorter timelines are succeeding. It's no longer a six month lag. It's half that. And many of these events are abandoning traditional powerpoint presentation formats, opting for panels and discussions on where we're headed instead of where we've been. You'll still find the "how-to" sessions if you want them, but the "why" sessions are much more up-to-the-minute.
This is nothing new. Companies like IIR have done this for years. They've been doing six month cycles from idea conception to presentation since they started. And very profitably. The shocker is why it's taken so long for everyone else to copy that model.
Blogs and social networking are speeding up this process even further. We're now seeing seminars done from start to finish in three months - and selling out both attendee seats and sponsor opportunities. Someone has an idea, bounces the idea off their contacts in the blogosphere, the conversation starts, and panels are formed almost in parallel with the event promotion.
We're getting to the point of producing conferences dynamically.
If your boss came to you and said, "We're not going to use the same six-month model anymore. Do it in three. And leave a lot of room for last-minute additions," could you cope with that?
It would appear the time is coming when many of us will have to respond to that challenge. Not this year. But soon.
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