I should note that this post presumes we’re talking about more modern conferences and/or events where people might be even vaguely connected to the Internet.

27 Things To Do Before a Conference

Research

1. This seems silly to start with, but check the schedule of the event. Mark off what you want to see. Get a sense of what you might ask for a pertinent question based on the session description, and/or decide what the business value of your interaction at any session might be.
2. Check in at Twitter Search for anyone talking about the event you’re attending. You can then determine if you want to follow them and start conversations ahead of the event. This works amazingly well for people who might be a bit shy.
3. Check via Google Blogsearch and Technorati for any references to the event. See whether any companies are announcing anything. Look for signs of business opportunity ahead of the experience, and if you find some, do more homework with search and research.
4. Visit Flickr and look for recent pictures of attendees or other people you hope to meet at the event. I keep a little document of all the faces I might want to meet, sometimes with a few facts about the person, in a document. (I don’t do this for every event, but when I do, it helps).
5. Visit the prospective attendees or business people’s blogs and Twitter streams for ideas of how things are going in their lives or in their businesses. Before running into someone, wouldn’t you want to know if they were in a car accident the day before, or maybe you’ll read that they just closed a B round of funding, and thus might have budget for a project with you. It’s free intelligence before a meeting.
6. Read up on any industry news around the event you’re attending, to understand what might be impacting the people you’re mingling with. My guess is you’ll know where this information is for the type of event where you’re going. If not, consider this similar to my point above about Google Blogsearch and Technorati, but also check Google News and maybe do some straight Google searches as well.
7. If you can, check a few of the people’s Twitter streams before you say hi at the conference. This way, you can have a few tidbits of someone’s personal news top of mind before connecting at the event.
8. Check out the exhibitors and sponsors for the event. Click through the site links and visit their web pages. What do you know about them? Are they a prospective vendor for you? A client? Do you see some business value in meeting any of them?
9. Check your LinkedIn for the city where you’ll be attending, and/or for any of the speakers’ or exhibitors’ names to see their professional profile.

Content Preparation

10. Consider putting up a few post-dated blog posts so that you don’t have to worry about writing on deadline at the event. Unsure what to write about? Here are 100 blog topics.
11. Write some of your best work in the days leading up to the conference, and have a great post launch on the day of the event. The likelihood of people checking out your blog during or just before an event is high. Heck, I just recommended that you do it.
12. Consider writing posts that might help you form conversations at the event. For instance, if you’re looking to work with restaurants, write a blog post about how you’d help restaurants improve sales. Thus, people who might investigate your blog ahead of time might also know what you’re thinking about and will engage you.
13. If you’re looking to connect at the event, some of your content should be outreach related, via services like Twitter or Facebook. Message the world using the event’s hash tag (if it has one), and/or the city/state (or province, etc) where the event is held. Thus, people using Twitter Search or poking around via Facebook might catch you in a search and engage you.
14. Consider making a video about something and posting it to your blog. Videos will give people an even better opportunity to observe you and see what you’re about. It might also help with the people recognition factor, as seeing you in motion might improve their chance of seeing you at an event.
15. If you’re thinking of liveblogging the event, prepare ahead of time (here’s a great article at Web Worker Daily about that).
16. If you’re going to take lots of photos or videos at the event, check your gear to make sure you’ve got everything (charger, media transfer tools, spare whatevers). This seems to muck up things often.
17. Sometimes an event has a blog. It might be neat to see if you can guest post on it. That might up your chance of meeting folks at the event.
18. Here’s one: blog about people you know who might be at the event that you hope to connect with. Write about what you might want to talk with them about. It can’t hurt. (Though, in saying this, I’m not sure you’d have to blog that you want to meet me to meet me. You can just come over and say hi.)

