E-venting.net

But do we make good Moderators?

I've said that Bloggers make good conference speakers, but how are we at moderating?

I guess we'll find out. I'll be moderating a panel on "The State of Online Advertising" at Digital Media Wire's 3rd Annual Digital Media Conference in McLean, VA on June 23rd.

I'm really looking forward to it. I've spent the past 4 years putting other people on stage, coaching speakers and moderators, developing sessions and conversations, but haven't done any speaking myself during that time. But I should. Everyone who programs conferences should try their hand at moderating - somewhere. I plan to follow my own advice to speakers and moderators and see if it works, or if I'm full of crap. (I followed my advice on getting a speaking gig and that seemed to work out, so maybe I'm onto something after all...) And I'll review my performance here, and let you know where I was wrong, and what doesn't work, and otherwise let you profit from whatever pain I engender.

I used to be an analyst, and I remember saying then that one of the hardest things about that job was that the longer I spent as an analyst, the more difficult it was to understand the industry because I was no longer a practitioner of what I was analyzing. Sure I spent tons of hours studying, researching, contemplating, and meeting with folks chin-deep in the field, but I wasn't there grinding it out myself anymore. And I feared that while I had a good grasp of the industry facts and theories, there were nuances of practical execution that eluded me. It was hard for me to feel authentic after a while, so I moved out of research into Event Programming. And now that I've found myself in an Events Ivory Tower, I'm excited to get back to class and learn.

So go forth and moderate.

Welcome to the Next Seller's Market

My article this week for MediaPost's Online Publishing Insider was entitled 'Welcome to the Next Seller's Market.' It's based on observations made at OMMA Hollywood, which make it pretty clear that publishers' stars are on the rise right now. I believe there is more industry interest in what new inventory (particularly video) publishers come up with, than there is in how much advertisers are spending online, and on what. All the conversations skewed in that direction; publishers' sessions were more full than those on creative or search or email or even Web 2.0.

The anecdote at the end of the article, about the diary of an 11 year-old boy in 1946, was found through my fiancee's blog - Bethesda Rookie. Her friend is in Bali, and it's her father's childhood diary (and her blog) I referenced.

If you haven't read the article, don't intend to, but are still mildly curious about what I'm talking about, here's an excerpt:

There are a thousand reasons for this shift in the market equilibrium, and while identifying, vetting and ranking them would be an entertaining and self-congratulatory debate, I'll leave it to someone else. At some point in the past year, online had its Chuck Fruit moment. It had a thousand Chuck Fruit moments. So here we are-- now what do we do to smooth out the valley that will inevitably follow this peak?

So far it looks like we're doing what we did last time:

• Google is raising another couple billion dollars, and joining a VC firm is suddenly fashionable again.
• The press release wars have been joined again (and the battle has expanded into the blogosphere).
• Start-ups (particularly in social media) are leading with their exit strategy once more, aiming more at getting acquired than building a sustainable business.
• We're scheduling, programming, promoting, sponsoring and attending industry events with a fervor not seen since 2000.

None of this is bad, of course (particularly the last bit about events). But as we go down this road again, we have to be mindful--vigilant, even--about remembering previous missteps. Now would be a good time to reread business plans or strategy powerpoints from 2000--not for resurrectible ideas, but retrospective wisdom. They may be the closest things we have to a diary, like this one that I found excerpted on a blog just today.

An 11-year-old boy began this diary in 1946, and revisited his entries almost four years later. "I found this diary and read it. I sure must have been girl crazy," he reflects. I hope we can be as wise about our future as a 15-year-old was about his past.

Top 5 Tips on How to Be an Uncommonly Good Conference Speaker (or Lessons from OMMA Hollywood)

There were about 120 speakers at OMMA Hollywood. Most of them were commendable, and a few really stood out. Here's my Top 5 Tips - as the show's programmer and an attendee - on how to be an uncommonly good speaker at your next gig:

1. Be Original
Nobody wants to see the same research or hear the same shtick that's been all around the circuit already. If you're speaking on a panel, be prepared to release some new information or propound a new position. If you're presenting, make a new presentation.
Examples: Marissa Gluck and Aram Sinnreich of Radar Research. They're former Jupiter analysts who recently started their own company. I asked them to present on Branded Entertainment and they conducted a custom research project expressly for the event. A lot of work, a lot of analysis, and some highly relevant findings. For more relevant and original analysis, check out their blog.

