The brief: Take two events; one in Milan and one in Vienna in April 2017 – and reinvent the way conference delegates take home the messaging from the keynote sections of the agendas. Avoid the boring, the mundane and the delegates ‘switching off’ by capturing the essence of the event differently.
The how: Build better conferencing with ‘conference news television’.
The result: In a little under two weeks: over 9000 YouTube videos watched post-conferences (that’s over 600 hours of cumulative viewing).
The skinny: Conference fatigue is very real. (I’m almost weary of saying it – but your delegates always fill up from the back rows first, right?) Particularly when it comes to congresses with educational or conference sessions wrapped into them. You know this too; for every 1 000 congress delegates you are lucky to get 100 fill up the ‘conference’ section of the program. Attention spans are shorter than they used to be. Screen time from smartphones to tablets and laptops are an amazing distraction. People are busy, and easily distracted. So how to cut through? Simple.
Use an expert presenter in a studio built from two or three chairs, a simple logo backdrop, a couple of cameras, lights and a great AV team and create a personalized event TV studio. Interview guests, speakers, sponsors and committee people in the studio – and then feed YouTube a channel (either public, or privately emailed video clips) which you then socially promote like hell post-event, to the delegates.
Our results on this have been amazing. Delegates love the contextualized messages fed to them post the event, and keenly watch them with colleagues and other interested parties. Sponsors are happier. Clients are ecstatic. And it’s all incredibly inexpensive. More importantly it creates a buzz which helps build the next annual event or congress.
The future of conference messaging has arrived: But there is one caveat. Notice the italicization of the word expert above. Don’t fall into the trap of believing any Tom, Dick or Sarah can pull this off. As a professional business conference speaker at over 2500 global events I’ve learned how to do this well – in one take – and put together some superb results by so doing for clients since launching this concept under the banner of Building Better Conferences with an amazing speaker bureau… Unique Speaker Bureau located in both England and South Africa – who have a complete selection of trained presenters (all top speakers like myself) who’ll put this together and deliver it for you, via a locally sourced AV company anywhere in the world.