Posted by Dave Lorenzo - Business Coach

Decker Marketing has 15 Ideas to Create a Great Conference. Here are my favorite:

Send a Countdown to Hotel Sell Out — Every conference has a preferred hotel with reserved room. Most attendees are procrastinators on booking the hotel. With a regular email tell them how many rooms are left.

Separate Content and Exhibitor Fees — Should exhibitors be able to pay their way to speak? Would this create great content? Good magazines separate editorial from advertising. Conferences should do the same. If part of a conference’s product are great speakers and topics, the event organizer should find the best speakers and topics…period. At online online retail conference, for example, you can pay to speak (and it costs a lot). Even if I had more budget than I knew what to do with, I wouldn’t want to be associated sponsored speaking because as an attendee (and I am both), I wouldn’t want to listen to sponsored speakers. I think the topics aren’t as interesting and the content suffers. Anyone paying to speak will be more likely to ’sell’ in an effort to recoup that investment.

Create Roundtables — Shop.org has a popular section of their conference where brand leaders, sometimes with their agencies and vendors, present topical case studies. Roundtables are popular because they are targeted, small enough to allow Q&A and discussion, and they are great for networking. It’s also a great way to find out what topics are most popular! One roundtable on organization issues had to put two roundtables together to meet the demand.

Filed under: Competition
TrackBack URI     

No Responses »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>

Name (required)

E-mail (required)

URI

Your Comment