Are Events Dead?
Marco Arment recently bemoaned the fact that Mac-related conferences are dead. Most small tech conferences, not just Mac conferences, indeed are dead. Personally I was surprised they didn’t die earlier. They are a huge amount of work to produce, and they just seemed to run their course. That’s because their purpose has evolved from the presentation of information necessary for sales to just networking.
Conferences with big booths used to be essential to the marketing of technology products before the internet, but the death of Comdex should have been the canary in the coal mine on that score. We can see better demos and shop for products online. And many conferences livestream at least some of their presentations.
Marco misses the conferences as a reason to get together with old friends made at previous conferences. It’s the social part he misses, which used to masquerade as the presentation of valuable information. Since we now have information at our fingertips 24/7, if we are still going to bring people together, it must be for better reasons.
The new mode of conference can’t be for introducing new products, but it can be for branding a company, for doing industry deals, or for simply creating human connection among people with common interests. Our society does a pretty bad job of creating community, as the UK admitted when it recently created a position for a Minister of Loneliness. There are 10 million lonely people in the UK. Lord only knows how many lonely geeks there are in the US.
As a result the action has shifted to what surrounds the conference. It’s not in the presentations; it is in the private rooms, in the parties and receptions. This week will be SXSW, and in ten years of attending I’ve watched that conference change from an exchange of new information to a reason to see old friends and party in Austin (not that there weren’t plenty of parties in the beginning, but not until consumer brands outspent tech brands were there the out and out binges.) Now most of my friends are burned out on SouthBy, and on large conferences in general, and I don’t know anyone who attends unless they’re a speaker. Who does attend? Ordinary people:-)
We still have some smaller events, but they’re much more targeted and purposeful. There is the Dent conference, which is about making a dent in the universe, and there’s Wisdom 2.0, which is for tech people but not for tech products. There was Foo Camp, and YxYY, conferences meant to gather tech people to discuss things beyond tech (yes, there are some). The best conferences are invitation only.
If you are an enterprise company, how should you respond to these changes? I believe by acknowledging them and attending fewer events in the old way, lugging the big booth and causing staff to miss days of work standing around on a concrete floor when they could be using a targeted lead-generation product online.
And by satisfying the innate need for human connection by holding smaller, more intimate events to which you bring influencers, customers, and prospects together, in an interesting mix of people reminiscent of a 1930’s New York society dinner.
Or if you have a product that lends itself, by having a “user conference” for your ecosystem, like Oracle Open World or Dream Force.
But if you were planning a conference in the middle, and if you plan for it to pay for itself, you are just SOL.
