Things I don’t get (preparing for PCMA 10)
By tony | 5 Comments
I often feel like an outsider to the conference industry because all of my expectations were set by being in the worlds of consumer web startups and open source software. There’s good and bad in that.
I didn’t get sponsors and that was a good thing
The upside is that it’s easier to have a fresh perspective and to see opportunities for improvement.
For example, there have been two waves of event social network providers. In 2006 I covered Dreamforce as a reporter and joined their social network. There were ten-thousand attendees at the conference and three people on the network. All three immediately tried to sell me their products. The first wave was based on the premise that social networks were a good way for sponsors to contact attendees. For sponsors, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Unfortunately, the fish didn’t want to be in the barrel.
The second wave, which we kicked off in 2007, and now has (I believe) seven competing products, is characterized by being attendee-centric. We figure out what the attendees want (better networking, discussions, interaction with speakers, control over their schedule) and then make sure they’re happy. We see adoption rates in the 30-70% range. In other words, we would have expected at least 3000 people on that Dreamforce social network. We didn’t come up with this approach because we were smarter, we came up with this approach precisely because we were less-smart. We’d mainly experienced conferences as attendees of high-energy, high-passion, tech-centric conferences. We built the tool we would have wanted as an attendee. Sponsors weren’t part of the initial tool is because, well, we’d only had the attendee experience of trying to avoid them.
Things I don’t get
I know a lot more now than I did in 2007, but there’s still plenty of things that leave me confused. I’ve just arrived at the PCMA annual meeting for four days of conference-industry educational sessions and lots of networking with meeting planners (PCMA used CrowdVine). And I’m on a mission to get smarter. Here’s what has me confused:
Why are suppliers so fragmented? The most glaring example is online registration providers. I’ve heard there are more than 190. In our customer data, the biggest registration provider is EventBrite with maybe 5% of our customers. Really? This isn’t software that could be standardized and commoditized? I think this is bad for everything except keeping salespeople employed. It’s bad for decision makers. It’s bad for software quality. It just seems like a backward dynamic. Why don’t meeting planners pick and promote winners?
Why is customization so important? One of the reasons I’ve heard for the the industry having so many reg providers (and every other type of provider) is because every event has such different needs. Really? Wouldn’t many events benefit from working with software that has smart sensible defaults? One example I’m thinking of is event websites which often are extremely cluttered and hide the most pressing information (I often can’t find dates, location, or even the conference topic). Ask yourself how many navigation links on your event website and then compare that to the event Information Architecture annual summit (basically an association of experts on such things). They have seven navigation links. Your website probably has 20.
Where are the opportunities to make real impact? When the economy crashed, meeting industry leaders made a big PR push to make sure that everyone knew the value of conferences and events. Their biggest talking point was how many people the industry employs. I know the people who have jobs in this industry appreciated it–but I thought that talking point was incredibly demoralizing. Is this industry a giant high-carbon-footprint make work project? We love conferences because of the energy they generate and the way they spread new ideas. Those types of conferences have impacts on the world that we get excited about. I want to find more people that think that way and ask them how can we have more, better, more world-changing meetings? Can software help?
Why is everything so expensive? I once paid $200 to plug in a monitor for two hours. I know a company that charges $5k to turn on their API (consumer web app companies turn this on for free). Lunch is $80 per person. On the software side, I think this goes back to the point above, supplier fragmentation. All the suppliers have to rely on sales teams because each customer is won through one-on-one efforts. Those sales team salaries are paid for by meeting planners and attendees. I think this is a major road block for new meetings and independent organizers. Wouldn’t it be better if we measured IQ points added?
Expect plenty of blog posts and tweeting over the next week as I take my open source, tech-startup ideals to the experts. If you’re going to PCMA 10, here’s my CrowdVine profile. Make sure to say hello.
Tony, interesting post! I used to run the largest registration and lead retrieval company in the country and do consulting for one of the leading SaaS registration solution providers. No question that there are a lot of players in that space, but there are only a handful that play well in each segment. My guess is that you will see quite a few providers exit the business in 2010. The small guys can’t compete with the medium to large companies.
Many of the major shows/conferences have an incredible amount of business rules that need to be applied to their registration solution. Associations will often make one off deals with exhibitors or members that need to be handled through customization vs. configuration. Some want those rules to bridge between the housing and the registration process. Some want real close ties to their membership system. Larger shows need to outsource to handle the substantial requirements of onsite registration, credentialling and lead management. Slowly, but surely though, best practices are being adopted and configurability and commoditization is getting closer.
I think you’re going down the right road by having a solution with an attendee focus. 2010 is definitely the year of the attendee. If you can win the adoption game, you win the race (as long as you can monetize/maximize each opportunity).
The reason everything is expensive is that our industry is notorious for passing the cost on to the exhibitors. The host organization often pays significantly reduced $’s to their Exhibit service contractor, A/V company, or registration vendor because they are receiving a high % of their revenue off the backs of those exhibitors.
Your solution for PCMA definitely had one of the better adoptions that I’ve experienced to date. Congratulations! I’d love to see a case study with use analytics.
Looking forward to meeting you at PCMA.
Dave Lutz – @velchain
Velvet Chainsaw Consulting
You’re dead-on about the poor design of so many conference websites.
I spent 20 minutes last week trying to find the full schedule of a conference only to find I buried several links down. You’d think they might want that easily accessible off the conference home page.
Keep questioning some of the assumptions that have the industry in its current state. Many of them are not tied to any current realty, but are simply reflective of past precedent.
Jeffrey Cufaude, @jcufaude, Idea Architects
@Dave Thanks for that insight. I think that example, of layers of business rules, is something that’s supported by the current sales-staff-heavy suppliers as well. When you charge by the hour the incentive is to say yes to every customization. I don’t see many people searching for solutions that simplify these issues. I think that’s one of the major untapped opportunities in the event software space–but it pretty much requires that you organize your company without a traditional sales staff.
@Jeffrey Thanks for the encouragement. I asked all of these questions repeatedly at PCMA and came away thinking that a lot of them really do need to be challenged, and in several cases, saw places where we could be the company to do it.
I find to often the people are writting to a select group– themselves. If your no part of the association it become difficult to understand the layout of the show. Not that is anything different, but their just don’t know how to present the data that is user friendly.
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