2. Create Controversy
I don't mean adversity, and I don't mean contrariness. But there are thousands of dissenting opinions in the industry and a conference is where they should rise to the surface and get vetted, debated, turned over.
Example: Alan Chapell, Chapell & Associates. Alan moderated a session entitled, "On Their Best Behavioral: The Maturation of BT." His panel was comprised of some of the leading players in the BT space, where some of the greatest points of dissent were between the audience of media buyers and the panel of BT purveyors. Alan is a former attorney. I don't know what his specialty was, but at OMMA it sure looked like litigation. I don't want to say he grilled his panelists, but 'interrogated' is not too strong a word. And he brought out the relevant issues. Here's his blog.

3. Be Funny
Funny gets people laughing, and laughing makes people comfortable. And comfortable people engage in conversations, which is what conferences sure ought to be.
Example: Geoff Ramsey introduced Shawn Gold of MySpace.com, the Day 2 AM keynote, by referring to a book series he had written, The Guide to Laughing. The series is comprised of The Guide to Laughing at Family, The Guide to Laughing at Love and The Guide to Laughing at Sex. Shawn took the stage and his first remark was, "It's OK to laugh during sex. Just don't point and laugh." See? I can laugh at that.

4. Don't Wing It - Aim to Create Something
I believe panel conversations should be authentic and unrehearsed, but I also want those who are participating in them to see their stage time as an opportunity to create something, to get somewhere - not just to self-promote or, equally unacceptable, fill some time. Uncommonly good speakers use their stage time in the same way uncommonly good bloggers approach each entry - they want to stimulate, motivate, create. They want their session to be the beginning of a process, not the end of one. They recognize that being on stage isn't the value - it's the conversations that follow that are worthwhile.
Example: Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro. Gord moderated a panel on Video Search and spent a lot of time and energy trying to craft the conversation he believed the industry needed to hear and participate in. When we had a last-minute speaker cancellation he wasn't deterred. He remained flexible, and he changed the conversation to accommodate the expertise of an excellent pinch-hitter.

5. Be Conversational
The best panelists are those who speak the same way on stage that they do in a meeting, or at a dinner party, or over coffee with relatives from out of town. They don't (always) wait for their turn, or assume that they should have a turn on every point. They chime in, recognize what others have said, remark on it, and build on it. They pay more attention to the point of the conversation than they do the talking points their PR person wrote down for them on an index card. They're lively, authentic, personable, human.
Example: Erik Flannigan from AOL and Scott Moore from Yahoo!, both of whom were on THE CONTENT Keynote Panel moderated by Rafat Ali in the morning of Day 1. If you've ever been media trained or taken a class on public speaking, you'll recall that 90% of a speaker's impact comes from presentation, and only 10% comes from content. Erik and Scott get this, and didn't aim to hammer home any points as much as they had a conversation with Rafat, Albert Cheng of Disney, Charlie Tillinghast of MSNBC.com, Brian Grey of FoxSports.com, and each other. As a result, this whole panel sparkled with life and was, in my opinion, the highlight of the show.

Thanks to these and over 100 other speakers for their hard work and get-it-edness. Hope to see a lot of you at OMMA EAST in September.

And The Winner Is...

If I had an inbound link for every person at OMMA Hollywood who complained about the overlapping schedule between OMMA, iMedia Breakthough and/or Digital Hollywood, I'd be well on my way to breaking into 5-digits on Technorati.

I've posted before on building an Interactive Events Calendar Wiki, and shopped the idea around a bit at the show. Unwavering support. Which is great, although I should have asked for a written commitment. Still, now that I'm through OMMA and have some breathing room, I'm plowing ahead with the idea and hope it gets some traction. If you can spare bandwidth of any type to support, please raise your hand.

Because I'm competitive, I did some hunting around today to see how well OMMA Hollywood fared against the other shows running simultaneously. I know in absolute terms the show was a success: over 2000 registrations, 1200+ folks at the show just on the first day, packed rooms throughout, and really strong speakers. I couldn't have been (much) more pleased with the way it shaped up. Thanks so much to everyone who contributed a voice to the show - 120+ of them, in pleasant discord. What a conversation!

But to see how the show fared in comparative terms, I turned (natch) to the blogosphere, particularly IceRocket.com. I used their Trends Tool to measure buzz for each of the three shows in the month leading up to the event, through yesterday:

Digital Hollywood had the largest share of e-voice for the month, which isn't surprising given how long the show has run, and also that "Digital Hollywood" refers to the entire series, not just one show.

"OMMA Hollywood," by contrast, is a single show, and one that didn't exist more than 6 months ago. So we did all right.

If you look closely, you'll see a little orange slash on the graph around March 16, for iMedia Breakthrough. The blogosphere didn't really light up about that show. No real surprise, given the exclusive-nature of the show and its deliberately smaller scale than the other two.

This is pure quantity, by the way. There's nothing in here to indicate the quality of the references, and in truth quite a few of the OMMA listings are from a company exhibiting and speaking at the show that happens to be a SEO, and has several blogs suspiciously redundant in their entries.

