Not Your Party Girl
On Thursday, Feb 25th, I celebrated 11 months of working at SimilarWeb by wrapping up the biggest event we ever had — MWC 2016. That’s a good enough reason for a celebratory and oh-so-rare post.
Here’s what I learned over the last 11 months.
1. Start with the “Why”
Understand why you’re doing what you’re doing from the strategic level all the way down to a specific event detail.
What are the goals of your event strategy? How are they supporting the overall business goals? Who are the people you are trying to reach? What is the message you are trying to communicate?
Answering all those questions (and many more) creates a framework that streamlines decision-making and helps you measure success.
2. Build your machine
Events are a cross-company game. Marketing, sales, product, R&D, finance — all are involved in creating a successful event.
I spent the first 3 months in SimilarWeb identifying stakeholders, getting to know them, and making them part of the process I was building. Without their cooperation, I could not have moved as quickly as I needed to and building solid personal relationships with each one was a key success factor.
We built a set of processes that facilitates every event. Finding and validating events, staffing them right, training and prepping the team, collecting leads and measuring event ROI — all require the coordinated work of many people across the organization. It’s a machine we keep optimizing with every event, and watching it work is a very satisfying thing.
3. Create a memorable experience
People come to trade shows and conferences and see dozens of companies every day. The way to facilitate a successful follow up after an event is to make sure they remember you when they go back home.
This is what guides me in every decision we take for any event. From the way our booth is set up, through the interactions a visitor has with the team, all the way to the food and giveaways we select.
You can serve coffee in your booth and get a lot of morning traffic — but will people really remember where they got their coffee? We had branded bubble tea and got people talking about it in the evening parties. That’s memorable.
4. Bring your own personality into it
The only unique differentiator you have is who you are. If you go generic, there’s no real reason someone else can’t do your job.
Within the clear decision-making process, I use my own personal KPI to make decisions — do I find it funny? You can replace funny with “exciting” or “interesting”, but the point is the same — if you don’t think what you’re doing at an event is something you would like to experience, don’t do it.
I say to people that my title in the company is Chief Stupid Ideas Officer, and I totally mean it. But it’s those silly ideas that help make a memorable experience. As my COO would put it — you wouldn’t think a box of 1000 inflatable sharks is a good idea, until you see hoards of people coming to your stand demanding their shark.
5. Don’t confuse “easy” with “fun”
I have the best job in the world. I get to travel to cool places, spend my days thinking of stupid ideas, and meet new people all the time. I bust my ass doing it, but that doesn’t make it any less fun.
At the end of the day, that is the most awesome privilege — to enjoy what I do to the extent that I spend my first free morning after one of the most demanding weeks of the year sitting at a Barcelona coffee shop writing this post.