Promotion and Other Prep

19. Order fresh business cards. They don’t even have to be corporate-approved. Just buy some. Go to somewhere like Overnight Prints and pick up some new cards. Here’s the thing: make the NAME part very large. Make your primary mode of requested contact come first. Make it VERY clear what you do for business. Make sure you add the kind of offering you’re putting out there for the event (or for the next several events, if that makes sense).
20. Scour your LinkedIn contacts for the city where you’ll be visiting and send some personal emails to people that you might want to meet in the target city. They don’t necessarily have to meet you at the conference, but you might be able to schedule coffee.
21. Send message via Twitter saying that you’ll be visiting ____ conference in ____ (city) and let people know you’re coming. See if you can strike up friendships ahead of time. Maybe mention some of the stuff you’re looking to do, business-wise.
22. Backup your laptop before you travel. You might not think about it, but there are many chances to destroy your data once you’re on the road. Make sure that’s not going to happen.
23. Consider any extra batteries or power supplies you might need to bring with you.
24. If you’ve got a business offer to promote at an event, practice and practice and practice how you’re going to talk about it. Be crisp. Make it easy to say. Be very clear about the ask. If you’re looking for people to review your demo, then make that the ask. If you’re looking for work, be clear that you’re available for a few extra projects. It seems that lots of folks beat around the bush or don’t exactly know how to have a beginning, middle, and end to a conversation.
25. Practice believing in yourself.
26. Remember that not meeting someone at an event isn’t always the end of the world. There are other chances, other times. Just the same, if it’s the kind of event where people have traveled to be there, take every opportunity to reach out. It’s harder to recreate an opportunity once everyone’s gone home.
27. And this should come first, but remember to give your family a bit of extra love before leaving for the event. Take them out to dinner, and/or give the little ones some extra fun. Make a game of showing where you’ll be via Google Maps, and switch to Satellite or Street View to show them the visuals instead of just the map. Give everyone a chance to connect while you’re on the trip via Skype video, so they can stay in touch. It makes it easier.

Your Thoughts

What works for you on this list? How will it help you with your next event? What did I miss?

Photo credit GriffinTech

Here’s the video from the presentation. I moved around a lot, and the fact that I’m in the frame most of the time is practically magic. It’s also VERY long, so it’s broken into parts. Here’s part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Thanks to Mac Slocum and everybody at O’Reilly for letting me loose on your event.

I just gave the morning keynote at the Stamats Higher Education Marketing conference in St Petersburg, Florida, and I decided to go totally away from slides, and just speak from passion. To do that, I kept a single sheet of paper with some notes so that I didn’t forget what I wanted to say. (I did the same thing in my making money isn’t evil presentation – remember, that one had lots of cursing.) I wanted to capture some of what I said as part of my presentation: Turning ROI into Return On Influence. I’m sure I’m missing a lot of what I said, but here are the main points.

I led with a quote.

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.- Ralph Waldo Emerson US essayist & poet (1803 – 1882)

I went on to tell everyone in the room (marketers) that they are salespeople. They might not think they are (more than 50% raised their hand when I asked them about it). I say this because marketing is about moving a behavior forward from one state to another, and especially in 2009, it’s even more important that marketers feel and believe just how tied they are to the sales cycle, and for that matter, to the PR and customer service cycle.

I mentioned that marketers have to think like media makers, like CEOs, like salespeople. they have to OWN the process, the experience, the business of moving people from a to b. (Yes, this is a mix of Seth Godin and Tom Peters stuff.)

I talked about the five steps of media as an influence tool, but I think I forgot to tell them all five in detail. Here’s the five phases of it, at least.

1. Awareness. – People become aware that you’re out there.
2. Attention. – People actually open their eyes to what you’re saying.
3. Influence. – People start thinking about what you’re saying and map it to themselves.
4. Reputation. – You become known for having good information/ideas/whatever.
5. Authority. – People consider you the top voice on the matter.

Where do YOU want to be on that continuum. I know.

Beyond that, it’s all a blur. If someone recorded it, I’m sure it won’t sound nearly as good as it felt coming out.

Mostly I shared that folks must atomize their marketing. Break media into bites and throw it all over the place. Don’t focus on a newspaper. Focus on getting two way conversations started everywhere. Get things out to the places where people are. That kind of thing.

What would YOU have told them?

Photo credit, FoundPhotosLJ

Without further ado, Pixelated: Play

Here’s Austin Hill from Akoha presenting at TechCrunch50:

Here’s a quick snip from the gang at Area|Code regarding one of their games:

Watch Jane McGonigal talk about alternate reality games:

Will Wright talks about games that makes worlds (Spore):

Sugata Mitra on how kids teach themselves (replace “kids” with people learning in unique ways):

Anuzis explains The Prisoner’s Dilemma:

Jeff Minter: Llamasoft and the Space Giraffe:

What makes this idea cool is that anyone can mash anything into a theme and build a conference of ideas around it. Not the same as a face-to-face event, but this took me about 40 minutes of searching to find hours of great information that I could curate into my own project. Know who’s believed in this forever? Steve Rosenbaum at Magnify. He pioneered the idea of video curation as a creative effort a few years back, and is still going strong.

What’s YOUR Pixelated conference going to be about?