I'll probably run this analysis again in a few weeks, to see what the post-show buzz looks like for all 3. Most of the lead-up was 'I'm speaking here - come see me.' The post-event (and real-time) buzz is where true feedback will reside.

OMMA Hollywood this week

I'm at OMMA Hollywood on Monday and Tuesday of this week. If anyone's out here and wants to say hey, I'll be the official-looking guy with the blue clipboard and the headset, walking a a slightly-too-fast clip.

1800+ registrations, 120 speakers, 36 separate sessions. This show got big, fast. I'll do my best to update you on what I'm seeing here.

If anyone else out here is blogging, let me know and I'll link to you here also.

I Can't Go to Every Interactive and Tech Conference

I can't get to even about half of the shows I want to. But someone is going, and chances are, someone is blogging about them.

Like Graeme Thickins, whose writes at Tech~Surf~Blog. I got a note from Graeme today, thanking me for the article I wrote. Graeme will be blogging Esther Dyson's PC Forum show. Subscribe to Graeme's feed if, like me, you can't make the show yourself.

If anyone else is blogging an interactive show, let me know and I'll tell everyone here.

Field Report: Ad:Tech Impact, Seattle

Without question, Ad:Tech is first and foremost a trade show. Secondly, it's a conference. The Ad:Tech Impact show in Seattle yesterday (the first of a 10-city sweep) was neither. It's more seminar than anything else, and its programming has more in common with IIR or IQPC events than what we commonly think of as Ad:Tech. I suspected as much when they were first announced, not without some skepticism about how they would go over, and integrate with the rest of what Ad:Tech does.

It's too early to rule on the integration, but the Seattle event was, by most measures, a success. And that's no small feat for the first occurrence in a road show of a brand new event. A moderately-sized audience of about 120 arrived roughly on time and stayed through most of the day; many of the show's 33 paid sponsors were either presenting on stage or showing their wares in the 'Solutions Expo' of tabletops in the back of the general session (underscoring the likelihood that the show was a financial success); and the speakers were well-prepared and largely professional (except for the guy from Responsys - he was patronizing).

The first thing you can say about the content at Impact is that it's tactical. Jim Sterne provided the opening keynote, and gave a history of web analytics and some direction for how to champion interactive issues within the organization through analytics and ROI. His speech was peppered with his characteristic folksy wit and warmth, and his audience alternated between scribbling notes and chuckling. While his speech wasn't as provocative as some interactive industry keynotes, it did open the day perfectly. His most memorable concept was about funnels (and not just because he categorized (and drew) them as 'martini glass,' 'margarita glass', 'wine glass' and 'shot glass'), and in truth the day's content was a sort of a funnel. Jim touched broadly a dozen different issues in analytics and marketing ROI, each of which was tuned later in the day in one of the other presentations.

Notice that I said 'presentations,' not 'sessions.' The entire event was comprised entirely of presentations. PowerPoint after PowerPoint - ranging from 15 to 60 minutes each. This was one of my two grumbles with the program. While the PowerPoint and the next PowerPoint and the following 6 PowerPoints certainly underscored the tactical nature of the event, it also robbed the program of some of its potential freshness. I'm a strong proponent of the presentation as a programming format, and I've done research with a client to support it. But as Oscar Wilde said, 'Moderation in all things, including moderation.' An unrehearsed panel discussion or two would go a long way towards adding some electricity into the room.

The second challenge I would make to the show's content strategy is about the speaker mix. One of the conferences I programmed last year was the Shop.org Annual Summit. The tracks at this event are also programmed to be tactical, and Shop.org achieves this by stocking each session with retailers presenting to their peers. Not one of the speakers at Impact was a marketer, or even from an agency. All were vendors. That's not to say that vendors don't know their stuff - in many cases they know it better than their clients. But vendors-only presentations don't allow much room for dialogue, or peer-to-peer networking. And while most of them did a good job reigning in the sales pitches, attendees nevertheless saw about a dozen different companies essentially talking about what their companies could do for the attendees, if hired.

And no small part of the content was sponsored. Of the 6 3/4 hours of content at the event, over 2 1/2 hours - almost 40% of the show - were solo presentations delivered by sponsors expressly because they were sponsors. While this is a good way to satisfy sponsors stage-time requirements, I think Ad:Tech will find it a challenging way to build a long-term franchise for these events.

But almost every attendee I spoke with about the event felt it was worthwhile. Based on my (admittedly small) sample, I got the impression that most of the attendees were either from companies too small to afford a travel budget for larger shows in San Francisco, Chicago or New York, or else they were more junior employees at larger corporations, who didn't personally have conference and training budgets yet. Several I spoke with had never been to an industry event before (despite being in Seattle - a fairly connected city). And that's precisely why Impact works - it reaches a largely unitiated audience, starved for content. Attendees reported how grateful they were that Ad:Tech came to their city in the first place, and were pre-disposed to get something out of the show. That's a far cry from trying to hold a show in New York, where the audience is jaded before the opening keynote even begins.

