Virtual Events and Conferences

Over at Influential Marketing Blog, Rohit Bhargava presents 6 reasons why virtual events are becoming more popular. A couple I take issue with, but the rest are right on the mark.

His first reason is budgetary, and he is right on the mark with that, although I think the situation is more bleak than he presents, albeit it is industry independent. Ie, for some industries, conferences are an intergral part of their business, for others, they are beneficial for sure, but the funding priority ends up being pretty low. Back when I was a corp guy, I tried to make sure my team got out 2-4 times a year, and I was super tight with funds, but I saw the value in doing so. On the other hand, when budgets got slashed, and it was a call of whether to get a new piece of equipment, or travel, the equipment budget always came out on top.

The fantasy team aspect is a pretty good one, esp as one can time shift in the virtual domain, where as in person, it can be too much. Ie, if one pulls together a fantasy team for a in person analog conference, it often results in information overload in a huge way. A virtual event would provide for the ability to timeshift, esp since most virtual events archive the content. I remember the Bipolar / BiCMOS conferences from years back… it was a time to get brain fried in a huge way, as effectively it was 3 days of a firehose datadump. A virtual event on the other hand would allow one to self moderate such that info overload headaches would be minimized. Granted if one is a BiCMOS process dude, and its their lifeblood, a fantasy team for such a conference is likely pretty cool, as contrasted with a scientist working on the periphery. Based upon the hundreds of conferences I’ve attended over the years, in most cases, I was on the periphery, rather than it being a focus. (Radiation thermometry is too small a field to support an exclusive conference, even though it transcends a multitude of arenas).

The multitasking issue is where I have a problem, especially for smaller companies. Many conferences provide for total immersion in a subject arena away from the fires of the day. More than a few times, I felt the value of attending was the single subject focus, even more so than the presentations in and of themselves. Now, some might ascribe this as an issue of time management, and they are partially correct. The difficulty is, when a production line crashes, or a customer has a problem, being right there pretty much mandates stepping in, where as if one is offsite, either A, it can wait, or B, folks will solve it on their own. Of course there are the situations when a major line goes down, onsite attempts at a restart are not working, and it ends up one of those hundreds of dollars an hour deals or more. In those cases, the virtual conference would be a real saver, contrasted with last minute super spendy redeye flights back to say nothing of the headaches involved with trying to get up to speed on an issue while on a plane.

I agree with him as concerns small business as concerns the finance pov. Way back when we started out with 8 folks in 89, we made it a big point to hit conferences, as the ROI for the time and money invested was amazing, despite the fact I was Mr cheapskate. As time went on, we hit the 25-30 person management plateau, we cut back for a bit… but once past it, the doors were once again open. As far as intimidation goes… when I struck out on my own fulltime in 2002, I hit conferences the same as way as when I worked for a 2000 plus person employer. The disadvantage of course was that I had about zero buying power and company name recognition, vs the 5 figure signoff capability I had as a corp guy. I never saw these disadvantages as intimidating, but more so just a practical aspect of being new and small… of course I still had my corp contacts, and that opened a lot of doors.