Now, I’m going to steal it and mix it up a bit more, and YOU can help.

The Pixelated Blog Conference Series

Here are the steps:

1. Decide on a theme
2. Find videos from YouTube, Blip.tv, Magnify.net, Google Video, whereever
3. Write a blog post and call it Pixelated- (and then your topic)
4. Insert the videos as if they’re your speakers at the event
5. Tag the post “pixelated” and also “conference”
6. Link to http://www.twistimage.com/blog (as homage to Mitch)
7. Spread the word, and we’ll all come “attend” your conference

I think it’d be tons of fun. How about you?

Now, for the secret.

I just got a few limited 50% off coupons to share. I had them set aside, and then forgot to use them. So, if you want to come to a $795 conference for $395 (okay, so that’s a bit more than 50%, but I’m not good at math), drop me an email: cbrogan at crosstechmedia dot com.

There are just a few, and hey, this conference is in two weeks, so if you want to go, and you were on the fence because of price, definitely go. For a bit less (seeing as I forgot to use these).

You know I’m also bringing some PR and marketing college seniors for you to meet and potentially recruit too, right? Just cleared that up today. So not only can you learn from the best speakers, sample the latest technologies, you can also meet prospective new hires all at the same event.

Pretty decent secret, eh?

Drop me a line if you think you can attend on the 14th and 15th. I’d love to see you there.

http://www.gonewmarketing.com

What’s In It For Me? (WIIFM?)

Here’s one way to help your audience understand what’s in it for them: start by asking them a question that sounds like it came from right out of their head. If you’re giving a session on how the communications industry will be changed by audio podcasting, ask something like, “Do you think people REALLY believe that podcasting will change the world?”

This is actually two tips in one. It relates to the “what’s in it for me” (WIIFM) issue, but it also does something I love to do in presenting: take away their sword. This means, start by making sure your audience (especially if they’re skeptics) knows that you’re on their side.

So, ask a question that might come from your audience’s head, such that it sets them in the right frame of mind to absorb the brilliance you’re about to bestow upon them.

Takeaways

This is something I learned to do better after working with Stephen Saber at CrossTech Media. He stresses that every presentation I do for the company have five takeaway points: things people can do with the information I’ve given them during the presentation. That’s the whole “next steps” stuff that people seem to crave at events.

Since I started adding “takeaways” to my presentations, in one form or another, I’ve found that people have started to rate my speeches much more useful. I score high on entertainment, but now, with making sure people know what comes next, they also get scored pretty high on usefulness.

Takeaways should be very actionable. If you’ve finished up your speech on how podcasting changes communication, give people an assignment to find five podcasts on iTunes and subscribe for a month. Take notes on the ways each show introduces information, etc. Review your current corporate communications documents. Do any lend themselves to a potential audio format as well?

Things like that.

How These Help

People love structure. In my recent post on Cirque Du Soleil, I failed to note just how structured the experience was from start to finish. From buying tickets to being seated, from the opening curtain to the final bow, everything in the experience was crafted such that we, the audience, didn’t have to think much about the mechanics of the experience. We could just watch the event and absorb the experience.

By starting with WIIFM and ending with 5 takeaways – even if you do it in a creative way that breaks the mold a bit, people will feel like they better understand and appreciate your efforts to educate and entertain them.

Does that make sense? Have you done something like this? How do you improve what I have here?

Photo credit, Brian Solis

Glenda’s a published author, an acclaimed advocate for accessibility rights and reform, QUITE the blogger, a joker (see the bottom of this post).

If you’re a business looking to understand the power of the online world — plus the sheer frustration — for bloggers and web citizens with accessibility concerns, and you don’t meet Glenda, you’ve done your company a disservice.

Finally, bring an extra $20 and buy a copy of her book, I’ll Do It Myself. I’ve read parts of it at least a dozen times. When I feel sad or lazy or down in the dumps, I read about Glenda’s personal strength, her conviction, and her family’s love and support, and I find myself giving my efforts an extra push. If you don’t leave Blog World Expo with your own copy (she even signed MINE), then why’d you come?

You can meet me any old time. Make SURE you meet Glenda at Blog World Expo.

Photo credit, Glenda Watson-Hyatt, used with absolutely NO permission.

We’ve got room for a few more folks to attend, and I’ve got a VIP code ( CHRISVIP) that will take $100 off the ticket. If you’re interested and able to make it, come visit. I promise it’ll be lots of information and loads of fun.

More information at the New Marketing Bootcamp website.

Photo credit, soldiersmediacenter