Part of Ad:Tech's strategy, however, is to use these events to feed into their bigger shows. If they're successful, they'll be left with a new challenge on their hands. They will have raised their audience's expectations of what Ad:Tech means, and will have to elevate the Impact content (and operations - the show was much rougher around the edges than the rest of Ad:Tech) to rival the bigger shows. Or else continue to rely on a fresh crop of attendees to introduce into the Ad:Tech fold every time Impact comes to town.

Does Conference WiFi = Lunch?

I'm probably not alone in expecting to find a WiFi connection wherever I open my laptop. I don't mean to suggest I'm entitled to a connection; my expectation springs merely from repeated observation.

But it's a fine line between expectation and entitlement, and those of us in the conference business - which is a service industry - have to pay attention to our customers' expectations, and often treat them as if they were entitlements.

So how then do we answer the question of the wired conference? I've seen a different approach at nearly every event.

The folks at WOMMA, for example, believe that their audience should pay attention to speakers instead of their email, and deliberately keep WiFi out of the general session. The result at the Orlando show is that the vast majority of their audience remained attentive in ballrooms, but pods of attendees clustered around hotspots in the hallway, wedged 4-across onto benches, and even sitting on the floor.

At OMMA WEST and OMMA EAST last year, ESPN sponsored a gorgeous and expansive WiFi lounge in the exhibit hall. Attendees always had a place to go and connect, but because exhibit hall attendance was free, the lounge was usually jammed with, well, loungers who had no place else to go at the event - probably not the audience ESPN was targeting.

At the IAB events at the Millennium Hotel that I produced, we kept some space open in the exhibit hall for a WiFi lounge, but choosing to make the space truly functional would have come at the expense of booths. As a result, the lounge was too small to be of much use for anyone. Except of course the event marketers, who could claim in communications that we had a 'free WiFi lounge so that attendees can stay connected to the office and clients, without ever leaving the show'.

Different shows have different strategies, but the audience expectation is growing increasingly constant. WiFi has officially become the cost of doing business in the conference industry.

Here then are my thoughts on Best Practices for Conference WiFi:

• WiFi is like lunch. You're not obligated to provide it for free, but if you don't you had better make sure it's readily available somewhere close.
• But WiFi can also be like your exhibit hall. It doesn't have to be always open. Show producers should experiment with 'WiFi Live' times, if there's a good reason not to keep it available always.
• Be transparent and proactive in communications. Tell your audience where, when and how WiFi will be available - both before the event and in lots of signage at the event. You know they're going to ask. Why wait for it?
• Face the attention competition head on. If you know your attendees want WiFi but you're afraid they'll be distracted from your event - program a more engaging event. (WOMMA, by the way, didn't need to turn off the WiFi - their audience wouldn't have looked away from the stage much.)
• Look for the upside to ubiquitous connectivity: invite a dozen bloggers, vloggers, podcasters and others to attend and cover the event in real-time. During breaks, show the most recent entries live from a computer connected to your main stage projector, for the audience to consume while they're taking their seats again.

The good news, for now, is that while attendees expect WiFi, they don't necessarily expect it to be available for free - yet. So don't break your budget buying 2000 people a $10 day pass they're not asking for. You engender goodwill through a strong signal alone.

Ad:Tech Impact - Seattle

I'm going to be at the inaugural Ad:Tech Impact event in Seattle on Tuesday of next week. I'll give you as much of an Insider's perspective as I can here, given that this isn't a show I'm actually on the inside of in any way.

If anybody wants to connect with me at the show, give a shout.

Presenters and their Macs

Something both my stage manager and I noticed at the WOMMA and other recent events is the rising preponderance of Macs on stage. Mac may have something like 6% of marketshare among PCs, but they seem to have about 40% of marketshare among people presenting at marketing conferences.

So what? Well, for me it means 2 things:

1. I bought some AAPL. People who present at conferences are influentials - if only by the fact that they're presenting at conferences. Hundreds of people see them endorsing Macs by using them.

2. I always carry a special Mac VGA adapter, because somebody is going to forget his or hers, and Macs don't plug into projectors or switchers without them. PowerMacs and iBooks, aggravatingly, use different adapters. Make sure you at least get the one for PowerMacs (which I hope is the same for the new MacBookPro). AND during your speaker last-minute logistics emails and phone calls, remind your speakers to bring their adapters.

This message has been brought to you by my eTrade portfolio and my childrens' education.